Various animal species can engage in socio-communicative interactions with humans, yet the factors that promote such behaviours remain under debate. Domestication, socialization, and species-specific predispositions may all play a role. To better understand how human–animal communication is shaped, it is essential to compare different species kept in similar conditions However, adopting a comparative approach when studying non-human animals, presents several challenges. Researchers must account not only for species-specific sensory and motor differences, but also for animals’ domestication history, motivational tendencies, and ecological background. Designing tasks that are truly comparable across species is particularly complex, raising questions such as whether experimental procedures should be standardized or not. In this seminar, I will address these issues and open a space for debate around the topic, by presenting a series of studies directly comparing the humanoriented communicative abilities of two domestic species—companion dogs and companion pigs— where our aim was to explore the factors that may shape emergence of such abilities

Seminar hosted by Kimberly Brosche