Dogs seem especially keen on monitoring exactly where you are at all times. Unless they are sleeping, dogs almost always react when you come into the room or otherwise become visible.
Most of the time, this reaction involves tail wagging. Even if the dog doesn’t lift its head, the tail usually starts thumping as you approach—at least for a while. Dogs acknowledge their relationship with you like this dozens or hundreds of times per day.
Imagine if I said “hi” to my wife every time she came in and out of the room I was sitting in. Yeah. Ugly rebuke (or a straight jacket) would surely follow.
Even though humans are masters of nonverbal communication (with our faces and arms), what dogs appear to be accomplishing with their tails is something we do with language.
appeasement
submission
subordination
affiliation
‘positive arousal,’ i.e., happiness, enthusiasm
fear/alerting to threat1
I don’t think dogs are attention-seekers like some humans. They are simply obsessed with bonding, relationship affirmation, and safety/protection, as this list tells us on the surface.
Dogs’ focus is community. What’s impressive is how consistently they do this all day with one furry appendage - their tails.
Humans may only have sad little, invisible tail bones, but we, too, display nonverbal cues to sustain our relationships.
A trendy ‘relationship improvement’ term covers this well - a phenomenon called “bids.” The word originates from the Gottman Institute, based in Seattle. Here’s their definition:
A bid is any attempt from one partner to another for attention, affirmation, affection, or any other positive connection. Bids show up in simple ways, a smile or wink, and more complex ways, like a request for advice or help.2
Notice how the word “request” slides in there at the end. “Request” means a mouth opened, a larynx flexed, lips curled, and words came out—something your dog is envious of.
They have loads of backed-up requests with no modern larynx and no lips. My Beagle wouldn’t have to pick up his metal food bowl and slam it down on the tile floor to get fed if he could just make a “request.” A+ for self-advocacy, Mickey. A+
Back to the tail-less bipeds. Humans use language to initiate, sustain, and end relationships. And relationships, the smallest and humblest of them, mostly ladder up to communities that protect and nurture us (theoretically).
For my soon-to-arrive argument, though, it is our obsessive chatterbox use of language to sustain relationships that concerns me. Even the laconic men of northern New England chatter incessantly in this way, well…compared…compared to a dog.
Following Gottman’s “bid” metaphor, we don’t rely on winks and smiles alone to sustain relationships. We use language and its more efficient cousin—ritual—to accomplish this. Language and ritual are historically the building blocks of all human communities. Language is an everyday tool. Ritual occurs much less often to mark significant transitions and for larger acts of coordination and celebration in and beyond our most intimate social networks.
As many modern Americans have retreated into narrower, more private social worlds, external forms of community do less to bind us together in ways that can meet our emotional needs as humans. Very few rituals are mandatory, as in preliterate societies. Even the family dinner is no longer mandatory.
So, in the wake of ritual’s very American decline, I suspect we focus on talking to sustain relationships with our romantic partners, friends, and very close family members.
I can’t prove it very well here, but in many ways, we overcommunicate today compared to decades and centuries past.
Why do I surmise this? Because, in a more formal, conservative age with more fixed social roles, the community structured our relationships much more intently. We did not need to work as actively to shore up this or that dyadic (i.e., 1-on-1) relationship. Communal rituals invoked notions of obligation to protect and nurture non-relatives. They pull us out of our narrow household worlds. For many Americans today, though, their idea of a ‘ritual’ is attending a public sporting event as a spectator or having a family movie night. This would not impress a traditional Masai clan or an orthodox South Indian Brahmin family. Our lives would look like managed chaos to them. That’s because, well, they’re right!
If I’m right, we now lean on language more than in traditional, pre-modern societies to sustain relationships. This means we have set ourselves up for a problem—not an insolvable one, but a problem nonetheless.
Why do I believe this? Language is infinitely more subtle than tail wagging and more nuanced than most ritual practices with their assigned make-up, costumes, and symbols. With language, there are many ways to misfire and under-communicate or over-communicate. This is the story of my Aspie life so far. I grew up to find myself thrust into a hyper-communicative, chatterbox, insecure urban America devoid of ritual and drowning in autonomy.
Constantly talking relationships into existence is common sense in an autonomy-biased society like ours. It’s just harder for folks like me.
And in our hyper-individualistic society, it makes sense that psychologists have to use the word ‘bid’ to describe the verbal behavior required to get someone’s attention. It’s also creepily capitalistic (i.e., it invokes a cattle auction).
The dog is already looking at you as you bid for your partner’s attention. Who? The partner who is inevitably on their phone scrolling through a YouTube Shorts feed of Jackass stunts or cosmetic rituals. And ignoring you.
The dog is still looking at you and wagging its tail as you ‘bid’ again for engagement from this so-called ‘partner.’ What is this? Sotheby’s? Is there an online application to talk with you? I married you and, for years, have endured your IBS farts and your snoring and - OK, let’s cut it off right there.
No, getting your spouse’s attention and relationship validation should not be hard. And yet, this seems to be a quiet social epidemic in the United States.
That’s why we need tails, folks. So much easier than talking.
If you like this writing, I’d be honored if you pre-ordered my forthcoming book - Our Worst Strength. It’s a tragi-comic exploration of American individualism and what it has wrought. I promise it will make you laugh, cry, and pound your fist, but not in any particular order.
Here’s the trailer -
Thanks for your help with the launch! Now or later!
All but the last one comes from a recent literature review on the science of tail-wagging. Silvia Leonetti et al, “Why do Dogs Wag Their Tails?” Biology Letters, January 17, 2024, accessed on March 21, 2024 - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2023.0407
https://www.gottman.com/blog/turn-toward-instead-of-away/#:~:text=A%20bid%20is%20any%20attempt,request%20for%20advice%20or%20help.