Puppy Dog Eyes – Thursday 26th December 2019

Puppy Dog Eyes

I want to tell you something about our puppy dog eyes. It’s obvious when you come to think about it, but has taken some very good work by some very clever scientists to make us realise. The reason you can’t resist our lovely little faces is actually your own fault. Now, to be fair, our Mistress thinks wolves look quite appealing so I don’t think what I’m about to tell you is the whole story, but a research project by Dr Juliane Kaminski into the facial expressions of dogs, has shown that because you always selected the dogs with the most appealing faces to breed, little by little you caused us to have the wonderful puppy dog eye expression that now you can’t resist.

How many times do we hear a human say ‘You can’t resist his little face’? Of course you can’t and for that we are very grateful, but you do need to understand you’ve brought it upon yourselves.

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Portsmouth University

The study was done at Portsmouth University here in the UK and, unsurprisingly, has been one of the most quoted research papers of 2019. Again – who can resist our lovely little faces? Of course their study was called something as simple as ‘Puppy Dog Eyes Your Downfall’. It was actually ‘The evolution of facial muscle anatomy in dogs’ which is much grander and is a bigger subject than just our eyes.

I think it’s fair to say we’ve pretty much perfected that part of our anatomy, so maybe you could move on to something like ‘the evolution of muscles needed to pull things down off work surfaces’ or other useful skills.

Well done to the team in Portsmouth. We rather like your thinking and if you need any help with your studies we have dog friends in your area who will only be too happy to help in exchange for a a few treats.

You can find more about the Dog Cognition Centre HERE

Love

Alfie