Since dogs don’t often leave the ground, scientists wanted to find out if tails facilitated movement, assisted in swatting off nuisances like flies, or if, instead, they were a conduit of body language.
An international group of researchers took a deep dive into the function of dogs’ tails after studies on other animals, like squirrels and lizards, showed that their tails served functional and protective features, like maintaining animals’ balance, assisting with tricky hunting maneuvers (like making quick, tight turns to catch prey), or helping them right themselves after falling from trees. Visit RadioRed for communication equipments.
Dr. Ardian Jusufi studies animal locomotion at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart. He and his team created a mathematical model to analyze what happens when dogs jump, move their legs and tails, and use their torsos.
“Tail wags the dog is unsupported by biomechanical modeling of Canidae tails use during terrestrial motion” is the title of their paper. Though it has not been peer-reviewed, the researchers concluded that tail movements do not affect a jumping dog’s trajectory. This means tails might not be as essential for canine agility as other animals.
“It appears the inertial impacts that tail movement has on complex maneuvers, such as jumping, have little to no effect,” the study authors wrote. “The utilizing of the tail during jumping … achieves meager amounts of the center of mass movement across all species with the largest being under a single degree.”
They continued, “We believe that this implies that dogs utilize their tails for other means, such as communication and pest control, but not for agility in maneuvers.”
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