Massive EU Program To Study Three-legged Dogs

DMandPenfold writes "A multi-billion dollar European Union IT research fund will help study the behavior of three-legged dogs, it has been revealed. The fund will support extensive studies into how three-legged dogs move. There is a particular focus on how the dogs balance and function, given their missing limb."

Re:It's for locomotion research

[starfishsystems]

From the perspective of cognition this is very interesting stuff, in fact. As everyone knows, four-legged animals make use of multiple gaits: walking and cantering for example. These gaits are dynamic, and there is no such thing as an intermediate gait. Halfway between walking and cantering is called falling down. So an animal has to know how to accomplish a shift between gaits in mid-stride.

So there's already lots going on cognitively here, just with ordinary gaits. Now imagine that misfortune has struck and there is one less limb. What happens, not just kinematically but cognitively? Is the pattern for a preexisting gait reconfigured, or is there some degree of latent capability that wakes up?