Yes, I was just looking at the narrower picture of alarm reactions triggered by the unfamiliar. It is well documented that dogs can alert suffers of epliepsy that an attack is imminent. Dogs can indicate cancer in some cases. How they do it is not certain - probably a change in the person's body chemistry. Dogs can sense far more than we give them credit for sometimes

I agree, my friends dog could tell when someone was pregnant - even before they new!

Hmmm, will have to try that, purely in the interests of scientific research, of course!

Ah ... the enquiring scientific mind Don't blame me if you get bitten

You can just see it can't you?

"Ello Jakey, give ush a kish then! Ow by dose, whaddya do that for?"

tob acts different with the kids we visit as pat work than he does with children at the school gates.
more calm,gentle, approaches them slower etc.
a friend who is a nurse has told me that a dog can pick up on cancer and its a study that shows if a person has skin cancer the dog will keep licking it etc as they know some thing isn't right, it reckons 9/10 times the results are some form of cancer and the dog is trying to get rid of it.
tob had his 1st experience of a child who is dying the other day at hospital and i think it un settled him he seemed depressed as such and was a different dog when we walked out the main doors.
i was just thinking this what does a dog sense that we don't know about it seems alot more than you think.
but then why would 1 dog bark or back away from an ill/different person and another be gentle with the same thing?
does this got down to the dogs nature or how stable the dog is in different situations on the whole?
i would think how a dog re acts to some one with a problem what ever it is would be down to the nature of the dog maybe i'm wrong, like if a child crys some would go to the child and try and cheer them up others wouldn't do anything.so at a guess is it how well the dog is at sensing different things make them act differently.

Akita reacts to people with mental handicaps, but is fine with physically diasbled people. My mum had a neighbour who had lost his legs as a young boy and was in a wheelchair, and he always made a fuss of her. So wheelchair equals nice person in her head, where as she never liked a man who was skizophrenic (sp) even though he was always quiet and never forced any contact with her. Also she would raise hackles and even growl at a man who was mentally disabled.
(sorry about terms used, english is not my first language and some words I just don't know)