Your Dog Knows You Better Than You Think

For any of you who have grown up with a dog, you know how attached not only you get to them, but also how attached they get to you. Having a dog is like having a friend that you can always depend on to greet you like you are the best thing they’ve ever seen, to jump all over you when you come home from college, and to cuddle with you every time you sit down on the couch. Here is a picture of my dog, Belle. She is a 5 year old Newfoundland, and also basically a giant teddy-bear of a dog.

I’ve always thought it was incredible how she seemed to know when me orIMG_4617 someone in my family was excited, upset, or angry, even if we weren’t outright expressing these feelings. Belle would always seem to sense and react to our moods. When someone is upset, she lays her head on their lap and seems to be looking into their eyes, and if someone cries she whimpers and licks their face. It is like she is a person showing empathy and trying to cheer you up. When someone is afraid, she is immediately on guard-dog duty. My younger sister used to be afraid of thunderstorms, and Belle would sit up tall right between my sister and the nearest window, as if she wanted her to know she was protecting her. When someone is happy, Belle runs to find the nearest toy that she can find, whether it is one of her chew toys or a stuffed animal from mine or my sister’s rooms, and she brings it to you like a present. She doesn’t even like to play fetch, she just is excited to go run and find something to give to you and show that she is excited too. After going home for Thanksgiving break and remembering how excited Belle was when I got home and how upset she seemed when I said bye to my family and to her, it got me wondering about how dogs can sense what is going on with the people around them.

When I began my research, I came across an article that posed a very good point. The article pointed out that dogs are meant to belong to a close knit family, just like humans do. Dogs, like humans, have a language of facial expressions, body language, and vocalization. If a dog grows up as part of a human family, doesn’t it make sense that the dog would adapt to their family’s languages?

One study that was done focuses on how humans read each others faces, and compared it to how dogs read humans faces. The study showed that humans and dogs both read the faces on humans the same way, first looking slightly on the left half of the face and then the right. What was remarkable, though, was what happened when the scientists showed a dog a picture of another dog. Instead of looking left to right like they did when observing a picture of a human, they first looked to the right and then to the left. The study concluded by saying that dogs have evolved to learn how to read human faces, and they do it in the same fashion that we do, enabling them to understand facial expressions extremely well. Certainly, correlation does not equal causation. There may have been a confounding variable, such as the way the scientists acted when each photo was pulled up. Although I think the study may have been more effective if there were no other scientists in the room with the dog and the photos, the results of this study are still worth looking at.

Many pets sit home for most of the day, just sleeping and lounging around when their owner is not paying attention to them. During all of the time your dog lays in the living room while you watch TV, or sits in the kitchen while you cook, it makes a lot of sense that he or she is also observing what you are doing. Since nearly every aspect of their life depends on their owner, a dog pays more attention to what their owner is doing than they may think. This is how a dog understands your habits or routines and, can see when you are happy or sad. They say that human communication is 90% nonverbal through body language and facial expressions, and only 10% verbal, so your beloved dog may understand you better than you think.

One thing we need to remember about dogs is that they have much more powerful senses than we do, so even if we cannot communicate verbally with our pets, they have other means of understanding. According to this article, dogs most important sense is smell, and their nose is anywhere from one thousand to one million times better than a human, and their sense of hearing is four times as strong. This is how our dogs can sense our mood other than obverting our body and facial expressions. When you are nervous or upset, your body naturally perspires,
and even if you don’t notice it your dog can. When you are afraid, your dog can smell adrenaline and will most likely react in your defense. Although dogs cannot understand your verbal Screen Shot 2015-12-01 at 2.59.05 AMcommunications, they do understand your tone of voice. Your dog will easily be able to tell if you are speaking in an affectionate tone or an angry one.

After learning so much about how much time our dogs spend thinking about what we are feeling, I can’t wait to go home and play with my dog. It is important to remember how every little thing we do around our dogs directly affects them!

4 thoughts on “Your Dog Knows You Better Than You Think

  1. Nicholas Eric Pulos

    This topic has been talked about in my family for years now. We have a little west highland terrier, and in his younger days, he is 14 now, he was always very good with his sense of our emotions. Whenever someone would be upset, he would go and sit with them on the couch, or keep them company until they were feeling better. That, unfortunately, is not always the case anymore. His hearing started to go about 3 years ago, and now he is completely deaf in both ears. Because of this, he is not able to articulate our emotion through sound anymore, and thus is unable to emphasize the way he used to. This article from NPR, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/21/280640267/how-dogs-read-our-moods-emotion-detector-found-in-fidos-brain , states that scientists found a patch in dog’s brains that allows them to articulate our emotions through their remarkable sense of sound. So, this does correlate well with why my dog cannot sense our emotions as well. This was a great topic that you chose, and I will share it with my parents so they too now know why my dog is not as emphatic as he used to be!

  2. Matthew Meise Kreymborg

    I really loved this posted because I can relate with my dog. I have a 5 year old chocolate lab and everyone in my family thinks she is secretly a human. She is extremely vocal, and lets us know every time she wants something by nudging us or whimpering. She is also one of the most comforting dogs I have ever witnessed. For example, she does the same thing as your dog, after someone is upset, or after people are yelling, she will lay her head on them and look up towards them, as if she is trying to cheer them up. https://mysmelly.com/content/dogs/dogs-and-signs-of-affection.htm. This is a like to a website I found interesting about the different ways dogs show affection. Ive also always wondered about if all dogs could suddenly speak to us, what would they say, and what stories would they have about us? Kind of fun to think about

  3. Bowen Wang

    You did a really decent job on the researches you found on the website. It is almost incredible for me to believe that dog actually could adopt the way human being look at each other and differ it from looking at other dogs. My family have couple dogs back in my hometown and one of my friend have the same dog as you do, even the color, but the one he has is a boy. What a coincidence.
    I often think about the way our pets act as, well, our pets. I mean almost everyone have suffered from ‘misunderstanding’ in their daily manner even if we are able to communicate each other by the most efficient way. While certainly we are not able to understand what our pets are saying but it seems that, as you mentioned in your post, they understand us very well. While this may be a hypothesis theory after red though your post, but for once I thought it may due to a duplicate learning process. As we taught them over and over they pick up the certain order you say and it makes us fells like they understand our language. Actually they just understand the certain combination of volume and cadence from your order. The first article below at the reference place is an article explains the hypothesis. The reason why I thought about this is because even if the same kind of dog they may could ‘learn’ different kind of languages. For instance, you could taught a dog you bought from a pet store in Korean to ‘sit’, and taught he or she to ‘run’ in English, after a while he or she will understand what you speak regardless of the Language.
    It also very interesting and refreshing for you to come up with the fact that our dog have a better sense of smell and hear, I truly convinced by your finding and article that they may sense those emotions that we never thought they would noticed. Those articles are really creditable.
    Thanks for your quality post. I will share this to my friend with this.

    References:
    http://www.animalplanet.com/pets/can-dogs-understand-what-we-say/

  4. Elyssa Paige Woods

    This is a great post as it can relate to many people and their families. I have a 7 year old Australian Shepherd and she definitely notices and reacts to how each person in my family is feeling that day. My brother broke his arm earlier this year and the second she noticed my brother pain she followed him around all day and when he would sit down she would lay right beside him; If you knew her you would know she would not do this on a daily basis. I looked this topic up, http://www.livescience.com/20823-canine-comfort-dogs-understand-emotion.html, and found that many researches are still trying to conduct more studies on this topic to get more evidence linking human emotions and how dogs will react. What these researchers are also considering is that different breeds of dogs might react to human emotions in different ways. Overall, your topic and ideas were very interesting and clearly thought out. Great job!

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