The More the Merrier:Dogs can Assess Quantities in Food-Choice Tasks

Animals in their natural environment often face situa-tions where it may be advantageous for them to be able to make decisions based on numerical or quantity discrimination. Canids like pet dogs, wolves and coy-otes have been known to have a preliminary sense of number. We tested 303 unique free-ranging dogs for seven food-choice tasks, skewed in terms of stimulus: olfactory, visual and reward obtained. The dogs pri-marily used olfactory cues in the decision-making process, rather than visual cues, to discriminate between different quantities in a context-dependent manner.