Hirsch and a team of European researchers began a study hoping to answer one question: Why do dogs wag their tails?
Last week, researchers published their findings: Humans likely changed dogs' tail wagging without realizing it, the researchers reported in the journal Biology Letters.
These findings could upend the long-held belief that dogs wag their tails because they are happy. Instead, Hirsch and her colleagues suggest that wagging dogs' tails makes people happy, so humans tend to choose this trait when welcoming canine ancestors into their lives and raising the animal.
Tail wagging is rhythmic, and previous studies have found that rhythms — everything from music to the sound of a horse's hooves — stimulate brain activity that… It helps make people feel happy. Humans, even unconsciously, may have enjoyed the rhythm of dogs wagging their tails, the researchers said.
“It almost sounds like a metronome — tick-tock-tick-tick,” Hirsch, who was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands during the study, told The Washington Post.
The researchers found that since people associated dogs' soft tails with the animals' feelings of joy, it was also possible that more tail-wagging dogs would be chosen as pets. The owners probably assumed the movement meant the furry creature was friendly.
“We don't have a time machine to go back and look at… What did we want from the dogs?” Hirsch said. But she added: “We can try to do our best with modern dogs and modern humans to try to reconstruct this evolutionary path.”
In February 2022, Hirsch and her colleagues began studying dog behavior. Scientists Researchers have found that dozens of dog traits and behaviors changed during domestication, including the appearance of their fur, ears, body size, and even their ability to form “puppy eyes.”
But Hirsch said researchers have been unable to find a clear answer from previous studies as to why dogs shake the part of their body that extends from their spine. They examined dozens of previous studies on canine evolution in an attempt to understand movement.
One study found that dogs started wagging their tails more than wolves when they were as young as three weeks old. Another study found that dogs wag their tails faster and more often than other canines. Additional research has indicated that dogs use their tails to try to express their feelings to people.
Then Hirsch read an article in American Scientist about a study monitoring domesticated silver foxes. The research found that foxes selected for tameness and friendliness end up wagging their tails more than other foxes. She remembered thinking the same was true for dogs.
The authors of Wednesday's paper said more research is needed to confirm their theories. Hirsch, now a researcher at Oregon State University, said she hopes to examine dogs' brains, heart rates and other vitals to understand what the animals are thinking and feeling as they wag their tails.
The research could also shed light on what humans believed and preferred tens of thousands of years ago, according to researcher Andrea Ravignani, co-author of Hirsch's study.
“It's a bit like finding prehistoric cave paintings A wise man Or Neanderthals, which indirectly tells us that our ancestors at that time enjoyed art or had symbolic thinking. “In our case, what we know about how modern dogs wag their tails tells us that our ancestors 35,000 years ago may have already perceived this rhythm.”
