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While living with animals comes with its own set of problems and joys, for animals, living with other humans comes with hurdles as well. A lot of times, us intelligent human beings run into problems with our own devices, or with other humans, so to think that cats and dogs are exempt from this is… Not accurate. Besides, animals can have a bad day, and express visible discomfort with or without a human being present. It’s just one of the many things that make us love them.
That being said, it’s a little hard not to get a giggle out of their reactions. They seem so upset and so done with their situation, that your heart just aches for them. But at the same time, it’s so amusing that you can’t look away. There are cats here who had food stolen from them, dogs who got dyed a weird color, and turtles who accidentally fell back on their shells and couldn’t get back up. It’s sad, but also so very cute.
Source: Reddit
TheAtlantic found something very interesting when it came to animal expressiveness.
Dogs, more so than almost any other domesticated species, are desperate for human eye contact. When raised around people, they begin fighting for our attention when they’re as young as four weeks old. It’s hard for most people to resist a petulant flash of puppy-dog eyes—and according to a new study, that pull on the heartstrings might be exactly why dogs can give us those looks at all.
A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans.
For the study, a team at the University of Portsmouth’s Dog Cognition Centre looked at two muscles that work together to widen and open a dog’s eyes, causing them to appear bigger, droopier, and objectively cuter. The retractor anguli oculi lateralis muscle and the levator anguli oculi medialis muscle (mercifully known as RAOL and LAOM) form two short, straight lines, which connect the ring of muscle around a dog’s eye to either end of the brow above.
These researchers have long been interested in the ways dogs make eye contact with humans and, in particular, how they move their eyebrows. In 2017, Juliane Kaminski, the lead author of the new paper, found that dogs moved their eyebrows more often while a human paid attention to them, and less often when they were ignored or given food (which, sorry to say, is a more exciting stimulus for them than human love). That suggested the movement is to some degree voluntary. On our side of these longing glances, research has also shown that when dogs work these muscles, humans respond more positively. And both man and mutt benefit from a jolt of oxytocin when locked in on each other.
For cats, there’s something similar. BBC covered it!
Moriah Galvan and Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US studied 12 cats and their owners. They found that the animals behaved differently when their owner was smiling compared to when they were frowning. Cats can read human facial expressions, and they learn this ability over time When faced with a smiling owner, the cats were significantly more likely to perform “positive” behaviours such as purring, rubbing or sitting on their owner’s lap. They also seemed to want to spend more time close to their owner when they were smiling than when the owner was frowning.
The pattern was completely different when the 12 cats were presented with strangers, instead of their owners. In this setup, they showed the same amount of positive behaviour, regardless of whether the person was smiling or frowning. The results suggest two things: cats can read human facial expressions, and they learn this ability over time. We have known for a while that dogs are good at recognising human facial expressions. But this is the first convincing evidence that cats have the same capacity. People are more likely to spoil a cat when they are in a good mood
That does not mean they feel empathy. It’s more likely that the cats had learned to associate their owners’ smiles with rewards: people are more likely to spoil a cat when they are in a good mood. Still, even if cats do not truly understand our moods, the study still suggests that they can pick up on surprisingly nuanced human gestures. It also suggests something more basic: they are interested in us. “People care about whether cats really do understand and pay attention to their owners,” says Vonk. “Our work shows that they may not be as indifferent as people accuse them of being.” Domestic cats first appeared around 10,000 years ago It may have taken so long to discover cats’ emotional intelligence because their responses are rather subtle. As well as obviously “positive” actions like purring or rubbing, Galvan and Vonk noticed that the cats adopted certain body positions, and ear and tail movements, that are associated with contentedness.
What about you? Did any of your animals have a bad day like this?
