For dog owners, few sights are more heartwarming than their pooch wagging its tail. Suggesting excitement, eagerness, or simply pure joy, the tail wag has long been emblazoned as the default symbol of canine carefreeness. But it always begs the question: Just why do dogs seem to wiggle their behinds when happy?
The answer, as it turns out, is complicated, involving a complex interplay between natural selection and humans’ artificial influence on behavior. And, dogs don’t just do it as an indicator of joy: A new study published in Biology Letters reviewed the existing body of literature to outline several theories pinpointing the mechanisms behind the infamous tail wag.
“We won't be able to fully answer [why dogs wag their tails] until we start thinking about tail wagging as this behavior that has multiple components,” says Taylor Hersh, one of the study authors and a bioacoustician studying vocal complexity in animals at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. “By putting all the information into one place, it helps us to find out what we still don’t know.”
Why Do Dogs Wag Their Tails?
For starters, it's long been known that dogs wag their tails for a variety of reasons. After all, just as we gesture with our hands, or point our feet toward people we enjoy, tail wagging is but one mechanism by which dogs nonverbally signal to one another.
