Apparently there is a new national hero in Chile. It's a dog, filmed by traffic cameras in the you tube below. One dog is lying dead or injured on the expressway, having been hit I suppose. The other dog goes out into the middle of the freeway with cars flying past and drags the other dog off to the side of the road all by him/herself.

Apparently members of the public wanted to adopt the rescue dog, but rescue workers couldn't find him after the incident.

I have NEVER seen anything like this. What are the behavioral explanations? Is this really a dog showing altruism?

It's a pretty sad Vid, but amazing.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=LRj_NZrPO_8

Pretty amazing isn't it?? There are many issues with putting human emotions onto dogs but sometimes you have to put things on human terms. I really don't have any idea except perhaps the two dogs had a very close bond, as sometimes seen with some human dog pairings. Was it Blackfriars Bobby - the little dog that waited for his master long after the master had died? Just found it - waited on the grave for 13 years.

Very sad video. Both dogs were homeless so essentially they would be part of a pack or just had each other and had a close bond. Just makes you wonder, be interesting to see whether any experts on dog behaviour comment on this story. Had a look on the internet whether there was any opinions from dog behaviourists but couldn't find anything.

Nothing surprises me when it comes to animals there was a news story a couple weeks ago of a dog staying beside a litter of kittens during a house fire in Sydney, they all survived.

One of the amazing things in the vid is the dog doesn't drag the other one off with his mouth as you may expect, he actually uses his forelegs the whole way. Incredible.

Why would this dog do this? It's not a trained trick.It is either a grief or protection reaction I think. Could the dog that got run over be a pup of the rescue dog?

My ex hit next doors young dog when it came out at him he was on his moter bike, both he and the dog were hurt the poor dog yogi was in vary bad way screeming and bleeding from the mouth and nose because the bike landed on him, my ex got up but only had skin off and some deep cuts, i did not care about him he would live lol but not for yogi life was cut short anyway when yogi was still screeming his mother flew out of their yard and attecked him and was trying to kill him we had to drag her away and lock her up while yogi's owners tried to comfort him until the vet arrived wich only took a couple of minutes but his injury's were to great and he was given the needle, now yogi's mum is a gentle dog and i have seen this behavior again a couple of mths ago when Bella fell of my back stair and hurt her back leg (not broken) one of my other pups attacked her in the same manner, now i think it is because of the screeming the other dogs panic and because they can't find what is hurting killing the other dog they some how go into protect mode and feel a need to protect themselves and to attack but become confused so they attack the hurt dog, when i was a kid we found a young dog (about 6mths old) killed by other dogs just up the road and i think that one dog had a fight with him and because he would have been screeming the other dogs joined in, in panic we never found out who owned that poor dog or found the dogs that did this to him it could have even been my fathers dog he may have been one of them we will never know, so watching that video was very interesting to me that is not a normal dogs behavor

I think Dawkins talks about altruism in the Selfish Gene (we seem to be talking about him a lot lately). It makes sense to me that social animals should have some form of altruism. This is pretty amazing though. It's usually hard to work out what animals are actually motivated by when they do things like this (and what they actually think that they are doing).

Royalla, both my stupid idiots end up rumbling with each other when they hear a strange noise outside and they get into guard mode and I have the door to outside closed. They go pelting off to get outside, come to a skidding stop at the door, look at each for a split second and then end up going for each other. Luckily it only lasts for a few sec's until they work out who they are actually attacking, and they never have really hurt each other. The whole thing actually looks like a cartoon it's so dopey.

The more I read on genetics and evolution the more I understand our human development (I'm up to when we have an Ancestor whose line split to become human down one line, and a shrill like ancestors down another line in The Ancestors tale right now). What Dawkins shows me in terms of genetics and species development is that we ourselves are mammalian creatures, and that what we high fallutingly often think of as "human" behavior is just our version of an animal behavior. I think the behaviorists may have it the wrong way around when they say we attribute human characteristics to animals, when in fact there are many behaviors with other mammals that we share. Altruism has a function in community survival for us (Peter Singer the Ethicist has done lots of studies on how those who cooperate win in the end), and animals also have a genetic investment in community survival.

I believe that we are really just funny primates with too large adrenal glands and too small frontal lobes for our ambitions.

Does this make sense? What is amazing about the vid is the risk the dog took, and the way he didn't use his mouth to pull the other dog away, but used his forelegs. Alot of dogs are quite dextrous in the paws, but a job like that would have been quicker done by using its stronger jaws.

Patricia McConnell's book The Other End of the Leash is very good in explaining how our primate behaviour often interferes with our relationship with dogs and how we transfer our primate expectations onto canines. Shall have to get round to reading Richard Dawkins!

Paxy does a tackle grip very much like what this dog does when dragging the other dog. She does it when you stop playing with her and walk away, she literally tackles you with her front paws wrapped around one of your legs!

Altruism does have an evolutionary purpose, but how we think about it is still probably very different from how other animals do (perhaps mainly because of language? - don't know, need to think a bit more about that. Perhaps also because of our more developed sense ourselves and others in time?).