A study found that dogs cry when they are reunited with their owners animal behavior

If your canine companion is nothing but a canine dog that cries all the time, it could be because he’s full of emotion.

Researchers in Japan say they have discovered that dogs cry when they are reunited with their owners. What’s more, the chatter appears to be related to levels of the “bonding hormone” oxytocin.

“This is the first report to show that positive emotions stimulate lacrimation in a non-human animal, and that oxytocin acts on lacrimation,” the team said.

Writing in the journal Current BiologyThey describe how eye contact between humans and dogs encourages the former to care for the other, while a dog’s gaze can cause its owner to release oxytocin. Dogs have also developed the ability to raise their inner eyebrows, An adjective that scholars say He urges people to take care of them.

Now researchers in Japan have found that tears may have a similar effect.

“I have two standard poodles and I have had one female who has been pregnant for six years,” Professor Takefumi Kikusui, a co-author on the research at Azabu University, told the Guardian. Kikusui noticed that her face was more tender than usual while caring for her young, and realized that her eyes were watering.

“It gave me the idea that oxytocin might increase tears,” he said. We have previously observed that oxytocin is released in dogs and their owners upon interaction. So we had a reunion experiment.”

In the first step, the team measured the volume of tears that 18 dogs produced when they were in their normal home environment with their owner, using the Schirmer test. This involves placing a special strip of paper inside the lower eyelid and measuring the distance the moisture travels along the strip.

The team compared this volume with that produced during the first five minutes of dogs being reunited with their owners after a separation of more than five hours.

Researchers say the dogs produced a significantly higher volume of tears when reunited with their owners than when they were wandering around the house alone. However, this increase did not appear when 20 dogs were similarly reunited with a familiar human who was not their owner.

An additional trial in 22 dogs showed that dropping oxytocin into their eyes increased the volume of tears they produced – a result not seen when using another oxytocin-free solution.

The team then presented 74 participants with 10 pictures of five dogs, depicting each animal with or without wet eyes, and asked them to rate on a five-point scale how much they wanted to avoid or care for the animal. Kikusui said the results reveal that dogs with tears increased by 10 to 15 percent of people willing to care for them. The team says this indicates that the teary eyes of dogs elicit such feelings in humans.

The researchers add that unlike other animals, dogs acquired high-level communication abilities with humans using eye contact.

“Through this process, their tears may play a role in eliciting protective behavior or nurturing behavior from their owners,” they wrote, noting that it may deepen interrelationships and bonding between humans and their canine companions.

But Kikusui said that while the team found that dogs showed an increase in crying during reunions with their owners, questions remained.

“We don’t yet know if dogs show an increase in crying during a dog reunion. We also don’t know how dogs use tears to communicate with each other. “We need to clarify the social function of dog tears.”