Dogs communicate different feelings with right or leftward tail wagging
Source: The Guardian
Dogs communicate different feelings with right or leftward tail wagging
Ian Sample, science correspondent
theguardian.com, Thursday 31 October 2013 17.19 GMT
Dogs can tell how other dogs are feeling from the way their tails are wagging, according to researchers who monitored the animals' heart rate as they watched canine movies.
The Italian team found that dogs had higher heart rates and became more anxious when they saw others wag their tails more to the left, but not when they wagged more to the right, or failed to wag at all.
The curious form of communication is probably not intentional, or consciously understood, but is instead an automatic behaviour that arises from the structure of the brain, said Giorgio Vallortigara, director of the animal cognition and neuroscience lab at the University of Trento.
"It's not something they explicitly understand," Vallotigara told the Guardian. "It's just something that happens to them."
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/31/dogs-communicate-feelings-tail-wagging
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