Even dogs prefer democracy

Recent research has shown a robust and positive correlation between the amount of democracy we enjoy and how happy we are. This is true for the Swiss, at any rate, for it was among the cantons of Switzerland that the research was conducted. If you believe the Swiss are a peculiarly unrepresentative group, you may be interested to know that the same rule holds true not only for melted-cheese-­eating neutrality monkeys, but also for dogs.

Dogs prefer democracy? How can we possibly know? I’m not suggesting here that dogs have sophisticated political views — though Rod Liddle has written that ‘all dogs are notoriously right-of-centre creatures: loyal, patriotic, implacably pro-hunting … wedded to the family unit and deeply suspicious of all aliens’. Instead I am referring to a psychological experiment conceived by some ingenious though faintly sadistic scientists in order to demonstrate that it is not only your circumstances that determine your happiness, but the extent to which you control them.

The experiment, as explained to me, works as follows. You place two dogs in a single large box separated by a partition. The floor of the box is metal, and allows you to administer an electric shock to both simultaneously; not enough to harm them physically, but enough to cause them considerable annoyance. The only difference between the two compartments is this: in one there is a button, which the dog can nuzzle. Doing so cuts off the electric current, at least for a time. The other compartment has no button. Soon the first dog learns to push the button fairly rapidly in response to a shock administered by the experimenters, and so the bursts of electricity delivered to both are comparatively brief. What is interesting, however, is what happens to the mental state of the two animals. Even though the degree of pain delivered to both animals is identical — they both share the same floor — the moods of the two dogs diverge rapidly.