http://www.flickr.com/photos/memestate/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Socrates and Aristotle, make way for Fido and Rover. According to a new theory of ethics, the social order of dogs, wolves, and coyotes may be the best source of insight into the roots of human morality.

After years of closely analyzing the ways in which dogs play with each other, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce—whose new book Wild Justice is slated for a May release—concluded that dogs follow a rigid code that prevents their seemingly violent play from becoming a fight. By bowing to each other, showing signs of apology, and adapting their strength to the abilities of their playmates, dogs safely control themselves when they play, promoting fairness and preventing injuries. Bekoff and Pierce claim that the "moral intelligence" of dogs, "probably closely resembles that of our early human ancestors. And it may have been just this sense of right and wrong that allowed human societies to flourish and spread across the world."

Dogs frequently risk their lives to save their canine friends and their human companions. Seriously—you think you trained your dog well? What does it mean that it's really dogs who have trained us?

Written by Logan Scherer

vannattabros / CC

I'm having a hard time typing this with a straight face, but scientists at the University of Vienna have recently released a study claiming that, in the words of a news article, "living with humans has taught dogs morals." Apparently, the researchers attribute dogs' sense of "fairness" to their contact with humans.

Are they drinking from their lab-bench pipettes again? I mean, don't you always think of dogs as exemplifying the finest attributes we look for in humans? Loyalty, love, and—of course—fairness … aren't these qualities we can all learn from dogs? With all the human injustices—the wars, rapes, pillaging, cutting other people off in traffic, etc.—it seems a bit grandiose to claim that dogs learned their sense of fairness from us.

Consider this news story from Argentina: A 14-year-old girl abandoned her newborn baby outdoors, in winter, in the middle of the night. When the baby was found, she was being kept safe and warm—not by the human being who left her to die or by any other human but by a dog.

The dog, China, was keeping the baby girl safe among her own puppies and, perhaps seeing that she was weirdly hairless, had even covered her with a rag! Authorities theorize that China found the baby outdoors and carried her back inside. If not for China, the baby would have died unprotected against the cold outside.

So let me get this straight—who should learn from whom here?

Written by Amanda Schinke