Dr. Mary Bates' excellent summary of a recent study by Isabelle Laumer and her colleagues called "Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species" was all it took to motivate me to offer some pilot data my students and I have collected over the years on teasing by free-running dogs. Bates writes:

Like joking, ape teasing is intentional, provocative, persistent, and includes elements of surprise and play. Teasing requires sophisticated socio-cognitive abilities and may be a precursor to joking behavior in humans. The cognitive prerequisites for teasing may have evolved in a common ancestor of humans and apes.

Playful teasing behaviors in apes had some key features in common: They were provocative. Teasers led the interactions by directing hard-to-ignore behaviors at their targets. They were intentional. Teasers approached specific targets and persisted when they were ignored, by either repeating or increasing the intensity of the behavior or switching to a different behavior. They were playful, but not “play.” While teasing is a playful activity, it differs from play. Teasing was more one-sided than play, and apes rarely used play signals when teasing. They........

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