Dr Taylor Hersh, from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and her co-authors looked at more than 100 studies on why dogs wag their tails to come up with two hypotheses.
Both suggestions relate to how dogs have been domesticated and bred by humans for tens of thousands of years, slowly developing more tail-wagging tendencies than other types of canines.
One of the theories, which they call “domesticated rhythmic wagging”, details how humans intentionally selected dogs for breeding who wagged their tails more frequently than others, simply because we like rhythmic sequences.
Alternatively, the experts suggest tail wagging in dogs increased over the domestication process simply as a “by-product of selection for other traits, such as docility and tameness”.
Does tail wagging actually mean a dog is happy?
However, tail wagging can also be used to convey information from dog to dog or dog to human, the paper says, such as showing a dog’s appeasement, submission or non-aggressive intent.
One study the paper references found that dogs may use tail wagging as a requesting signal. For example, if they want you to give them food, they may wag their tail to get your attention.
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