Have you ever noticed to when, and how often, your dog slams his eyes? Probably not, or you have always thought it was just a way to keep eye bulbs clean. A new study by the University of Parma, however, suggests that this gesture has one Important value in communication between dogs, and also in that between dogs and humans: beating your eyes is not just a instinctive gesturebut means something. To try to understand what, the Parma team organized an experiment, whose results are published on Royal Society Open Scienceand which is only a first step towards understanding this gesture.
Evening at the cinema with the dog. The experiment in question involved 54 dogs and relative humanwho were faced with a screen watching a series of movies. Not those who go to the cinema: they were three different videos, in which as many dogs of different ages slammed their eyes, licked their face or stared at the room without moving.
We know that A dog that licks his nose is waiting for something, or is expressing frustration – Two feelings not so distant, if you think of an animal waiting for food. A dog that fixes you without closing your eyes, however, is keeping an eye on the situation. And as regards beat the eyelid?
Why bang your eyes? Experiments have shown that A dog who sees another dog slam his eyes will do the samewith a frequency decidedly higher than that shown in the face of the other two behaviors. The study compares this reaction to what many animals (including us humans) have in front of a yawn: Even the eyelids, in short, is contagious, and on the other hand the same happens to us humans (there are studies that show that during a conversation we tend to synchronize the mutual beating of eyelashes).
To be deepened. Therefore, a question remains: what is the meaning of this gesture for dogs? Usually, banging the eyelids is considered a way to express non -aggressive intentionsand the fact that it is contagious could serve a facilitate the links between conspecificationsand also with us humans. However, we are not yet sure: what we can say for now is that that gesture has a precise meaning (or more than one), but further studies will be needed to identify it.
