👀 New Study Reveals How to get your Dog to Actually Listen

New Study Reveals How to Get Your Dog to Actually Listen

If you've ever stood in your kitchen pointing at your dog's leash while begging them to stop chewing your Birkenstocks, good news: science is finally on your side. Researchers in Austria just confirmed that the magic combo to getting your dog to pay attention isn’t just yelling their name like you're summoning a toddler—it’s using both your eyes and your hands. That's right: pointing and staring at the thing you want your dog to notice actually works. It’s the canine equivalent of underlining a text, bolding it, and throwing in a sparkle emoji.

In a delightfully extra experiment at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna’s “Clever Dog Lab” (yes, that’s a real place and yes, we want to visit), scientists outfitted 20 dogs—including poodles, Aussie shepherds, and some good ol’ mutts—with mini eye-tracking helmets. Think GoPro, but for doggy gazes. The dogs were then presented with two bowls—only one had a hidden treat—and were guided by researchers using different cues: pointing only, looking only, pointing and looking, and the classic fake throw (aka the oldest trick in the dog-parent book). Spoiler: the dogs totally fell for the fake throw, proving once again that some pranks never die.

Turns out, the doggos nailed it most often when the humans used both gesture and gaze together—suggesting dogs don’t just follow directional signals, but may actually understand that we’re trying to tell them something. “It’s not just ‘go that way,’” explained lead researcher Christoph Voelter, “It might be more like ‘hey buddy, there’s something important over there.’” In scientific terms, this aligns with the concept of "referential communication," which has been heavily studied in toddlers learning language and object identification (Csibra & Gergely, 2009).

But before you give your dog credit for passing the SATs, the researchers caution that there's still a lot we don’t know. Are dogs truly interpreting our signals like little furry students in a classroom, or are they just really good at reacting to body language? Voelter and his team plan to dig deeper into how dogs process "natural pedagogy"—the fancy academic term for how beings learn through communication cues like pointing, tone, and eye contact. The next step? Seeing if pups actually learn better when we talk to them like the weird baby-voiced millennials we are. So keep pointing, keep staring, and yes, keep calling them your “special little bean.” Science says it might be working.

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