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Study Says Dogs Use Their Eyes To Tell You What They Want

Canines use their ‘look’ to communicate with their owners.

 

London, December 31, 2019: a new study has found that our clever pups use their eyes to communicate with their owners, particularly when it’s regarding food or wanting attention. As per the report published in Country Living , research by Pet Munchies and K9 Magazine found that almost two thirds of dog owners say their pets use a certain ‘look’ to communicate their needs, instead of barking, whining or nudging their owners.

About the Study 

The team behind the study asked 1,100 dog owners about how they interact with their four-legged friends. While it’s not uncommon for dogs to use ‘puppy eyes’ to get what they want, the study also found that dogs can use intense eye contact when they are expressing their concern over the welfare of humans. K9 Magazine publisher Ryan O’Meara, who also owns three dogs, said: “Learning how to ‘talk dog’ is extremely important. It’s crucial to understand what our dogs are trying to tell us when they communicate with us. “One of the ways dogs have always communicated with humans is through studying our eyes. Over the decades, dogs have learnt to learn to judge our mood and character, for example, by staring at us.

Friendly Gaze Works 

This is a dog’s way of trying to actually talk to us. They know we will understand what they are trying to tell us because as our relationships with dogs have evolved, we have learnt to read their signals as well as they read ours.” Ryan also explains that dogs are indeed incredibly smart and have used their eyes for decades as a clever way to get what they want from humans. “Over the years, they’ve extended how they talk to us using their gaze with the evolution of the ‘puppy dog eyes’ look, which is designed to pull on our heartstring by mimicking the wide-eyed look of babies.”    

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Study Suggests, Dogs Evolved Sad Eyes to Manipulate Their Human Companions

Dog’s expressive eyebrows are the result of selection based on humans’ preferences.

New York, June 20, 2019: About 30,000 years ago, a wolf decided to give up the wild life, commit to a steady relationship and become the first dog. Today, dogs and humans are the undisputed best friends of the animal kingdom, and, according to a new study, that comraderie may have been propelled by some serious emotional manipulation.

As reported by Live Science,  the study published on June 17 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  researchers looked at the evolution of “puppy dog eyes”, the signature, eyebrows-raised look of sadness that any dog can employ to escape virtually any consequence, and found that the expression finds its source in a powerful muscle that seems to have evolved specifically to mimic human emotions.

In a small survey of dogs and wolves, the researchers found that the muscle is “uniformly present” in modern dogs, but conspicuously absent in their wild cousins. The ability to make this hangdog expression, which closely resembles the look of confused sadness often worn by human babies, “may trigger a nurturing response” in humans who behold it, the authors wrote, and could therefore be an evolutionary advantage to doggos.”We hypothesize that dogs’ expressive eyebrows are the result of selection based on humans’ preferences,” the researchers wrote in the study. “In only 33,000 years, domestication transformed the facial muscle anatomy of dogs specifically for facial communication with humans.”

To reach these conclusions, the authors examined the eye muscles in six dead dogs and four dead wolves of varying breeds. They found that five of the six dogs had thick muscles capable of lifting their eyebrows intensely (the only breed that didn’t was the Siberian husky, which is a breed closely related to wolves. The wild wolves, meanwhile, were either missing that eyebrow-lifting muscle entirely or had a thinner, stringier version of it.

The researchers coupled these anatomical studies with a behavioral analysis, in which 27 shelter dogs and nine wild wolves were filmed up close by a human with whom they were unfamiliar for 2 minutes. The researchers recorded how often the animals raised their eyebrows during the interaction and, unsurprisingly, found that the dogs made puppy dog eyes about five times more often than the wolves did. The dogs also raised their eyebrows significantly higher than their wild cousins.

According to the researchers, these findings suggest that some selection process has encouraged domesticated dogs to evolve a more human facial anatomy than wolves in just a few tens of thousands of years. It’s likely, they hypothesize, that these anatomical changes are a result of interaction with people, who may be more likely to favor dogs capable of making expressions that could almost pass for human.

This is just a hypothesis, of course, and, as some dog experts told the Associated Press the study’s small sample size prohibits any sweeping conclusions about canine evolution. Still, gaze into the eyes of a forlorn corgy puppy for a few seconds, and it’s hard to argue with these results. Dogs are clearly doing something to get into our mushy human hearts and brains, and we’re OK with that.

 

 

 

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