Does your dog really feel guilty when he does something wrong? We finally have an answer

You may be wrong

The only problem is that it’s not the way it looks. The dog owner is cheated, and himself. The reason is the assumption that the dog behaved badly despite teaching him. The dog then looks like a bare misfortune, puts on his sad expression, and thus as if confirms that he failed something. Different dog owners agree on signs of behavior after what the dog has done something – bends his head, freezes, slowly strangles, pulls the tail and even raises the paw and looks as if nothing has happened.

Can dogs feel guilty? Explanations can be found in this YouTube video:

But! Many surveys show that when it comes to the infamous dog’s guilty look, it is not because the dog feels blame for doing something unfair.

The obedience test revealed the novelty

The author of the book Inside of A Dog (translated as inside the dog) Alexandra Horowitz describes the following attempt in her act. During the tests, several dog owners ordered their pets not to eat a treat and then left the room. The dogs then either ate the treat or obeyed the order and did not eat. When the owners returned to the room, scientists to those dog owners who did not deal with their treat, they said they ate it. What was the result? When the owners made the dogs, they looked just as guilty as if they had eaten. This means that sad look and guilty behavior is not related to what the dogs did, but they are related to what their owners did.

From the dog’s point of view

Let’s look at it a little deeper. It is tempting to think that the dog behaves like a child, but it is more effective to perceive the dog in an ethological context, or what a thing means in terms of dog, not humans. In the middle of the last century, ethologists examined the social behavior of dogs, especially their comrades – submissive behavior, which is common in social animals (including us people, even if we do not consider ourselves).

Dogs behave so because of you

Such behavior benefits from holding a group together. We will give you an example: this comrades behavior is characterized by lifting the paw, looking elsewhere, folding the head, whining, rolling on your back. Does that sound familiar to you? Sure, this is how the dog behaves after you scold him for the stretched toilet paper.

But there is another examined fact that the guilty expression is related to the behavior of dogs described above and describes that the place of guilt confession is the manifestations of reconciliation that occur during interactions evoking stress or fear. In other words, dogs see that you are angry and try to calm you down.

Guilty dog ​​behavior even if nothing caused

Good. In that case, you can ask yourself why the dog hides something when you come home and before you get to the point where you will see that he did something? It is quite possible that your dog’s behavior looks suspicious and that it means something. But that doesn’t mean what you think. We will explain. In 1977, the veterinarian Peter Vollmer had a client in Wisconsin, USA, who complained that his dog Nicki bites paper. The veterinarian recommended him to test the owner himself before he left the house.

Refuting the theory of a dog’s guilty expression

He did it, and when he returned, his pet was guilty, even though he did nothing wrong. So why did Nicki look guilty when she didn’t even touch the paper? It means the only thing, namely that dogs respond to stimuli in their environment or to the situations for which they were cursed – they are afraid or angry. And so the theory of guilty dog ​​view because the dog did something wrong, we can exclude.

Submissive behavior has another item in the social world of dogs. Dogs treat the members of the household subordinate quite actively and without urgent. They do not act in a confrontational way, so your dog may look guilty before you find a shoe chewed at Cimpr Campr, because it knows that when you find the shoe chewed, you will be unhappy.

So it can be concluded that if in a household with several dog members, one of them behaves guilty, it does not necessarily mean that the culprit is the dog apolo, which pulls the tail down and squints as if he did something, but it can do it, but it can Being calmly your carefree bitch Nikita, who smiles carefully at you.

In conclusion, the guilty behavior of your four -legged friend reliably does not indicate its disobedience.

Source: www.thedodo.com, www.shncealert.com