Do dogs smile? Inside the mind of man's best friend
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Need a pick-me-up today? Watch a video of a smiling dog – it should do the trick.
You could go for the dog smiling as his owner takes a selfie or the one where the owner is training their puppy to smile on cue. Maybe a whimsical edit of dogs smiling is your thing, or what will really cheer you up is a dog smiling after carefully trying a bite of cauliflower.
But is your dog really "smiling" in the way humans understand it? And if so, what is it trying to communicate? 5 Things Sunday host James Brown explores this topic with Clare Mulroy and veterinary behavior specialist Dr. Lore Haug. Eddie the dog makes a cameo too.
Show notes:
Do dogs smile? Absolutely. Here's why your pet does it and what they're trying to tell you.
Texas Veterinary Behavior Services
Texas Veterinary Behavior Services on Facebook
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
James Brown:
Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm James Brown. It's Sunday, February 26th, 2023. Every week we take an idea and go deep, and this week we're headed into the mind of dogs and other animals. For the first time in my life, I'm living with a dog, meet Eddie. He's a mutt, most likely a Shih Tzu and a bunch of other things.
Speaker 2:
We're good to go. Let's go out. Eddie, let's go out.
James Brown:
He's a small dog, a white fur ball with some streaks of brown hair. After he's been alone for a bit, he gets so excited to see us that his feet lose traction. It's like he's skating. Sometimes he climbs up my leg and tries to make eye contact with me afterward. This was a subject that my colleague Clare Mulroy looked into. I take it you're a pet person.
Claire Mulroy:
I am. The pictures in this story are actually of my dog. I really campaigned for that because my dog has the best smile in the world, so I really needed the world to see it.
James Brown:
Well, that's one of the things that I wanted to ask about. So, before you researched this topic, you believed that your dog smiled.
Claire Mulroy:
Yeah. Ever since, we've had her for I think 11 years almost, and ever since we got her, she does this kind of no teeth smile where she brings her... The corners of her mouth up and it's pretty indistinguishable. So, for me, I just really wanted to find out what she was trying to tell us. I always kind of assumed it was the equivalent of a human smile, but I really wanted to dig in more and find out what exactly it was and if it was actually smiling that she was doing.
James Brown:
What did you find out? Is the smile a display of emotion or is it a happenstance? What did you find out when you looked into it?
Claire Mulroy:
It's a sign of active submission. It's basically the dogs giving you this appeasement greeting behavior. But what's particularly interesting about this is that it's only directed at people. It's not directed at other dogs. It might be accompanied with other greeting behavior like approaching their owners, wagging their tails, maybe even some whining, and it's really showing that appeasement greeting behavior to your owner.
James Brown:
Does it look like a human smile?
Claire Mulroy:
It could be, humans, we smile with our teeth without, and dogs do the same. There's some dogs that may never smile with their teeth, and there's some dogs that do smile.
James Brown:
What was the response like? Did you hear from people whose other dogs smile?
Claire Mulroy:
I was kind of patrolling the Instagram comments because it was posted on Instagram yesterday and seeing some people comment, I always thought my dog was smiling. I had a hunch that that's what it was, but I wasn't sure if there was an actual reason behind it. I wasn't sure if they were actually smiling. So, it's nice to hear that people have been observing this such cute behavior from their dogs and now they can actually have a definite answer that yes, their dogs are smiling.
James Brown:
Smiling isn't the only way that dogs express emotions. Dr. Lore Haug has been working with and counseling animals since the 1980s. She's a board certified veterinary behavioralist, or in other words, an animal therapist. At 81 time, her office in the Sugar Land, Texas area is tracking hundreds of animals. She's seen a lot.
Lore Haug, welcome to Five Things.
Lore Haug:
Good morning, how are you?
James Brown:
I'm well. How are you?
Lore Haug:
I am doing well also.
James Brown:
And I understand we have a dog with us now.
Lore Haug:
We actually have two dogs in our office today.
James Brown:
What are their names?
Lore Haug:
One of them is named Sunny. She is a pit bull mix and the other dog's name is Charlie and she is a German Shepherd.
James Brown:
I would think to be an animal counselor or a psychiatrist or psychologist, you have to be pretty talented and you could have done a lot of other different things. Why settle on this discipline?
Lore Haug:
I've just been interested in animals since I was a little kid. I find medicine fascinating. I find behavior fascinating, and so it was kind of a natural progression for me to blend veterinary medicine and animal behavior together, so that I can take care of both their mind and their body.
James Brown:
What are your toughest cases?
Lore Haug:
They're a variety. I mean, obviously dogs that have... Or any kind of animal, we don't work just with dogs, but animals that have disorders that involve self-injury, like they chew on their body parts or they're having panic behaviors, so severe that they might jump through a second story plate glass window to try to get out of the house or get away from a storm. Those are obviously really disturbing. And then, cases where there's a lot of behavioral pathology, animals that really probably have abnormal brain development where they're showing aggression maybe even to their own family members. And sometimes those cases are quite severe and it's very emotionally traumatizing for the animal and the people.
James Brown:
A dog jumping out a window because they're afraid, are they anxious? Where does that come from?
Lore Haug:
It's a panic behavior. We've all heard about people maybe that have panicked attacks or people that get in scary situations and they just panic. Or in an animal's case, it's survival. If they're so terrified about, say a thunderstorm and they're just running anywhere thinking they can get away from the storm and they're like running anywhere and the house isn't working, maybe I just need to get out of the house and they will sometimes true through the wall or like I said, "Go through windows," and they're serious cases because obviously they can get hurt.
James Brown:
How dense is the field of research on this? How long have people been trying to figure out about animal emotions?
Lore Haug:
I would say it's become really a much more prominent field in the last 10 years. For many decades in the past, we didn't even accept that animals could feel pain, and obviously fortunately we know better than that now. But I would say there's a lot of people looking into animal cognition and higher level thought, if you will, and emotions a lot. Like I said, "In the last 10 years."
James Brown:
Wow. We didn't believe that animals could feel pain.
Lore Haug:
Yes, I mean, for a long time in the past nobody believed infants felt pain either, which is why they did things to them without pain medicine.
James Brown:
Wow. I did not know. That's really scary. I'm living with a dog for the first time in my life. It's clear that Eddie can retain certain things. He knows the sound of our cars. He knows which door he goes out to go to the bathroom. He knows which way his food is, typically. How much can animals retain? And dogs in particular.
Lore Haug:
Quite a lot, you hear about some of these border collies that have learned over 300 different cues or they can differentiate a hundred different toys by labels. But animals are quite capable of associating environmental stimuli with things that are important in the environment. And this is a survival mechanism. You need to know where the danger stuff is and you need to know where the good stuff is, where's the food in the water and the stuff that brings me company. So, dogs are very good at making those kind of associations with their environment. And they even have some temporal associations too, because you hear about these dogs, for example, that well around 4:30 they go and sit at the front door or the back door because they know their owner's going to be home at five.
And that isn't so much because they read time, but they almost have kind of this internal capability of tracking time to a degree so that their brain kind of knows, "Hey, this is about the amount of time or the time of day when my owner usually comes home." So, they're capable of a lot more than many people realize.
James Brown:
You've worked with lots of different types of animals. I was asked by a couple different people if cats smile as well. Are you aware of that?
Lore Haug:
Yes, and I would say cats do. It's a little different than dogs, both in how they do it. They don't have as many facial muscles as dogs do. The expression is much more subtle and they don't smile for the same reason. The dog smiling is an appeasement greeting behavior. Kind of like when a person approaches like, "Hi, how are you doing?" Cats, when we talk about smiling, they're smiling is sort of just at a representation of how they feel at that moment. Like, "Oh, that cat again looks happy, look at that smile on his face." But they don't specifically smile as a greeting behavior.
James Brown:
Are there other animals that smile?
Lore Haug:
I am not aware of other animals that smile in the way that dogs do. And I think again, that's partly because the dog smile, as I mentioned in the article, is a specifically people directed behavior. Like they don't smile, they don't do that appeasement smile to other dogs, not in the same way they do to people. And dogs are really the only animals that evolve to cohabitate, specifically with humans like we have other domesticated animals, but dogs actually evolved with people and that is partly what makes them very special in how they bond and behave around us.
James Brown:
Any famous last words?
Lore Haug:
I will just say that there's a lot of patients or pets that need help, and if you think your pet's having any kind of distress or anxiety, get professional help. So, talk to your veterinarian, get a referral to a qualified professional. There is no regulatory body for dog trainers or animal trainers, but there are regulatory bodies for veterinary professionals. So, there's a lot of really good professional assistance out there, but there's also still a lot of people that are providing services that are not appropriate.
James Brown:
Lore Haug, thank you for joining me.
Lore Haug:
You are welcome.
James Brown:
Thanks to Clare Mulroy, Lore Huag, and of course Eddie the dog, for joining me and to Shannon Ray Green and Alexis Gustin for their production assistance. Tell us what you take of the show. Review us on your podcast app and send me an email at jabrown@usatoday.com or leave me a voicemail at 585-484-0339. We might have you on the show. You can also find me anywhere online at James Brown TV, for all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening.
I'm James Brown, and as always, be well.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Do dogs smile? Inside the mind of man's best friend: 5 Things podcast
