Can most animals distinguish left from right?

It seems like various animals having a deep understanding of left and right would be a hard thing to prove. Especially when some people seem to have a hard time distinguishing left from right (at least some times). Perhaps left and right movement through the environment is likely mostly intuitive for animals. They don’t have to think about it. They just do it. When they have to go left or right, then they go left or right. No big deal,

By the way I think that my cat is left pawed because while batting his cat toy around the room he uses his left paw much more than his right, Consequently he bats his toy around the room in mostly large clockwise circles. He really gets into it. Fun to watch.

“If you hide food in your hand, could you train a dog to always choose the left or right hand?”

Yes, definitely. Think of guide dogs – visually impaired owners can ask their dogs to go left, or walk on the left side of a road.

No. Left and right are words. As far as we know, the only animals with true words are humans.

Most animals seem to navigate more from instinct than from understanding.

I think that in order to have a true understanding of left and right, you would have to be able to communicate it. Point, if not verbalize. Mutual understanding among species.

Great, thought-provoking, question, BTW.

Work horses can be trained to go right or left on command, but not sure what they associate it with. And we had right and left handed cows, but I think that was just conditioning over time. Dogs can be trained to respond to commands if you’ve ever watched a retriever competition.

Horses can be taught to change their lead on command.

Honeybees use left and right to communicate locations of food sources in their waggle dances.

Well, they have to be able to distinguish direction or they couldn’t get home. Is it something they consciously think about? Probably not, just like when we go someplace we go to often we don’t think, “OK, I have to turn left here.”

@ibstubro As far as we know, the only animals with true words are humans.

…and that damn bird.

@thorninmud , When I mentioned insects I was thinking particularly of honeybees. Rather extraordinary that they can know left from right, though the whole concept of a waggle dance is rather mind blowing.

For those who bring up understanding left and right as words, consider this. Using only words, how would you explain to someone which direction is left and which is right? It was that kind of question that got me to wondering how animals can make the distinction.

Well…I can’t @LostInParadise. Interesting challenge.

A friend of mine had a dog named Dutchie & he swore she would only let him walk on one particular flank…Pass the Dutchie on de Left Hand Side.

@LostInParadise I don’t know if this is the case, but maybe the sense of right and left comes from the brain’s own asymmetry. Since each hemisphere of the brain attends to sensory data from the opposite side of the body (and controls motor functions on the opposite side, too), and since each hemisphere seems to have a measure of autonomous consciousness, it wouldn’t be surprising that left-ness and right-ness would be fundamental percepts.

Neural asymmetry goes pretty deep down the evolutionary tree. Here’s evidence that bees display a functional difference in how data from the left and right antennae is processed, indicating a neural asymmetry.

www.rightleftrightwrong.com/issues_animals.html

Here ya all go, and yes, as mentioned, horses learn left/right in reining and in their leads.
Meaning they learn to change leads depending on cue from leading with their left or right front leg. This is part of our horses workout and training routines.
I have also observed several of my cats with paw preferences.

@thorninmud , Good point. Maybe there is no generalized concept of left and right for bees, but several neural circuits that drive specific directional behaviors. Still it seems hard to explain how a bee can get to the correct location based on waggle dance information without some general idea of direction.

If taught to do so, like sled dogs. Usually, aside from these dogs, animals don’t have a name for “left” or “right.”

No. Left and right are human conceits used as a language shortcut in a sea of information overload.

Animals orient according to the sky and its relation to the time of day. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west. Nocturnal animals develop an entirely different method of orientation that puts them at a disadvantage during the day.
Instinctively, animal navigate North, South, East and West.

My brain worked on this question while I slept, and spit out this answer first thing this morning.

How do you explain @longgone‘s point that seeing eye dogs are trained to respond to commands to go left or right?

They can be trained but that’s not understanding the meaning of the word.

Pavlovian response, @LostInParadise. The same way you teach them to sit.

Have you ever seen an alpha dog bark and make a pack of dogs sit. No. A drill instructor can lead from any position. An alpha dog leads the pack or responds to individuals verbally (growl, bark. whine) and physically (nip, lick push).

That’s the difference between instinct and language.

I am not suggesting that dogs understand language, but if a dog is in a place it has never been before and given a command to go left, it has to be able to consistently go left, irrespective of the position of the sun. At some primitive level, the dog knows the difference between left and right.

If you try to train a dog to respond to the color red, you are going to fail, because dogs are color blind. Just as we have an innate recognition of different colors, both we and dogs must have an inborn understanding of direction.

I wonder if you could get a newborn child to turn either left or right based on some signal.

No, animals do not understand nor know the difference between the concepts or directions left or right. They perceive, and act on stimulus and training.
The word ‘left’ is a distinguished sound to a trained animal and means to turn ‘this way’ (as the animal might ‘think’ it). Training is the tuning of instinctual behavior by providing stimulus and altering reactions to the stimulus via positive and negative reinforcement.
I say go left, the horse goes right, I swat the horse and say go left. When the horse goes left, it is rewarded. Repetition trains the reaction to the sound, a sound we understand the meaning of, and they do not.
As for hiding food in one’s hand, the animal smells it. Preferred appendage use is natural, right handed people do not choose their right hand to be dominant.
As for finding their way home, it is following the familiar odors and visual stimulus.
This sin’t to say that animals do not perceive the world around them and that there are things to their left, they simply do not understand that ‘in that direction in relation to their own standing’ is what we call left.
You also have to take into account that animals rely much more heavily on body language, since they don’t understand verbal human language. To wit, animals gather a lot more information and are more acute at deciphering stimulus that humans even knew they are giving.
For instance: the caretaker of the dog squats down with both hands out, one with odorless food (hypothetically), and says “wave your left paw.”
Each time this person has done this, and the dog has raised a paw, it has gotten something to eat. The dog might even start waving its paw before the person gets totally squat down and in position if it’s been through the trick many times. That’s because it reacts to the familiar stimulus of the person approaching, making eye contact, any verbal sounds, closed hands, the person stopping right in front of them, and starting to squat. When the dog repeatedly puts the paw in the air and receives only verbal sounds in response, it will, without understanding, try again, sooner or later with the other paw, at which time it is rewarded and further trained. Consistent training will lead to the dog reacting to the sound, what we recognize as a word, left or right. The more times the dog goes through the experience, the quicker and more accurate it will respond. The dog never learns it’s left from its right conceptually, though it does associate the sound with a specific response. But this is done on an instinctual level, not an intelligent level.

I read about a study a few months ago: Dogs wag their tails with a clear bias to the left when they are fearful, worried, or nervous. Happy dogs wag to their right. There has now been another study done, which suggests that other dogs will interpret these differences correctly.

@ibstubro

I’m not sure what distinction you’re making. If a dog will reliably choose the left of two balls when asked to retrieve the left one, why would you say he has no understanding of “left” and “right”? How could he possibly manage that task without said understanding?

Sidenote: You teach dogs to sit using operant conditioning, which is probably what you’re thinking of. It’s a common mistake. The best way to remember: Classical conditioning applies when pairing an involuntary behaviour with a stimulus – like Pavlov’s drooling dogs.

@Sinqer

“Training is the tuning of instinctual behavior by providing stimulus and altering reactions to the stimulus via positive and negative reinforcement.”

A swat is not negative reinforcement. The “positive” and “negative” can be read as math terms, “add” and “take away”.

Positive reinforcement: Add something pleasant like a treat.

Positive punishment: Add something unpleasant like a swat.

Negative reinforcement: Take away something unpleasant like a constant, high-pitched noise.

Negative punishment: Take away something pleasant like a kid’s pocket money.

Or just yell “GET OFF THE DAMN DOG!!!”

^ Um, this is an animal thread. Before accepting any further comments, I’m gonna need at least five accounts of a behavioral problem you have solved in a dog under three years of age. ~

@longgone
1 – pissing/crapping inside
2 – jumping up on visitors
3 – barking and snarling at visitors
4 – Jumping up on children smaller than the dog (tackling them while playing)
5 – snapping at the owner’s hand when they reach for the dog’s food bowl
I could list a few more

”...How could he possibly manage that task without said understanding?”
Operant conditioning is the answer. But after reading up so I could use the terms correctly to communicate, I notice that both operant and classical conditioning… condition the animal’s instincts to respond to a given stimulus. The fact that drooling is involuntary, and sitting is voluntary would be neither here nor there, simply for the fact that the dog does not recognize an option, decision, or choice to sit anymore than it recognizes an option to drool. It reacts to stimulus based on conditioning or reinforcement of its instincts. It’s merely by projection of motive that we inaccurately attribute abstraction as part of the process.

Studies suggesting things I generally dismiss based on the several errors I have often found in the application of “such and such study suggests, supports, or otherwise lends credence to…” One of those errors is the same St. Thomas Aquinas used in his proof of god by design theory.
For those who don’t know it, Aquinas argues that there must be a god since reality works as if designed, there is order to it. If one lands a boat on the shore and sees a word written in the sand, they conclude, since the word is a thing designed and employed by intelligent beings, that it must have had an ‘intelligent creator’.
The error I am pointing out in this and many studies is that the evidence just as much supports the opposing conclusion. It’s a matter of which truth one assumes (whether for sake of argument or otherwise) prior to the conclusion. Ecosystems work, and if there is no god, than the ecosystem is just as much evidence of the possibility of order without a god. In this take we are simply assuming the opposite of what Aquinas assumed, that there is no god, and since the order is still there, it’s obvious that it can be so without an intelligent designer.
So, how does this tie into your example (I would repost it here, but haven’t got the knack of linking yet) with the studies of the dogs.
The studies reveal that the dog’s instinctually act from birth, that there are two hemispheres of their brains, and those hemispheres do, well, stuff (e.g. wag their tail instinctively in relation to perception). The prized connection of the study is that a dog will respond to another dog’s tail wagging differently depending on the side of the wag. But I will quote a few passages for clarification of what the connection was not:

“But the issue remained open whether this asymmetry conveyed any meaning to an observing dog,” he said.

Vallortigara emphasized that just because dogs interpreted tail wagging as stressful or non-stressful, it did not necessarily indicate that the left or right tail wag was intended as a communication signal.

“It’s possible that there’s no communication going on in the intentional sense,” he said. It could just be a byproduct of the activation of one side of a dog’s brain over the other side.

In other words, there is no evidence of understanding anything on the dog’s part, it’s an unconscious, instinctual relation, not a rational or intelligent understanding. To point out the example that matches my Aquinas example of error, I quote here:

“What is clear is that there is a lot of visual information that dogs use when interacting with each other, and the tail is a very important signal,” Reimchen said. The study also provides evidence that “docking,” or removing portions of a dog’s tail, compromises their ability to communicate, he said.

The terms ‘use’ (in the first sentence) and ’...their ability to communicate…’ (in the last sentence) do not specifically specify, but will be understood by most readers to infer that the dog has intentions to use its tail for communication (as if it wags its tail to let another dog see it and respond). This is the same as starting with the assumption of god; whereas, if we start with the contrary (i.e. assumption of no intentions), we have the evidence that without conscious intentions to communicate, a dog’s instinctual behavior still satisfies as stimulus for another dog to respond to in accordance with its nature and reinforcement, and since the act is instinctual, unconscious, and consistent throughout the species (hardwired instincts), the reaction will also be constant… left side stress, right side make friends. So the evidence both supports lack of intentional ‘use’ for ‘communication’ as well as the contrary.

Though I do now wonder if you are using the term ‘understand’ differently than I. I only think this, because I would not use the term ‘interpret’ as they do, simply because it infers intelligent consideration, and dogs do not intelligently consider anything.

The actual journal results (versus lots of information taken out of context for an article):

The finding that dogs are sensitive to the asymmetric tail expressions of other dogs supports the hypothesis of a link between brain asymmetry and social behavior…

I would think most agree that brain anything (including asymmetry) is most certainly linked to social behavior… it’s the brain. And most I would think also agree with the discovery: Dogs respond (...are sensitive…) to the actions of other dogs (i.e. perceived stimulus).

By the way, thank you @longgone . I had to go read up on the terms and concepts to adapt my wording to convey my thoughts. Good reading, I enjoyed it.