Man’s Underground Best Friend: Domestic Ferrets

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0043267

In NOT A CHIMP I go into great detail about social cognition and look closely about what we know about the domestication of dogs and how the process of domestication in dogs and arctic foxes has led to changes in structure and brain chemistry that have accompanied a heightened ability to empathize with humans, track human movements closely, and react accurately to human cues as to the location of something. Here researchers extend the canon to ferrets- showing that domesticated ferrets test very much the same as dogs over a range of social cognition tasks involving interaction with their owners. fascinating stuff - and because it is in PLoS1 it is open access so you can download the whole paper.