Who’s a guilty boy?
Dogs know when they’ve screwed up — and their tail-between-the-legs pose is actually a highly evolved “apology bow,” according to CUNY researchers.
Naughty pooches hang their heads and tuck their tails to appear submissive to their owners — a socially shrewd move they inherited from wolves, according the City University of New York biologists say.
“It’s a very interesting phenomenon that goes far beyond the dog-human relationship and actually reveals quite a bit about the nature of communication itself,” Professor Nathan Lents, a molecular biologist, wrote last week in Psychology Today.
Domesticated dogs long ago evolved from wolves, which are so social that they shun badly behaved pack members, according to Lents, author of the book “Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals.”
When young wolves know they’ve done something wrong — like chomping down on a pal or getting too frisky while wrestling — they strike the guilty pose. The cowering bow illustrates to their canine compadres that they’re low-status and sorry, Lents wrote.
These days, Fido and Rover bust out the posture to “apologize” to humans for everything from swiping a sandwich to chewing a shoe.
“Dogs have inherited this behavior, and they will use it after any kind of infraction that results in being punished,” Lents explained.
“As social animals, they crave harmonious integration in the group, and neglect or isolation is painful for them.”
It all boils down to the power-dynamics of friendship, he notes.
“In a sense, an apology is indeed an expression of submission. ‘I was wrong; you were right.’ Nothing could be more submissive than that,” he said.
He added, “While it may seem like a trivial action, it is actually involved in multiple fairly sophisticated social behaviors.”
Ultimately, when dogs strike the pose with owners, they’re asking, “Can we be friends again?”
When dogs hunch into the posture, they also generally stop panting, “smiling” and making eye contact, according to researchers.
“Just like humans rarely misinterpret a smile from a snarl, animals surely understand the subtleties of their own body language,” Lents wrote.
Lents’ research piggybacked off of a 2009 study from Barnard College noting that the “guilty-dog look” pops up most often when owners scold their pooches.