A little experiment...

[Baby Tea]

It wouldn't work at all. The baby would die from malnutrition. The end.

Unless it was a large breed of dog which adopted the child.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a video of one animal taking another and accepting it as its own... I'd probably have an extra 5 dollars or so but still...

Still wouldn't work.
I don't doubt that the dog might protect the infant, but the baby would flat out die.
It would need the right food, the right elemental protection (Babies don't have dog's fur), all sorts of stuff that a dog or any other animal cannot give it. It would die.

 

[MajoraPersona]

b

It wouldn't. We actually have case studies of where this has actually happened. These are called feral children. (though they're not the result of experiment so much as unfortunate circumstance). The point is that there is a critical age, after which the mental structures in the brain designed for the learning of language begin to degrade, so a child raised by dogs would probably not be able to learn more than the crudest basics of the human language.

but we "normal" humans can learn many languages

That's not how it works.

A man once tried to raise a chimpanzee alongside his child, hoping that the chimp would be able to show some human characteristics. Instead, the child became more like a chimp.

The human brain is very impressionable, able to deal in the abstract and blah blah blah.

Languages are based off of the conveyance of ideas. "iuvenis est stultus" conveys that "(the) young man is (an) idiot". Dogs use barks and body language to communicate.

The learning of other languages consists of a breakdown of what constitutes the language (alphabet, kanji, etc), and the concepts conveyed through this system. In Japanese, the word for brown is "chairo", which means "tea colour". To some cultures, blue and green were the same colour.

Dogs are colourblind carnivores. The concepts they recognize are more along the lines of leadership, friend, enemy, prey, shelter, territory, mate, offspring, food.

If human beings were incapable of communicating these ideas to dogs, I imagine they'd eat us all (as animals are prone to do).

Also, it's already happened:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMbf8R9BPyg

 

[high_castle]

Let's also not forget that the human brain has a limited period of time in which it can learn human communication. I took psychology a while back, and we looked a case study of this girl who was locked in a room alone until she was 13, beaten if she ever spoke. She was never able to learn verbal communication. There was also a case of a kid in France who was raised out in the woods on his own. He also never learned human language. So a kid raised by dogs would never be able to communicate with humans in a meaningful way.

 

[fletch_talon]

It wouldn't work at all. The baby would die from malnutrition. The end.

Unless it was a large breed of dog which adopted the child.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a video of one animal taking another and accepting it as its own... I'd probably have an extra 5 dollars or so but still...

Still wouldn't work.
I don't doubt that the dog might protect the infant, but the baby would flat out die.
It would need the right food, the right elemental protection (Babies don't have dog's fur), all sorts of stuff that a dog or any other animal cannot give it. It would die.

Call me crazy but aren't there numerous posts above stating that it has happened. In the wild no less, as opposed to the controlled conditions of a laboratory. The baby would be able to suckle at first, and whilst dog milk isn't produced with human infants in mind, I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't suffice. The child would then be weaned onto whatever the dogs are eating.

The only issue relating to survival (considering the OP specified it was in a cell, which I assume to mean a controlled scientific environment) is food, and I'm not sure that it would be an issue at all. Admittedly though I am not an expert on the dietary needs and contents of a baby and dog milk respectively.

Besides if worst comes to worst, they can feed the child with minimal interaction, complete silence. Until it reaches the point where it can get its own food when they place it in the cell.

 

[ZombieNinja]

The child would Be able to communicate with the dogs but learning english would be different because the language of animals largely revolves around body language, I think the child would struggle to learn a language around solely speech and noise.

 

[Housebroken Lunatic]

Actually, you're kind of wrong there. An infant raised by dogs will learn to communicate as a dog does. I mentioned in the post just above yours the case of Oxana Malaya. If you want to watch the documentary, you'll see that Oxana literally moves like a dog (not like a human imitating a dog), she literally barks like a dog, she literally acts like a dog. To her mind she is a dog. It is not actually all that far fetched that a human could learn a dog's methods of communicating if raised by dogs (even those of us not raised by dogs understand many of their methods of communicating) because the fact is that dog communication is simply a lower step on the evolutionary scale, the genetic ancestors of humans probably communicated like dogs, through grunts, barks, and various physical gestures, and we haven't completely left these elements behind, we've just advanced them far beyond what a dog would be capable of.

You seem to have forgotten adressing the issue of smell. Dogs discern huge amounts of information through smell, and many vital parts of their communication is based on smell and influencing what smell others sense.

A human will never develop the same sense of smell that dogs have. Therefore the human will miss out on vital parts of the way a dog communicates with other dogs.

So unless you have a proposition to how a human would be able to acquire the same keen sense of smell as dogs do, my proposed theory is far from wrong and perfectly valid...

 

[sizzle949]

There was a case of a little girl being locked up all alone until she was like, 13 I believe. When she was finally discovered and brought to be studied by psychologists, they were eventually able to teach her how to speak English, just not well. The problem was that at learning it at her age she was unable to get any real grasp on syntax, which resulted in her saying stuff like "I pee go now". Humans can still learn language after a certain age, but they will have difficulties with trying to grasp concepts such as grammar.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

Actually, you're kind of wrong there. An infant raised by dogs will learn to communicate as a dog does. I mentioned in the post just above yours the case of Oxana Malaya. If you want to watch the documentary, you'll see that Oxana literally moves like a dog (not like a human imitating a dog), she literally barks like a dog, she literally acts like a dog. To her mind she is a dog. It is not actually all that far fetched that a human could learn a dog's methods of communicating if raised by dogs (even those of us not raised by dogs understand many of their methods of communicating) because the fact is that dog communication is simply a lower step on the evolutionary scale, the genetic ancestors of humans probably communicated like dogs, through grunts, barks, and various physical gestures, and we haven't completely left these elements behind, we've just advanced them far beyond what a dog would be capable of.

You seem to have forgotten adressing the issue of smell. Dogs discern huge amounts of information through smell, and many vital parts of their communication is based on smell and influencing what smell others sense.

A human will never develop the same sense of smell that dogs have. Therefore the human will miss out on vital parts of the way a dog communicates with other dogs.

So unless you have a proposition to how a human would be able to acquire the same keen sense of smell as dogs do, my proposed theory is far from wrong and perfectly valid...

I suppose that's true, although the real question of interest to me here is this: Is the difference between the dog's capability to smell, and the human's capability to smell the result of phisiological differences, the result of differences in the way they are trained to use their senses, or is it both? I strongly suspect the third (I've read a fair amount on the plasticity of the brain, and it seems likely that if we used our sense of smell more integrally, it would be more strongly developed), which would mean that while a human couldn't have quite as well developed a sense of smell as a dog, they would still probably be able to differentiate the various smells that dogs use to communicate. In this case, your metaphor of teaching a blind man about red isn't acurate. This is more like teaching someone who is hearing impaired (but not deaf) to understand human speach. If human speach is hard to hear, you can still learn it, it's just going to be more difficult for you.

 

[Baby Tea]

Call me crazy but aren't there numerous posts above stating that it has happened. In the wild no less, as opposed to the controlled conditions of a laboratory.

I looked at that Wikipedia entry, and reviewed a few of the cases, and in every one they were at least all 3 years old. There is a very significant amount of development going on from day 1 to year 3. Serious, major development. I'm under the assumption that the infant here would be a very young (Under 6 months) infant, at which point I stand by my 'it would die' statement.

At 3 years? Well I suppose it would happen. But, again, in every case that I read, those children never re-integrated back into society. One kid was even killed with boiling water because people were freaked out by him.

We wouldn't learn how to communicate with dogs, which is the 'point' of this whole 'experiment'. We would just have a socially challenged outcast.

 

[Crossborder]

But won't the dogs ignore the baby?

 

[Lieju]

There have been cases where kids have been adopted by dogs or wolves. In those cases the human has learned to act like a dog, and recognise the social rules and expressions of the pack.

But all that can and have been learned just by observing domesticated dogs and wolves in the wild. Better, in fact, since when using equipment we can study sounds and smells better than a human could with just his or her senses.

 

[iJosh]

It wouldn't work at all. The baby would die from malnutrition. The end.

This, all that needs to be said.

 

[Emperor Inferno]

Communication would, at best, be fundamental and basic. Besides the fact that the child would probably not survive, if it did, the outcome would not be worth it. The child could survive on milk and later meat, but if it did, it would be in poor health. So, to sum it up, interesting idea, but not practical.

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

It would be interesting to see what would happen, but then, it would raise mass controversy.

 

[chenry]

I think you shouldn't be allowed near kids or dogs.

 

[dietpeachsnapple]

Sorry, no.

There is something called 'feral child,' where children HAVE been raised by dogs.

The time and difficulty of teaching them to function within society is astounding. Teaching them the linguistic skills necessary to explain their inter-species experience might even be impossible.

Please understand that there is a phase in our youngest years where we acquire the necessary skills to interact with our "peers." It is a one shot deal. If you miss it, you will miss the vast majority of your prime learning potential. Your scenario places that period of the babies life in the care of the dogs, and the baby will identify the dogs as their peer.

In short, no dice.

 

[ae86gamer]

It wouldn't work. The child would become feral and the childs mental capabilities would be hindered due to the years of being surrounded by nothing but dogs.

The child would most likely just be able to perform basic actions and communicate at a very low level. There have been cases like this before, and they almost never end well.

 

[Iampringles]

Human babies are incredibly pathetic in comparison to the spawn of other species, and as such the baby in question would not be able to sustain its existence by walking (or even crawling) to its canine 'mother' for nutrients.

It's rather incredible that humans have got so far, in my opinion.

 

[teutonicman]

uhhh wtf brought about this thought? I mean it's interesting in that a lanuguage could be developed for dogs, but still.

 

[W00ty32]

The feral children site is really interesting, especially genie http://www.feralchildren.com/en/showchild.php?ch=genie, and kamala & Amala http://www.feralchildren.com/en/showchild.php?ch=kamala cases.