The most emailed article today from The New York Times describes a study from Italy looking into dogs and tail wagging. Based on research demonstrating emotional asymmetry in the brain, they hypothesized that dogs would wag their tail in a predictable direction based on their emotional state.When the dogs saw their owners, their tails all wagged vigorously with a bias to the right side of their bodies, Dr. Vallortigara said. Their tails wagged moderately, again more to the right, when faced with an unfamiliar human. Looking at the cat, a four-year-old male whose owners volunteered him for the experiment, the dogs’ tails again wagged more to the right but in a lower amplitude.
I could see this observation being utilized in some Turner and Hooch genre movie. The unsuspecting protagonist is clued into the fact that a person is a villain only by the subtle signal by his trusty pooch.
When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog — a large Belgian shepherd Malinois — their tails all wagged with a bias to the left side of their bodies.
Thus when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign, approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were fearful, their tails went left, Dr. Vallortigara said. It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Have you really taken a careful look at your dog's tail recently?
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2 comments:
I thought when dogs encountered aggressive dogs their tail went between their legs.
Facial expressions, tail wagging, eye contact, and body posture are all ways that dogs communicate with each other. The direction of the tail wag may have more to do with what the dog is communicating rather than what side of the brain is working. Or both could be the case: the supplicant behavior comes from the left side of the brain, so the tail wags right. Dogs then know that a right-wagging tail means submission or at least non-aggression.
With the invention of our language, we've come to largely ignore body communication - except in terms of recognizing these clues pre-consciously, i.e. as intuition. We just have a "funny feeling" about that guy, regardless of what he is saying (or rather because what he is verbalizing doesn't sync up with what our ancient body language listening tells us he intends.)
I figured this out ten years ago when I lived in Asia. When you don't speak the verbal language very well, you really have to pay attention to body language to understand someone. A by product of that was I came back to the U.S. with a better ability to tell when someone is lying to me.
Of course, with my ex-wife I simply suppressed what my intuition was screaming at me.
What if your dog is like mine and his tail swings the complete range of movement?
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