Dogs are infected with 'disease' yawning from people

If you have to wait for the doctor for many hours in the clinic, you must have yawned at least once. Many people know yawning is a sign of fatigue, but few people think it can spread to dogs.

In some cases, yawning is considered to be the body's response to stress, but in most cases it is a sign of fatigue. Some previous studies have shown that, when a person yawns in the crowd, many others will yawn. The same thing happens in primates - close relatives of humans.

A team of experts from Birkbeck University (UK) wants to find out whether dogs - smart and close animals - can understand the yawning of humans. They experimented with 29 dogs and a complete stranger to the animals.

Yawning is a way for dogs to show sympathy to their owners.Photo: Dailymail.

In the first test, the man sat in front of each dog and lovingly called their names. The team asked him to pretend to yawn as soon as the dogs made eye contact with him.

In the second test, all procedures were repeated, but instead of yawning, the man just opened his mouth and closed it quickly.

Scientists found 21 out of 29 dogs yawned after the man pretended to yawn. Their average yawn for five minutes is 1.9. One has yawned five times. Meanwhile, there aren't any dogs yawning during the second test.

The team believes that this is evidence that dogs mimic yawning to show sympathy for people, although they do not rule out the possibility that they do so because of fatigue or stress. They will continue to conduct testing to clarify this issue.

Dr. Atsushi Senju, the leader of the research team, said that, in addition to being intelligent and easy to manipulate, the ability to express sympathy is also a factor that makes dogs become friendly with humans from 15,000 years ago.