The Story
The phenomenon of puppy dog eyes is nothing new to dog lovers; a quick gaze from a canine friend may melt the heartiest of human hearts.
Researchers think that this is because dogs have developed new muscles around their eyes to help them connect with their human friends.
Researchers from the United Kingdom and the United States who investigated the anatomy and behavior of dogs and wolves discovered that the muscle composition of canine faces had altered, enabling them to “connect with people more effectively.”
Researchers took apart the heads of dogs and wolves and found that the muscles in their faces were almost the same, except for a muscle in dogs’ eyebrows that lets them “intensely” raise their eyebrows.
The research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) journal, discovered that the inner eyebrow-lifting action makes dogs’ eyes “look bigger, more infant-like, and also mimics a movement people make when they are sad.”
The study’s first author, Juliane Kaminski, is a comparative psychologist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. She told CNN that this makes people feel “nurturing.”
“The results show that expressive eyebrows in dogs may be a product of humans’ unconscious preferences that affected selection throughout domestication. “When dogs move, it appears to generate a tremendous urge in people to watch after them,” she added.
As a result, the dogs with the more active eyebrows would have a “selection advantage” over the competition, maintaining the characteristic in future generations.
The researchers also looked at how dogs and wolves behaved. They found that when exposed to a person for two minutes at a time, dogs raised their inner eyebrows more and with more force than wolves.
The study’s co-author, evolutionary psychologist Bridget Waller, said in a statement, “Our findings show how important faces can be in getting our attention and how powerful facial expression can be in social interaction.”
transformation
According to experts, the findings suggest that thousands of years of domestication were involved in face transformation.
“To determine whether this eyebrow movement is a result of evolution, we compared the facial anatomy and behavior of these two species and found the muscle that allows for the eyebrow raise in dogs was, in wolves, a scant, irregular cluster of fibers,” said lead anatomist Anne Burrows of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, another co-author.
Dogs’ elevated inner eyebrow movement is caused by a muscle not found in their closest living cousin, the wolf. This is a noteworthy distinction for animals separated just 33,000 years ago, and we believe the extraordinarily quick face muscle changes may be directly connected to dogs’ better social engagement with humans.”
Dogs have been shown in previous research to be able to identify good and negative human emotions.
Fun Fact
A dog’s sense of smell is legendary, but did you know that his nose has as many as 300 million receptors? In comparison, a human nose has about 5 million.
Best flea medication for dogs
Completely breaks the flea life cycle
Aids in the control of sarcoptic mange infestations
Completely breaks the flea life cycle
Aids in the control of sarcoptic mange infestations
Completely breaks the flea life cycle
Aids in the control of sarcoptic mange infestations
