On tail wagging and the scientific method

Great news folks! I am aware that things have been rather quiet lately on the Bouncing Bertie Boffin front. Well, fret not. The drought is over.

As an enthusiastic tail wagger myself, (see Waggly Wednesday) you can imagine how excited I was to learn that some chappies in Italy have published a scientific paper* on the topic of dog tail wagging and left/right asymmetries.

Yes of course this is a subject worthy of serious study. I mean not every one can be focussed on curing cancer or solving global warming can they?

Apparently it is already known - at least to a select group of researchers in Italy - that we pups are supposed to wag our tails to the right when we are happy and relaxed, like when our owner approaches with treats, and to the left when apprehensive.

And now we have this this new study, in which the (human) authors claim to have demonstrated, by measuring changes in heart rate, that us pups can read the messages implicit in the asymmetric tail movements of our fellow dogs.

Yes really. 

Really? 

I hope you have spotted a degree of cynicism in the wording of my description of this research. 

Scientists are taught to be sceptical and always to rigorously and critically examine the evidence and I think that such an approach is appropriate here.  

I mean, so many questions immediately spring to mind don't they?

• These dogs in the study, were they all Italian? If so, might there be an element of learned behaviour, what with living amongst a population of humans known to be such enthusiastic gesticulators?
• What about yours truly? I tell you, all week since she read the paper, Gail has been carefully studying slow motion videos of me excitedly waving my not inconsiderable tail and as yet has failed to detect a bias to either left or right.
• Should we be concerned about in-breeding in this particular research community, having noted that fully 50% of the papers cited in this new study are written or co-written by one of its authors?
• Can we treat seriously a paper when, in the discussion section, it refers to work investigating dogs' responses to the tail-wagging of a life sized robotic dog replica? I kid you not. 

Well fellow canines, you will be thrilled to learn that together we can surely surmount the shortcomings of this research and make a significant contribution to science. 

All you need is a bag of treats (to induce an appropriate amount of happy tail wagging, obviously) and an observant human. 

Oh and you might like to remind your human that sound science requires an experiment to be repeated many times over, so they will need a BIG bag of treats.

Please report your results (left wag, right wag, or no bias either way) as comments on this post, and feel free to add any supplementary information you think might be relevant.

A full analysis of the data provided will be published on this blog in due course.


*Siniscalchi et al., Seeing Left- or Right-Asymmetric Tail Wagging Produces Different EmotionalResponses in Dogs, Current Biology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.027