Point at a ball and a dog will look at the ball, whereas a cat will probably look at your hand. Dogs seem to have a ready understanding of how human beings direct attention by pointing, and can follow our gestures almost as if they thought the same way we do. Of course, dogs probably aren’t born knowing anything about people. We just carefully train them to look, fetch, and so on, right? Or do we? A comparative psychologist at the Max Plank Institute in Germany,Michael Tomasello,ran a series of tests on dogs which they find which sealed container had yummy dog food in it. The only hint they got was from a human being who looked or pointed at the right container. This wasn’t hard for dogs at all.