Responses

  1. I was thrilled to be able to apply some of the knowledge you shared in this session in observing the dogs in this Thai rescue I’m at for another 3 weeks, half-way through my stay.
    In particular, Lola is a chronic troublemaker and had a clearly kinked tail. Even in a relaxed state, she seems to a slightly kinked baseline, though.
    Here are some short clips, looking for conflict and relaxed:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYX_HWyV30c
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VqgbKJd9UQ

  2. I was wondering what your thoughts are on the “shake off” being a sign of stress release. In my experience, I’ve noticed that they tend to shake off after something stressful happens, or after going through something a little more difficult to handle. I often encourage dogs to shake off, like the guy in the video was, as I’ve found it to be like us taking a deep breath during a tough situation.

  3. Familiarity Bias and Physiological Responses in Contagious Yawning by Dogs Support Link to Empathy
    Teresa Romero, Akitsugu Konno, Toshikazu Hasegawa

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0071365

    RESULTS:
    Thirteen out of twenty-five dogs yawned during the experiment (Table 1). Overall, yawning occurred at an average of 1.0 (sd = 1.5) during the yawning condition and 0.2 (sd = 0.4) times during the control condition (familiar and unfamiliar conditions combined).

    Via GLMMs we verified which variables affected the occurrence of contagious yawning. Type of stimulus, familiarity level, gender similarity, dog’s sex and age, and number of presented stimuli were entered as fixed term. The only factor remaining on the best model was type of stimulus (Table 2). The presence of yawn contagion was significantly higher when dogs observed the model acting a yawn than when dogs observed the open-mouth actions (ß = 1.309, P = 0.025). Age and sex of the dogs were not among the variables remaining in the best model, which suggest that male and female dogs older than one year of age were affected by yawn contagion to a similar degree.

    I have noticed two different yawns in my dog one more human wide mouth tongue stretch and a much shorter yawn mouth open half way and no tongue which looked more like a stress related yawn my dog yawns after i do and when he seems to be in a really relaxed
    state as well as when he wakes up from a nap or has been laying around wich could signal boredom i guess it seems to me the wide mouth yawn may not always be stress related and may show empathy ie contagious yawning any thoughts ??