BrainStuff Classics: Why Do Dogs Yawn?

Dogs communicate by yawning, and it's complex to figure out what they might mean.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff. Lauren vog Obam here with another classic episode
from our former host, Christian Sager. This one is about
one of my favorite topics that's something of a mystery
to science, dog psychology, and more specifically, social yawning. Hey

(00:24):
brain Stuff, it's Christian Sager. I've got to come clean.
I like dogs. In fact, I own to my dog, Winchester,
does this thing whenever I get home from work, where
he's super excited and he's jumping around all happy, and
then he starts yawning for some reason. I don't know.
Maybe he's just tired, or maybe he's waking up. I
don't know, but he seems pretty delighted. And yawning is

(00:46):
one of the primary ways dogs communicate in their whole
complicated system of subtle body language. It could mean several things.
Did you know that yawning is actually the first expression
dogs learn to use when they're tiny puppies, So it
has multiple meanings depending on the situation a dog is in.
Dogs usually yawn when they want to send a pacifying

(01:10):
or calming signal out to other dogs or people, like, Hey, everybody,
let's take a breather and just chill out. Okay. Yawns
have no element of fear or aggression for dogs. It's
like the exact opposite of a threat. So imagine this.
You're in a fistfight and all you have to do
is just be like, yeawn, nothing dangerous or intimidating here,

(01:33):
just I'm I'm like bored. But wait, why would my
dog do that to me? Okay? Sometimes dogs yawn when
they're getting obedience training. If a dog is frustrated, he
might be asking you to give him a little break,
That is, if he sees you as the dominant one
in your relationship. It could also mean that your dog

(01:53):
might be just cooling off his brain. There's a veterinary
behaviorist at you See Davis that thinks dog brains get
hot during periods of inactivity. Dog brains get warm because
their circulation slows down, so yawning supposedly cools the arterial
blood down, helping the dog's brain function. There's one other

(02:16):
thing that yawning and dogs might mean. Dogs also yawn
when they're dealing with anxiety or uncertainty, and this includes
being excited. So maybe my dog is just trying to
control his enthusiasm. And Oh also, dogs yawn when they're
nervous too, Like in a VETS office. Do you yawn

(02:36):
when you're nervous? Check this out. Dogs can also catch
yawning from the human beings around them. You know how
if you yawn, then other people in the room around
you often start yawning. Well, that often has to do
with a person's capacity for empathy, you know, feeling what
somebody else feels. Well, there was a study about this

(02:57):
that was published in a journal called Biology Letters in
two thousand and eight, and they said twenty one out
of twenty nine dogs yawned at least once in response
to the yawn of an assistant in the room with them.
Human to dog yawn contagion. It sounds like the beginning
of a zombie movie where everyone just yawned at each other.

(03:24):
Today's episode was written by Christian and produced by Tyler Clang.
Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
For more in this and lots of other catchy topics,
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