Have you ever called a child by the wrong name?
It’s likely that you have. Parents of families with two children or more frequently swap around the names of offspring.
Researchers at Duke University discovered that we also call children and siblings by the name of the family dog.
Slips of the tongue tell us a great deal about the mind. And about politicians.
As reported in Futurity "study participants frequently called other family members by the name of the family pet—but only when the pet was a dog. Owners of cats or other pets didn't commit such slips of the tongue."
What does this tell us about dogs and cats? It says, perhaps, that we see dogs as members of the family, and cats as distinguished visitors.
Lead researcher and PhD student Samantha Deffler told Futurity “I’ll preface this by saying I have cats and I love them. But our study does seem to add to evidence about the special relationship between people and dogs.”
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