Dogs can wag their tails so much because people like the rhythm - researchers

Tail wagging is common in dogs everywhere, whether it's an elegant wag or a fierce sway. Researchers have now suggested that this could have become a common occurrence during the domestication of dogs because people like this rhythm, UNN writes with reference to The Guardian.

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It is believed that humans domesticated dogs somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 years ago. But while owners often rely on tail wagging to understand how their dog is feeling, it remains unclear how this "canine semaphore" evolved.

Now, experts have outlined a number of theories in an effort to encourage researchers to delve deeper into this issue.

"We may not be able to use a time machine to go back to the beginning of the dog-human relationship, but we can look at dog behavior today in tandem with human behavior to try to understand what this domestication process looked like," said Dr. Taylor Hersh, co-author of the paper from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

"Tail wagging is a very obvious and interesting behavior from the very beginning," she said.

In an article in the journal Biology Letters, Hersh and his colleagues describe a number of studies that have previously examined tail wagging.

Among them, experts have found that puppies raised in home conditions wag their tails much more often than wolf cubs raised in captivity, and that dogs wag to the right in response to positive experiences-for example, when they see their owners-and to the left when they want to withdraw, for example, in aggressive situations.

However, questions remain, such as why dogs wag their tails more often and in more contexts than other dog-like animals.

According to the researchers, one possible trigger is the process of domestication, and studies have previously suggested that other traits in dogs arose because they have a genetic link to behaviors chosen by humans, such as tameness or obedience. Hersh and her colleagues say that something similar may be involved with tail wagging.

But it is believed that there could be another explanation.

"We have put forward a new hypothesis that humans consciously or unconsciously chose to wag their tails in the process of domestication because we are very attracted to rhythmic stimuli," said Silvia Leonetti, the first author of the paper.

The team is now calling for more research on tail wagging to explore the possibilities, with Leonetti adding that experiments using advanced and non-invasive technologies - focusing not only on individual dogs but also on dog-dog and dog-human interactions - could help.

While others welcomed the article, Dr. Juliana Breuer of the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology noted that perhaps the enhanced tail wagging was chosen by humans directly for reasons other than its rhythmic nature.

Dr. Holly Ruth-Gutteridge, a dog researcher at the University of Lincoln, said she believed that tail wagging was a social signal between humans that dogs had adapted to communicate with humans because barking annoys people.

"We're a species that emphasizes the visual aspect and maybe we value rhythm. It's an interesting thought to explore, although I'm not sure we really respond that strongly to it," she said.

Ruth-Hatteridge added that wolves also wagged their tails and used this as a social signal, although there was limited data on the use of this in the wild.

I suspect that human ancestors saw tail wagging as a positive sign, easily readable in wolves, and developed it into the way we talk with our hands-as a communicative gesture that we can easily understand.