The dog would use facial expressions to communicate with human beings

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AFP

Thursday, 19 October 2017 11:27

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Thursday, 19 October 2017 11:27

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Ears at half-mast, eyes beaten dog, curled-up lips: the best friend a man could engage in these facial expressions to convey a message and not only in the grip of an emotion, according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports.

We already know that dogs are very sensitive to human attention. “But our results go further by suggesting that we need to interpret the movements of their face as a mode of communication”, explains to the AFP Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, one of the co-authors of this work.

To arrive at these conclusions, Juliane Kaminski and colleagues studied 24 dogs of different breeds, aged from one to twelve years. All of them were pets.

The researchers filmed the dogs and their expressions by placing it in a meter of a human, the latter being of the front, back, attentive or distracted.

Result: “the muscles in their face move more if the human is attentive,” says Juliane Kaminski. And “the eyes of a beaten dog” is the expression which they adopt most frequently.

The experiments have also allowed to highlight that the animal was less expressive in the face of food, a synonym of pleasure for him.

The researchers deduce that the face of the man, the dog expresses more than a simple emotion.

“The results could indicate that dogs are sensitive to the attention of the human, and their expressions are potentially active attempts to communicate, and not just displays emotional”, explains the researcher.

But it should not be inferred that a pet takes his eyes of beaten dog to coax his master. According to the team, the work does not allow us to assert that dogs have consciousness of what a human being can think or feel in the face of his gestures, a faculty seen as a sign of high intelligence, of man.