Some dogs I talk to say their owners claim they can tell what their hound is thinking and feeling just by looking at its face, and we all have a canine chuckle about that.
The Boss isn’t one of them though – he assumes I’m either thinking about food or not thinking at all, which is a complete misreading of my cognitive skills. And he obviously doesn’t know what I’m feeling – otherwise he would feed me more often.
He’d be better off with a wolf, because it turns out wolves are much easier to read than a finely-crafted breed like mine. A recent research report in Nature demonstrates that wolves are much easier for humans to read than domestic dogs, particularly those that are selectively bred.
The researchers from Durham University went to a lot of trouble, using a “dog facial action coding system” to identify distinctive facial expressions in the wolves. They came up with nine distinctive expressions, showing anger, anxiety, fear, curiosity, friendliness, happiness, interest, joy and surprise.
These emotional states became much harder to identify in domestic dogs though, and the researchers blame the way dogs have been bred for shorter muzzles, floppy ears, hanging lips and broad skulls.
They found they could predict the emotions of a wolf from its facial expression with 71 per cent accuracy, whereas that dropped to less than 65 per cent for domestic dogs across different breeds.
The dogs that had short, broad skulls, floppy or semi-floppy ears or hanging lips were linked to around 80 per cent of the cases where a dog’s facial expression did not match the perceived emotional state at all.
Given my long floppy ears and ample jowls, it might explain why The Boss is unable to instantly comprehend my most basic requirements.
And they said there was considerable confusion between positive and negative emotional states for domestic dogs, a pattern that was not seen in the analyses of wolf facial expressions.
In other words, when a wolf is happy or contented, he looks like it – whereas some domestic dogs look happy but are about to bite you.
The researchers say such high levels of confusion between positive and negative affective states is potentially detrimental to dog-to-dog and dog-to-human communication.
You can say that again.
The Durham researchers then really piled it on, saying, “It is well-known that selective breeding has led to a wealth of physical health problems in many domestic dog breeds. However, here we provide evidence that such selective breeding also generates social communicative limitations in domestic dogs”.
There you have it. Towards the end of the report, the researchers conceded that domestic dogs had adapted by vocalising more than wolves to indicate a mood or feeling – and if you heard my morning happy howls you’d know what they mean. Woof!