The NY Times has an interesting article from a week ago. "If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You, It's in His Tail."
Is everyone singing the shoop-shoop song now? I can hear Cher's voice in my head and I bet it sticks with me all day!
Okay, back to the NYT... "Every dog lover knows how a pooch expresses its feelings..." the article begins. Then goes on to describe a happy dog with uplifted ears, bright eyes, and tail going a mile a minute. But, the article goes on to note, "there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners..."
That's tail wagging. This gets into that whole right brain, left brain stuff, folks. I'm clearly... one or the other but can never remember which one - I think it's right brained cause... I'm left handed. That makes sense, right?
Anyway, the article says, "At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure..." Hmmm, now I don't want to be right-brained.
"Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and [vice-versa]...in humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain)."
All right, let's get to the good stuff. A Dr.Vallortigara and colleagues did a study to find out
what wagging its tail means to a dog. The results showed that when dogs viewed pictures of their owners, their tails went balistic... with a bias to the right. There's more... the tails went left when viewing an "aggressive unknown dog." Check it out for yourself (might require a subscription, which I think is still free).
The bottom line is that -- guess what -- dogs are people, too. They mimic a lot of our emotional and psychological behaviors (my interpretation, not from the article). And, we don't need a fancy research report to tell if they love us or not.
I found the comment on this post at CogSci Librarian, hilarious: someone named Kate wrote, "i have been staring at cooper's rear end for days now and without the graphic overlay, i find it hard to tell which side his tail is wagging on. i have discovered that staring at my dog's back end makes his front end bark at me, though."
Comments