Dogs wag their tails more frequently than wolves do, and they do it from an early age, which may indicate that the behavior originated in the line after people began taming them. Dogs may have evolved to wave in order to communicate with their human owners.
According to a recent study, dogs can transmit other complex emotions in addition to happiness by wagging their tails.
Two main theories about the development of canine tail wagging were put up by a group of European academics in a recent study that was published in the journal Biology Letters.
According to the study, dogs will typically wag their tails more to the right when they are feeling happy. When they are feeling down, though, their wagging leans more to the left.
The scientists proposed a possible biological connection between the dogs’ wagging behavior and arousal-related chemicals or neurotransmitters. Additionally, they suggested a possible link between tail wagging and the stress hormone cortisol.
First author Silvia Leonetti of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and research assistant in comparative bioacoustics said to Newsweek that many animals have tails and use them for locomotion (e.g., an alligator swimming), balance (e.g., a cat walking along a narrow fence), and pest removal (e.g., a horse swatting flies away from its body). However, those are not the cases of domestic dogs, whose primary purpose for having a tail is communication.”
Dogs wag their tails more frequently than wolves do, and they do it from an early age, which may indicate that the behavior originated in the line after people began taming them. Dogs may have evolved to wave in order to communicate with their human owners.
“One study found that during food denial situations, dogs wagged their tails more when a human was present versus not, suggesting that tail wagging may also function as a requesting signal,” the researchers stated.
It’s possible that this progression isn’t intentional. The study suggests that another trait, such as friendliness or tameness, may have preceded wagging.
For the purpose of the study, the writers reared a group of silver foxes for more than 40 generations. After being chosen for qualities like docility and tamability, they discovered that the foxes displayed a tail-wagging behavior akin to that of a dog.
“Based on this, we hypothesise that the domestication process may have led to changes at the anatomical and behavioral level that altered tail wagging behavior in dogs,” the researchers stated.
Despite the fact that these hypotheses explain how and why tail wagging arose, many uncertainties remain. Senior author of the study Andrea Ravignani stated, “We are just scratching the surface.”
How successfully canines interpret other dogs’ body language and regulate their own behavior are still mysteries.
“We echo the concerns of other researchers that these procedures may impair the communicative repertoire of an animal (although this should be empirically tested by comparing breeds) and reduce how well a dog can express its feelings and communicate,” Ravignani stated.
