Things Donors Know: Do Dogs Smell Fear?

YS asks: Do dogs really smell fear? In a mysterious way, quiet and educated dogs manage to attack with barking and growling, threatening the most apprehensive guests. How are they? Do you know who to use aggressively for and who to wag their tails to?

Illustration: depositphotos.com

In a mysterious way, quiet and educated dogs manage to attack with barking and growling, threatening the most apprehensive guests. How do they know who to use aggressively for and who to wag their tails to? The myth is that dogs smell some substance emitted by cowards. The hypothesis sounds plausible as some people tend to react aggressively to their proximity and they use the sense of smell to orient themselves in their environment but fear has no smell: there is no chemical difference between cowardly sweat and brave sweat. A more fundamental wonder is why fear will provoke such an aggressive response in the dog?

The psychology of our best friend is thoroughly investigated. Dogs were the first captive animal and yet it is the animal that is in the most intimate closeness physically and emotionally to us. This closeness has far-reaching results on the way it perceives the world.

A domesticated wolf

The domestic dog is a domesticated wolf, very little has changed in biology and even in his psychology since he moved from the spaces to the pillow in the living room. But this little includes elements that are important for communicating with us. Over the 15,000 years of friendship we have come to know each other and have developed a common language. Barking, for example, is a unique means of communication for the domesticated dog (in the wolf, barking is a means of communication limited to puppies) and humans fully understand what dogs tell in the different barking styles.

On the part of the dog, a tendency has developed that does not exist in wolves (not even those raised in infancy by humans) to look at people’s faces. Facial expressions are an essential component of human communication. Accordingly, a special area in the brain is dedicated exclusively to the task of recognizing faces and much of the information we receive from the world and transmit to it is through the abundance of facial expressions. In walking on all fours the communication task is divided into many body parts: the tail, the curvature of the back, the fur and more. Humans use the hands to handle tools, the lower limbs have to handle posture and movement on their own and many more communication tasks are loaded on the facial muscles that have indeed adapted to the task and allow us plenty of expressions: from smile to anger, curiosity or empathy. To chat with his friends, a wolf will look at a set of details scattered all over his body and he has no reason to reduce the field of vision to the head area. Focusing the gaze on a person’s face is perhaps the significant task to which we have genetically trained the dog. An experiment that demonstrated this showed that dogs can easily understand where their owners have placed food if the person looks at the right bowl. To transfer the information to a domesticated wolf it is necessary to send the whole hand towards the bowl or actually touch it. How did the dog learn this strange task? Presumably my domestic dogs preferred to keep as pets (or, in fact, as cave animals) dogs they liked. As thousands of circus animals know what an animal likes about humans is an imitation of human behavior. Heavy evolutionary pressure was exerted on the unfortunate wolf cubs brought from the field to the tribal bonfire to resemble the strange creatures around them. The one who succeeded in this was the one who focused a look on the faces of human beings and followed the direction of their gaze.

Do not understand canine

Unlike dogs who have learned to observe and interpret our body language humans have not developed good intuitions for understanding canine body language. Except for a superficial understanding of expressions of fear or an invitation to play most of us, including dog breeders, do not know how to read as a wagging tail or licking movement of the nose. Most dog owners will correctly interpret a humiliated tail as an expression of fear and distress but few know how to distinguish between a wide tail wagging motion of a happy dog ​​to quick and short tail movements that imply stress and even aggression

and here, in the jump Sharp, we will move from evolution to the postman or pizza courier who opens the courtyard gate and stands in front of the dog. Whoever a dog is for him is a threat flooded with adrenaline and the adrenaline does its job: makes him focus his gaze on danger i.e. on the dog. The dog, for his part, does what dogs have learned to do: look toward the postman’s face. The dog knows that there is meaning to the direction in which a person’s gaze is directed and the man in front of him is actually looking in his direction. In addition, the dog learned to recognize the pace and style of normal walking. And he who is afraid moves at a different pace and his movement is fragmented, he does not seem to come to provide food or play, so obviously his intentions are aggressive. The dog will not attack immediately but will display a sequence of warning gestures: collected tail, frozen body position, turning back ears, baring teeth and growling, continued movement perceived as threatening may lead to bite. To them. How the dogs were perceived as threatening and provoked an aggressive reaction included staring directly at the dog, hesitant walking with the back bent and without making a sound: this is not how a dog lover would normally behave. The same researcher (with the same body odor) Have a look at them.

Did an interesting, intriguing, strange, hallucinatory or funny question come to your mind?

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