Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Dogs Catch Yawns Too

According to a recent study, dogs can catch people’s yawns too.  It was previously thought that only humans and their close primitive relatives could find them contagious but apparently not.

The research team are based at Birkbeck College in London.  They say that autistic people are less likely to copy other people’s yawns and it is believed that our natural reaction to copy someone’s yawn is from a natural inclination to wanting to empathise.

29 dogs were involved in the tests and each underwent two tests, each lasting 5 mins.  In the first test, a person (a stranger) sat in front of the dog and called his name.  When they made eye contact, the person yawned.  In the second test, the person was asked to do the same but this time only open and close their mouth, not to actually yawn.  This was to ensure the dog wasn’t simply responding to an open mouth.

21 of the 29 dogs yawned in response to the yawn but not one yawned in response to the open mouth test.  This indicates that dogs can empathise with humans although the team couldn’t rule out stress-induced yawning, although they intend to continue testing in order to hopefully rule this out in future.

The research team also said that this capacity may have been increased during domestication as humans have selected dogs to be obedient and docile so through their breeding in domestication this sort of trait would be increased.

So next time you yawn, just watch and see what your dog does!