Current Science

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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.

Keywords

Food-Choice Task, Free-Ranging Dogs, Numerical Cognition, Quantity Discrimination, Stimulus.
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