Does The Use Of Masks Confuse Dogs?
Society has accepted the use of masks as the new reality. In addition to maintaining social distance, humans must use approved masks to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. With its use we cover a part of our face, and as a consequence, facial gestures lose expressiveness.
Dogs are able to read and interpret our gestures to a certain extent, but if they can only see part of our face, we subtract information. Does this mean that the use of masks confuses them? Find out with us.
Dogs interpret our gestures
Your dog understands when you speak to him. Although they cannot understand the meaning of everything you say, dogs are capable of interpreting our gestures, words or emotions.
In fact, dogs have very similar brain mechanisms to ours, since they process intonation with the right hemisphere and words with the left hemisphere. In this way, they not only know what we say but also how we say it.
As if this were not enough, they are also able to identify the most recurrent words that we use in communication with them and associate a meaning with them. Terms such as walk, food and play are accompanied by a specific activity and the animal knows it.
Dogs don’t just pay attention to sounds, as non-verbal communication is just as or more important to them. Dogs distinguish a happy human face from an angry one and understand what both expressions imply.
The face experiment
There are many studies that have tried to decipher how dogs interpret our expressions. Is what they learn from their owners transferable to the faces of unknown people? Do they discriminate a face by certain facial features or as a whole?
Finnish researchers attempted to answer these questions by recording the gaze of 31 dogs of 13 different breeds while viewing photos of the face of humans and dogs with three basic emotional expressions: threat, liking, and neutrality.
By following the dog’s gaze, the experts created maps on the photographs and observed that the dogs did not base their perception of facial expressions on the visualization of the structures separately, but on the composition formed by the eyes, the middle part. of the face and mouth.
Although the dogs fixed their objective more time on the eyes than on the mouth, they made a homogeneous sweep over the entire face. This means that they are not based on clues to interpret emotions —for example, showing teeth as an indication of happiness— , but rather evaluate our expression in full.
In addition to interpreting the expressions, the dogs responded to them. By visualizing the angry faces of people, they performed calm signals and tried to avoid them.
Do masks confuse dogs?
The masks cover a middle part of the face, nose and mouth and therefore subtract gestural information, but the expressiveness of the eyes, the context and the verbal communication give us enough clues to understand the message.
In fact, dogs are not very visual animals, although it is true that a foreign object on our face can cause an initial reaction, especially to the most reactive ones, in general, dogs are guided by the world with their smell.
The mask can confuse dogs a bit, but they use other visual, olfactory and sound cues to complete the information and understand the situation. For example, the tonality of the voice is key for dogs, since they can distinguish positive or negative messages just because of this characteristic.
The use of masks is not a concern for the daily life of dogs, especially when they live with us and are used to our way of acting, routines and schedules. Therefore, there is no justification for not wearing it in public places or as an excuse to stop walking pets.
Although at first some dogs may be surprised, it is normal that the mask stops attracting their attention day after day. If this is not the case and you think it can cause behavior problems in your pet, you can always consult a canine educator.
The pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus has no short-term solution and we must all work together to prevent its expansion. The dog, like any other animal exposed for a long time to the same stimulus, will end up getting used to the use of masks by the guardians.
For all these reasons, we can summarize all this debate in the following lines: Do not stop using the mask so that one day the dogs can read our faces again!
