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Dog and owner (symbolic image): Many people love it when their animal wags its tail in greeting
Photo: Gillian Jones-Heck/dpa
Dog owners love this moment: when they come home and their dog wags its tail rhythmically to greet them.
Many owners interpret this as a sign that their animal is happy about them.
Although dogs also wag when they are tense or otherwise negatively aroused.
People find this wagging tail so attractive that they may have domesticated dogs for thousands of years precisely because of this.
This is what researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, suspect in a study published in the specialist magazine “Biology Letters”.
According to current knowledge, people began making dogs their companions between 15,000 and 50,000 years ago.
And as the researchers write, dog puppies wag their tails far more often than wolf pups.
"We put forward a new hypothesis that humans consciously or unconsciously selected based on tail wagging during domestication because we are very attracted to rhythmic stimuli," the British "Guardian" quotes Silvia Leonetti, the lead author of the study.
This now needs to be examined in more detail.
The Dutch's assumption is controversial.
Dog researcher Holly Root-Gutteridge told the Guardian that in her opinion the dogs had adapted to living with people by wagging their tails - and used it as a means of communication because barking irritated people.
The hypothesis with the rhythm is interesting and should be examined in more detail.
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