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Do you really think you understand your dog?
Although they cannot speak, dogs have a particular language that facilitates their understanding. We explain some details about these forms of expression.
Dogs can be expressed in other ways. The key is to understand your body language. (Free Press Photo: Freepik)
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Dogs cannot speak, but their body language says it all. Many dogs lean when they want to play, for example, or lick their lips and look away when they are nervous or scared.
But people do not always interpret these signs well, or do not even perceive them, According to a new study.
In the study, the researchers presented to the people videos of a dog reacting to positive and negative stimuli, such as a belt, a candy, a vacuum and a scolding. When asked to evaluate the dog’s emotions, the spectators seemed to pay more attention to the situational signals than to the dog’s behavior, even when the videos had been edited to be deliberately misleading. (In a video, for example, to a dog that seemed to react when he saw his belt to walk, in reality his owner had taught him a vacuum).
“When it comes to perceiving only the emotions of a dog, we believe we know what happens, but in reality we depend unconsciously on many other factors,” said Holly Molinaro, a doctoral student at the Arizona State University and the first author of the new article, published Monday in Anthrozoös magazine.
This bias could give a wrong idea to the owners about the well -being of their dogs, Molinaro said. Who wants to be attentive to the experiences and emotions of his dog must “take one or two seconds to really focus on the dog and not on everything else that is happening,” he said.
The idea of the study was born in 2021, when Molinaro had just started his doctoral work in canine emotions, but the pandemic caused by COVID-19 had drastically limited his ability to investigate in person.
It was inspired by studies that explore how context clues affect people’s perceptions about the emotions of others. It was also inspired by a distinctive technology of the time of the pandemic: zoom. The videoconference software has a function that blurs the workers fund. Molinaro and his advisor, Clive Wynne – expressed in canine behavior of the same university – began to wonder if they could do something similar, creating videos that allowed people to see the behavior of a dog without seeing what happened around them.
Thus, while he was visiting his parents in Connecticut, Molinaro began recording videos of the family dog, Oliver, a mixture of 14 -year -old Pointer and Beagle, interacting with his father. In some of the videos, Molinaro’s father did things to which Oliver was likely to respond positively, such as teaching him the belt to walk or a toy. In others, he did things that would probably cause more negative reactions, such as gently scolding Oliver or bringing Molinaro’s cat, Saffron (“she wasn’t a fan,” she said).
Then, after an intensive video editing course, Molinaro made versions of each video that eliminated the entire situational context, leaving Oliver’s images, alone, on a black background.
The researchers asked hundreds of university students to see the two sets of videos and evaluate Oliver’s emotional state in each clip. When the subjects evaluated the original videos, they described Oliver’s emotions as more positive in the positive stages than in the negatives. But when the context was eliminated, Oliver’s emotions described as equally positive in both types of situations.
Next, the scientists took another step by joining videos of different situations, showing, for example, the father of Molinaro showing a vacuum along with images of Oliver’s response to see his belt to walk.
The spectators seemed to be more influenced by the context than by Oliver’s behavior. When Molinaro’s father appeared doing something positive, the subjects judged Oliver’s emotions as positive, although he had filmed reacting to something negative.
“There is no proof that people really see the dog,” Wynne said. “It seems that they have a kind of great blind spot around the dog itself.”
The study has limitations, including that it was based on the behavior of a single dog. Wynne said people could also do better if they were asked to evaluate the emotions of their own dogs, and that they would probably have noticed signs of intense terror or trauma. (Scientists did not subject Oliver to any extremely negative experience).
Even so, I expected the study to serve as a attention call for pet owners. “I am taking it very much in my own life,” said Wynne, who recently adopted a greyhound with retired races.
“I have proposed to learn how it is expressed,” he added. “Because if I know what makes her happy and unhappy, then I can guide her life towards greater happiness.”
Unfortunately, Oliver did not live enough to see the study published. “But it is very sweet to commemorate this investigation,” Molinaro said.