[Jimbuna]

Why dogs may wag their tails so much - according to experts

Researchers have put forward two possible reasons why dogs wag their tails.

Four experts came together to write a paper in Biology Letters on the enigma that is tail wagging, because while owners often gauge their pet's mood by how fast a tail's going, very little is known about why it happens.

Dr Taylor Hersh, from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and her co-authors looked at more than 100 studies on why dogs wag their tails to come up with two hypotheses.

Both suggestions relate to how dogs have been domesticated and bred by humans for tens of thousands of years, slowly developing more tail-wagging tendencies than other types of canines.

One of the theories, which they call "domesticated rhythmic wagging", details how humans intentionally selected dogs for breeding who wagged their tails more frequently than others, simply because we like rhythmic sequences.

"Cognitive neuroscience shows that human brains prefer rhythmic stimuli, which trigger pleasurable responses and engage brain networks that are part of the reward system," the paper states.

Humans either consciously or unconsciously made dogs this way because of how our brains are wired when it comes to appreciating rhythms, the experts suggest.

The paper states that this might explain why dogs wag their tails so often when interacting with humans.
https://news.sky.com/story/why-dogs-...perts-13050161