#5: Your dog is greeting you
Ever wonder why your dog goes nuts when they see you after an hour of absence?
Greeting almost always involves lots of drool and tail wagging.
Experts attribute this to 2 reasons. First, the dog’s ancestry. In the wild, wolves greet each other by face licking.
Second, the dog’s brain. When they see you, it triggers the pathways in the brain associated with reward.
Whatever the reason, your dog waits by the door, ready to welcome you.
Meet Jaytee, the ‘telepathic’ dog that seemed to know the arrival of his owner. Yet nobody could explain how Jaytee knew when to wait.
It all began when his owner left him with her parents when she went to work.
The parents noticed that Jaytee waited by the French window every day at about 4:30 pm. This was the time that his owner set off home.
Jaytee would wait by the window while his owner was on her way home.
The family attributed this ‘ability’ to time sense.
At one point the owner lost her job. She was gone for hours and did not have a set schedule of coming home.
But Jaytee still showed anticipation of her return.
The owner joined in a research study studying this phenomenon. She and her parents were asked to keep notes when she was away.
On 85 out of 100 occasions, Jaytee waited by the French window before his owner’s arrival.
At the conclusion of the experiments, there were surprising findings.
The author’s observation was that:
‘Perhaps he (Jaytee) was responding to her (owner) intentions or thoughts telepathically.’
It still remained a mystery of how Jaytee could anticipate when his owner was going home.
The author also shared that other dog owners observed the same phenomenon in their dogs.
Why does my dog lay next to me stare?
Let’s face it: Dogs love their owners, but when they stare expectantly, it’s not usually because they’re trapped in a reverie of devotion. Rather, it’s because they’re thinking they might get something. … Some dogs may just be trying to read an emotion in our human facial expressions.
Is it weird to spoon with your dog?
What it means: These dogs are usually have a very close relationship to each other. … While the “little spoon” dog may be having a bad day, they can trust that the “big spoon” will be there. In this position, they are not just showing their affection but great loyalty to one another as well.
14 Signs Your Dog Doesn’t Love You (Even if You Think They Do)
You may think your dog is excited at the sight of your face, but research published Monday suggests that unfortunately, she probably isn’t.
The study, in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that dogs aren’t wired to focus on human faces. What does make their brains spark is the glimpse of another dog. The sight of a human? Not so much.
Through MRI scans of humans and dogs watching videos — of both humans and dogs — Hungarian scientists learned that while humans have a specialized brain region that lights up when a face comes into view, dogs do not. Both dogs and humans, however, do have a brain region that sparks when a member of the same species comes into view.
“Faces are central to human visual communication … and human brains are also specialized for faces,” study co-author Attila Andics, an animal behavior researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, said in an email. But that doesn’t appear to be the case for man’s best friend.
Dogs do pay attention to human faces, Andics, said. “They read emotions from faces and they can recognize people from the face alone, but other bodily signals seem to be similarly informative to them.”
In other words, dogs may notice our faces, and even the expressions on them, but they use all sorts of other information, such as body language and voice cues, to tell what we are up to. Humans, on the other hand, value most what they see on a face.
To see if humans and dogs processed faces the same way, Andics and his colleagues recruited 30 humans and 20 dogs who were family pets. In the experiment, each human and each dog lay in an MRI machine while shown a series of two-second videos: a dog face, the back of a dog’s head, a human face and the back of a human head. The order in which thoe videos were shown varied with each run.
Getting a dog to lay still in a loud MRI scanner is a challenge in and of itself.
“They go through a several months-long training,” Andics said. The dogs are taught that “they cannot move during measurements, even a little.” He added that the “trained dogs are happy volunteers in these experiments, not forced or restrained in any way. They can leave the scanner any time if they want.”
When they analyzed the brain scans, the researchers found visual areas of the humans’ brains lit up far more when a human face was shown compared to the back of a head. Also human brains were more active when a video of a person played than one of a dog. When it came to the dogs, brain activity didn’t change whether a face or the back of a head was viewed. When videos showed a dog, the dogs’ brains were more active than when videos showed a human.
From an evolutionary standpoint, the study’s results make sense, said Dr. Carlo Siracusa, an associate professor of clinical behavior medicine and director of the animal behavior service at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
“Mother Nature will not invest in something that is not relevant to survival, either in dog-to-dog or even wolf-to-wolf interactions,” said Siracusa, who was not involved with the new study. “They use other ways of communicating such as ear position — which can be seen from the front and from behind. The ear position will tell about the mood of the dog. We humans don’t move our ears.”
Dogs also use chemical communication much more than humans do, he said. The scent of another dog will reveal whether that dog might be of interest.
But dogs may have evolved to pay attention to human faces because they’ve also evolved to depend on humans, Siracusa said. “They try to understand from facial expressions what humans want,” he added. “How likely is it they are going to get something to eat rather than be punished. They are like toddlers.”
Dr. Katherine Houpt also wasn’t surprised by the new findings. “We always look at people’s faces, but dogs look at all of us,” said Houpt, a professor emeritus at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. “Dogs have other ways of [evaluating] people.”
Experiments have shown that dogs will be less likely to go to a person who has demonstrated selfish behavior, such as refusing to help someone open a jar or share some cookies, said Houpt, who was not involved with the Hungarian study.
But for those feeling sad about the findings, Houpt offered words of reassurance: “Your dog loves all of you, not just your pretty face.”