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Man talks to his dog (symbolic image).
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A study shows that dogs may wag their tails to please people.
They could have unconsciously contributed to the selection over the years.
Taylor Hersh was watching a YouTube video of wolves a few years ago when the animal researcher noticed something strange.
The wolves barely wagged their tails.
This was a stark difference from the frequent wagging she observed in most domestic dogs, and made her curious about what had changed in the roughly 35,000 years since dogs were domesticated from wolves.
Hersh and a team of European researchers began a study hoping to answer a question: Why do dogs wag their tails?
Last week, the researchers published their findings: Humans have probably changed the way dogs' tails wag without realizing it, the researchers say in the journal
Biology Letters
.
The results could upend the long-held belief that dogs wag their tails because they are happy.
Instead, Hersh and her colleagues suspect that dogs' tail wagging made people happy, so people paid attention to this trait when adopting canine ancestors into their lives and breeding the animals.
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Dog tail wagging is rhythmic – rhythms make people happy
Tail wagging is rhythmic, and previous studies have shown that rhythms - from music to the sound of stamping horse hooves - trigger brain activity that helps people feel happy.
According to the researchers, humans may have enjoyed, albeit unconsciously, the rhythm of dogs' tails wagging.
"They almost look like a metronome - tick tick tick tick," Hersh, who was conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands during the study, told the
Washington Post
.
Because people associate dogs' tail wagging with their happiness, it is also possible that tail-wagging dogs were selected as pets, the researchers said.
The owners may have assumed the movement meant the furry creature was friendly.
“We don’t have a time machine to go back and see what we wanted from dogs.
Hersh said.
But, she added, "we can try to do the best we can with modern dogs and modern humans to reconstruct this evolutionary path."
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In February 2022, Hersh and her colleagues began studying dog behavior.
Scientists have found that dozens of dog characteristics and behaviors changed during domestication, including the appearance of their fur, their ears, their body size - and even their ability to make "puppy dog eyes."
But according to Hersh, researchers in previous studies have been unable to find a clear answer to the question of why dogs wag the part of their body that protrudes from their spines.
They combed through dozens of previous studies on dog evolution to understand this movement.
At the age of three weeks, dogs already wag their tails more strongly than wolves
A study found that dogs wiggle their tails more than wolves as early as three weeks old.
Another study found that dogs wag their tails faster and more often than other dogs.
Further research revealed that dogs use their tails to try to express their feelings towards people.
Then Hersh read an article in American Scientist magazine about a study that observed domesticated silver foxes.
The research found that foxes selected for tameness and friendliness wagged their tails more often than other foxes.
The same must be the case with dogs, she reminded herself.
The authors of the study published Wednesday said more research is needed to confirm their theories.
Hersh, now a researcher at Oregon State University, hopes to study dogs' brains, heart rates and other vital signs to understand what the animals think and feel while they wag their tails.
The research can also shed light on what people thought and preferred tens of thousands of years ago, according to researcher Andrea Ravignani, a co-author of Hersh's study.
“It's a bit like finding prehistoric cave paintings of Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, which indirectly tells us that our ancestors enjoyed art or thought symbolically back then,” Ravignani said in a statement to The Post.
“In our case, what we know about how modern dogs wag their tails tells us that our ancestors may have already noticed the rhythm 35,000 years ago.”
To the author
Kyle Melnick
is a reporter in The Washington Post's Morning Mix newsroom, where he covers stories from around the country and the world.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on January 22, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.