WASHINGTON - No fair! What parent hasn't heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something? Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way. Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they'll happily keep at it. But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again. Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.
Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.
"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who led a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."
Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.
Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.
Next, she said, will be experiments to test how dogs and wolves work together. "Among other questions, we will investigate how differences in emotions influence cooperative abilities," she said via e-mail.
In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw," to place their paw in the hand of a researcher. It's the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."
Those that refused at the start - and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs - were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.
The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.
The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received.
When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.
When both got a reward all was well.
One thing that did surprise the researchers was that - unlike primates - the dogs didn't seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.
Possibly, they suggested, the presence of a reward was so important it obscured any preference. Other possibilities, they said, are that daily training with their owners overrides a preference, or that the social condition of working next to a partner increased their motivation regardless of which reward they got.
And the dogs never rejected the food, something that primates had done when they thought the reward was unfair.
The dogs, the researchers said, "were not willing to pay a cost by rejecting unfair offers."
Clive Wynne, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of Florida, isn't so sure the experiment measures the animals reaction to fairness.
"What it means is individuals are responding negatively to being treated less well," he said in a telephone interview.
But the researchers didn't do a control test that had been done in monkey studies, Wynne said, in which a preferred reward was visible but not given to anyone. In that case the monkeys went on strike because they could see the better reward but got something lesser.
Range responded, however, that her team did indeed do that control test as well as others in which food was moved or held in the hand but not given to the dog being tested.
In dogs, Wynne noted, the quality of reward didn't seem to matter, so the test only worked when they got no reward at all.
However, Wynne added, there is "no doubt in my mind that dogs are very, very sensitive to what people are doing and are very smart."
The CIW is a community-based worker organization. Our members are largely Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian immigrants working in low-wage jobs throughout the state of Florida.
Southwest Florida is the state's most important center for agricultural production, and Immokalee is the state's largest farmworker community. As such, the majority of our more than 2,500 members work for large agricultural corporations in the tomato and citrus harvests, traveling along the entire East Coast following the harvest in season. Many local residents, and thus many of our members, move out of agriculture and into other low wage industries that are important in our area, including the construction, nursery, and tourist industries. The community is split, roughly, along the following ethnic/national origin lines: Mexican 50%, Guatemalan 30%, Haitian 10% and other nationalities (mostly African-American) 10%.
dollars annually for the community in increased wages) and a new-found political and social respect from the outside world.
against indentured servitude came in January of 2007, when a crewleader by the name of Ron Evans was sentenced to 30 years in prison. You can read more about the Evans case and the CIW's work against the most extreme forms of farm labor exploitation by clicking on the following link: 
Group against Human Trafficking through its Center for the Advancement of Human Rights.
The Taco Bell boycott gained broad student, religious, labor, and community support in the nearly four years since its inception, including the establishment of boycott committees in nearly all 50 states and a fast-growing movement to "Boot the Bell" from college and high school campuses across the country. Large scale national actions helped move the boycott forward. For example, in 2003 we organized a 10-day hunger strike outside of Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine, CA -- one of the largest hunger strikes in US labor history, with over 75 farmworkers and students fasting during the 10-day period -- galvanizing the support of national religious, labor, and student organizations and thousands of individuals. During that strike we posed Taco Bell’s executives one question: “Can Taco Bell guarantee its customers that the tomatoes in its tacos were not picked by forced labor?” The company had no answer. In 2004 and 2005, we organized cross-country tours featuring marches and actions in Louisville, KY, and Irvine, CA, lifting the campaign to new heights.
In March 2005, amidst growing pressure from students, churches, and communities throughout the country, Taco Bell agreed to meet all of our demands to improve wages and working conditions for Florida tomato pickers in its supply chain. The boycott victory was celebrated by observers including former President Jimmy Carter, former guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, Tom Morello, and the 21 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The Hispanic Caucus said of the accord, "This is a truly historic agreement, marking perhaps the single greatest advance for farm workers since the early struggles of the United Farm Workers. To the the workers and organizers of CIW, we express our deepest gratitude for their determined work for their own dignity and their historic contribution to advancing the cause of labor rights." 
And in April of 2007 -- following a two-year battle with the largest restaurant chain in the world, McDonald's -- the Campaign for Fair Food took an important new step forward. With an announcement at the Carter Center in Atlanta (President Jimmy Carter's center for conflict resolution), McDonald’s and the CIW reached a landmark accord that not only met the standards set in the Taco Bell agreement, but also committed the fast-food leader to collaborate with the CIW in developing an industry-wide third party mechanism for monitoring conditions in the fields and investigating abuses. 
Over the past several years, through the Campaign for Fair Food and our anti-slavery work, Immokalee has evolved from being one of the poorest, most politically powerless communities in the country to become today a new and important public presence with forceful, committed leadership directly from the base of our community -- young, immigrant workers forging a future of livable wages and modern labor relations in Florida's fields. In recognition of their work, three CIW members were recently presented the prestigious 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, the first time the award has gone to a US-based organization in its 20 years of existence. In recent years, the CIW and the Campaign for Fair Food have been recognized by several other institutions, including the World Hunger Year's 2006 Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award, the Freedom Network's 2006 Wellstone Award, and the 2005 Business Ethics Network's BENNY Award. 