Can Dogs Remember Their Moms?

As your pooch zooms around the house, it may be hard not to wonder whether your sweet pup remembers his or her mom? 

Your dog may also start jumping and acting all sorts of crazy (zoomies included). This is because your pup remembers! Your pup will likely be happy and excited to see their momma, and will wag their tail to no end to show that they are so very happy to be reunited.

It is also quite possible that other factors of DNA are at force. For instance, another innate canine response is to reproduce. With this premise lingers an implication that dogs will protect family over strangers because of the similar DNA familial lineages share. And by protecting family, dogs are protecting their own imprint on the world and continued lineage.

So it stands to reason that nature will set things up so that family is easier to recognize, whether it be by smell, sight, bark or some other biological method.

Experiments have proved that dogs are fully able to recognize their mothers based off of scent. Dogs smell each other because their scent glands give off lots of information about who each dog is, and this in turn helps dogs recognize familiar faces. Researchers believe dogs' olfactory sense help them recognize related dogs, even if they haven't seen each other for years. Although the dogs may not be cognizant of the relationship or understand why they recognize the other dog, they have an instinct to understand that the other dog is familiar.

To test this theory, researchers have experimented with dogs that were each about 2 years old. These dogs were separated from their mothers when they were around 8 weeks old. The dogs also hadn't seen their mothers again up to the time of testing. Researchers used large cloths that dogs' mothers had slept on for two days. These are called "scent cues," which help with recognition.

The results showed that when the dogs were given a choice of a cloth infused with their mother's scent versus one infused with the odor of an unfamiliar female of the same breed, 76 percent of the dogs showed a preference for the cloth infused with their mother's scent. This was notable because the pups had by now grown into adult dogs and had not seen their mothers for around two years.

It is also possible that dogs are able to recognize their moms simply by looking at their faces. Recent studies support the theory that dogs can distinguish the face of their owners from strangers and can spot dogs from among other animals. 

In 2009, researchers experimented with dogs by showing dogs sets of photos with familiar and unfamiliar dog faces. The researchers found that the dogs stared longer at the photos of the familiar dogs, suggesting dogs can understand facial cues to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar doggos. This study might provide another explanation as to how adult dogs could recognize their mothers.

One thing you can do, however, is continue to provide your dog with cues as they grow. These cues could be a blanket that smells like mom (and doesn't get washed - so use it sparingly!), a big picture of the dog-mom's face, or regular visits with your dog's mother as the dog grows. By exposing your pooch to their mom in various ways, they are not likely to forget her!