ohmidog!

NPR’s Peter Biello reported today on a program in which Marines incarcerated in the brig at Camp Lejeune, N.C. are training dogs as service animals for Marines wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dogs get a career and a loving home, and the Marines get to help their buddies, build self-esteem and serve their time productively.

To listen, click here.

A study published in the journal Biology Letters last week found that human yawns are contagious to dogs — the contagious yawn being a behavior once thought limited to humans and chimps.

In a study performed at London’s Birbeck College, 72 percent of 29 dogs tested yawned after observing a person doing so — a clear sign that dogs read human cues.

(The possibility that they were just really bored with the experiment was not addressed.)

Atsushi Senju and colleagues at Birkbeck College say mimicking human yawns is a sign of empathy. What’s surprising about dogs doing it is that empathy is not usually found in animals without self-awareness, which scientists say dogs lack.

(Except possibly poodles.)

Each of the 29 dogs watched a researcher perform a large yawn and then, in the control portion of the experiment, watched the same researcher merely open his mouth. No dogs yawned in the control portion. When the researcher yawned, dogs yawned contagiously 72 percent of the time, which is an even higher rate than reported in humans or chimps.

Scientists believe dogs lack a sense of self because they generally don’t recognize themselves in a mirror, as humans and chimps, dolphins and sometimes — when scientists can find a mirror large enough — elephants, do.

A sense of self is considered a prerequisite for understanding the feelings of others, (though it’s always seemed to me that too large of one can preclude that possibility). In my non-scientific view, it’s precisely that combination — the lack of self-awareness and abundance of empathy — that makes dogs so appealing.

But that’s just — Y-a-a-a-a-w-n-n — my opinion.