{"id":757549,"date":"2019-06-24T08:21:20","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T12:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=757549"},"modified":"2019-06-24T08:24:13","modified_gmt":"2019-06-24T12:24:13","slug":"study-dogs-eyes-have-changed-since-humans-befriended-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=757549","title":{"rendered":"STUDY: Dogs\u2019 Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Them"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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A big theme that\u2019s come out again and again in canine cognition and looking at the domestication of dogs is that it seems like they really just kind of dove- right-into our society in the role of being an infant or a small child in a lot of ways.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

HALEY WEISS:<\/strong> ‘Dogs, more so than almost any other domesticated species, are desperate for human eye contact. When raised around people, they begin fighting for our attention when they\u2019re as young as four weeks old. It\u2019s hard for most people to resist a petulant flash of puppy-dog eyes\u2014and according to a new study, that pull on the heartstrings might be exactly why dogs can give us those looks at all. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs\u2019 faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves\u2019 aren\u2019t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that \u201cadopt me\u201d look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It\u2019s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans…<\/em><\/p>\n

The origins of changes like these aren\u2019t immediately apparent. Certain physical dog traits\u2014including floppy ears and short snouts\u2014likely originate from the same set of developmental cells that code for tameness, a preferable trait in household pets, for instance. In the case of this new research, though, the connection between the physical trait and the related behavior is a bit more direct. \u201cPrevious work\u2014and much of it by these same authors\u2014had shown that these muscles were responsible for enhancing positive responses in humans,\u201d Brian Hare, the director of Duke University\u2019s Canine Cognition Center and the editor of the paper, told The Atlantic via email, \u201cbut the current suggests the origin of these facial expressions is after dogs split from wolves”…<\/em><\/p>\n

Research has already demonstrated that humans prefer pets with more infant-like facial features… \u201cIt\u2019s such a classically human system that we have, the ways we interact with our own infants,\u201d says Angie Johnston, an assistant professor at Boston College who studies canine cognition and was not involved with the study. \u201cA big theme that\u2019s come out again and again in canine cognition and looking at the domestication of dogs is that it seems like they really just kind of dove right into our society in the role of being an infant or a small child in a lot of ways. They\u2019re co-opting existing systems we have”. The same humanlike facial gestures could also be a dog\u2019s way of simply securing attention in the first place’.<\/em> SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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