How Making Eye Contact with Your Dog Can Let You Know What They’re Thinking

Have you ever wondered what your dog is thinking? Have you ever wished there was some way of knowing if your dog was trying to communicate to you?  A new study finds that dogs and wolves both know how to communicate with humans using just eye contact. It’s suggested that they use “gaze alternation” which means they’ll look between a human’s eyes and something they want that’s out of reach. This is thought to be the wolves and dogs asking for help from their human companions! And while some excuse this nuanced and sophisticated behavior as something genetic in dogs who have been domesticated for thousands of years, Heberlein et al. found that wolves raised in the same conditions as dogs had the same ability to display this behavior.

The researchers, who worked at the already established Austrian Wolf Science Center, raised 13 dogs and 8 timber wolves in the same conditions. These conditions included sustained human contact for the five months of life for at least 20 hours a day. After five months, the wolves/dogs were places in packs and began obedience training. The experiment was done by putting each wolf and dog in a testing room respectively. In the room, there were boxes out of reach of the animals but within reach of the humans involved. The dogs were taught by a third party that there was food in one of the pots. At this point, another person entered the room and sat in front of the animals. The animals then usually interacted with the humans and used gaze alternation to indicate the box that contained food in order to be fed. The people in the room then checked the box they believed the animal indicated to and if it contained food they gave it to the animal. This was done multiple times with the various wolves and dogs and their measures in place to control any confounding variables.

At the end of the tests, once all the data had been analyzed, they found that wolves were more likely than dogs to look at the location of the hidden food. But both species still seemed to enlist the help of the humans to get access to the food. This shows us that the wolves can communicate with humans when raised in the same conditions as dogs, even more so than those same dogs. Knowing this can help us when taking care of our own furry friends and inform our relationships with them.

Heberlein, M. T., Turner, D. C., Range, F., & Viranyi, Z. (2016). A comparison between wolves, Canis lupus, and dogs, Canis familiaris, in showing behaviour towards humans. Animal Behavior,122(1), 59-66.