What does your dog ’s tail wag really mean?

When your dog greets you with a furiously wagging tail, are they happy to see you—or is there more going than meets the eye? Wagging, which is mainly confined to domestic dogs, may represent a whole canine language that we are only beginning to understand. A new review article in Biology Letters pulls together more than 100 studies covering why dogs wag their tails and what those wags mean . Science spoke with three of its authors—bioacousticians Silvia Leonetti of the University of Turin and Taylor Hersh of Oregon State University, and evolutionary cognitive scientist Andrea Ravignani of the Sapienza University of Rome—about what waggly tails can teach us about dogs, and about ourselves. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. Q: What made you want to study tail-wagging? Taylor Hersh: The three of us and our other co-author are mega–dog lovers. I think a lot of the research that we do in general stems from this love of animals and from wanting to understand their communication better. Andrea Ravignani: We also are interested in the evolution of human cognition. By looking at how dogs are today, we get to travel back in time and see what the human domestication process has done in terms of dog behavior. So modern dog behavior, to some extent, brings a fingerprint of early humans. Q: Are dogs the only animals that wag to communicate? Silvia Leonetti: Many animals...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news