A study by Kyoto University in Japan has found that dogs can recognise bad people based on their actions.

Dogs are very socially aware creatures that are able to sense when you're happy, sad, angry, or annoyed...


And they're also able to sense when a person is untrustworthy, a study has found.

The study, published in the journal Animal Cognition, was conducted by Akiko Takaoka and a team at Kyoto University in Japan found that dogs know if you're to be believed or not...

According to certain cues you give.

In the study, thirty-four dogs were presented with 3 rounds of the pointing gesture.

The first round saw the dogs accurately pointed to where food was hidden in a container. Then, in the second round, they were pointed to an empty container.


In the third round, the same person pointed the dogs to the container with food in, but this time, the dogs failed to respond.

Of the thirty-four dogs used in the experiment, every single dog refused to go towards the container on the third round.

Following that, a new person repeated the first round, pointing to where food was hidden in a container...


This person found that the dogs responded once again.

"These results suggest that not only dogs are highly skilled at understanding human pointing gestures, but also they make inferences about the reliability of a human who presents cues and consequently modifies their behavior flexibly depending on the inference," the report reads, "Dogs have more sophisticated social intelligence than we thought. This social intelligence evolved selectively in their long life history with humans."

However, as per the BBC, John Bradshaw of the University of Bristol, UK, suggested that the results indicate that dogs prefer predictability.

Bradshaw, who was not involved with the research, also noted that when dogs don't know what's going to happen next they can become stressed, aggressive, or fearful.

Aren't dogs just the best?!