狗狗其实能读懂你的意思

Point at a ball and a dog will look at the ball, whereas a cat will probably look at your hand. Dogs seem to have a ready understanding of how human beings direct attention by pointing, and can follow our gestures almost as if they thought the same way we do.

当你用手指向一个皮球时，狗会去看球，而猫很可能会去看你的手。狗似乎天生就懂得人们如何用手指向事物来引起他人注意，而且狗能遵从人们的手势，就好象它们和我们用同样的方式思考。

Of course, dogs probably aren’t born knowing anything about people. We just carefully train them to look, fetch, and so on, right? Or do we? A comparative psychologist at the Max Plank Institute in Germany,named Michael Tomasello ran a series of tests on dogs,in which they had to find which sealed container had yummy dog food in it. The only hint they got was from a human being who looked at or pointed at the right container. This wasn’t hard for dogs at all.

当然，狗在出生时可能对人类一无所知。我们只是悉心地训练它们去看，去捡回物品，等等，对吗？德国马克斯普朗克研究所的比较心理学家迈克尔托马塞洛对狗做了一系列的测试，让它们判断，哪个封着的盒子里装着美味的狗粮。而这些狗可以从一个人的指向得到提示。这对狗来说一点都不难。

But it was hard for wolves. Wolves that have been raised by people should have had the same success at finding the sealed container, but they didn’t. Even chimpanzees, which are very smart animals indeed, weren’t as fast at finding the food as dogs. What does this mean?

但是这对狼来说却是很难的。按理说，被驯服的狼应该和狗一样顺利地找到封着食物的盒子，然而它们却没有。甚至连黑猩猩这么聪明的动物也没有狗找到食物快。这说明了什么呢？

One interpretation is that dogs do, in fact, have a natural ability to understand forms of human communication. Even nine-week old puppies found the food, suggesting the skill is there before training. Wolves don’t have the skill, suggesting that it has developed in dogs since the time they branched off from their evolutionary predecessors.

一种解释是，实际上，狗确实拥有理解人类沟通方式的天赋。就连刚出生九个月的狗崽儿也能找到食物，这说明狗天生就具备这种能力，而不是靠训练得来的。狼不具备这种能力，这说明，狗在从它的先祖，狼科中分离出来起就逐渐进化出了这种能力。

There is debate about this idea. But Tomasello thinks that in the past fifteen thousand years, as human beings and dogs have evolved together, the basis for fido’s ability to understand what you mean may have become encoded in his genes.

这种观点目前还有许多争论。但托马赛洛认为，在过去的1.5万年里，人类和狗生活在一起，共同进化，这也为狗狗们能够理解人们的意思奠定了基因编码基础。

chimpanzee: 黑猩猩

branch off: 从...分支出来

encode: 编码