Dog Behavior: Why Do Dogs Like to "Kiss" Us?
Contains material originally published at PsychologyToday.com.
Wolf “Kissing” a Woman—Is This Sweet or a Recipe for Disaster?
Traditional Views of Licking Behaviors
I think most people are familiar with the concept of doggie “kisses,” where we encourage our dogs to lick us on the nose or other parts of the face. This can be more than a bit unsanitary (many dogs will lick another dog's genitals and/or anal area when meeting them on the street or in the park, then come home and kiss their owners). Yet some people can't resist pushing their faces into their pup's face, almost forcing the dog to comply.
Of course, licking is not really the same thing as kissing. Dogs can't pucker their lips, for one thing. And I'd be willing to wager that most people who've been bitten on the face were probably sending the wrong signals to the dog who bit them.
In “Dog Licking: Are Canine Kisses a Good Thing?”—an online article for DOG International on LinkedIn's social media site—New York dog trainer Andrea Arden does an excellent job of explaining some of the pros and cons of letting dogs lick our faces, and gives several examples of natural licking behaviors found in canines.
Arden: “Licking is a natural behavior which begins in puppyhood. Puppies lick their littermates as a social bonding function as well as for grooming. They also lick their mother as a way of soliciting feedings. In turn, mother dogs spend quite a bit of time licking their pups starting from the moment they are born as a way of stimulating them and keeping them clean of urine and feces. Adult dogs may also lick each other during social interactions as a way of communicating an effort at appeasement.”
Personally, I don't think dogs lick with the intention of grooming their littermates or as an “appeasement” behavior. Licking may certainly create such results, but it's doubtful that a puppy has “grooming” or “appeasement” in mind when she licks one of her littermates or licks her lips” when she sees a strange dog approaching her: “My brother looks a bit scruffy, so I think I'll groom him...” or “That dog makes me nervous so I'd better lick my lips to show him I'm not a threat...” These are anthropomorphic explanations, the kind that humans make as a kind of automatic, knee-jerk means of explaining animal behavior in a way that makes sense to us, but doesn't necessarily make sense to dogs, or help us understand the real reasons behind their behavior.
Why do I say these explanations are anthropomorphic?
Because in order for a dog to form the intent to groom or appease a fellow creature, he would have to be able to see himself as a separate "self,” with the capacity to entertain the other dog's point of view. These are very high level forms of thinking, found only in humans and cetaceans, requiring the presence of a specific type of brain cell called von Economo neurons. These brain cells are found in very significant amounts in human beings, and in even higher amounts in dolphins and other cetaceans, but are not found at all in dogs.
So what's the real reason dogs lick us and others?
Sublimating the Urge to Bite
First of all, we know that dogs and wolves share a common ancestor. So it's not out of the question to suppose that many of the behavioral tendencies we see in modern dogs may have been inherited in some way from that common ancestral thread.
Secondly, wolves are predators, and most predators don’t form social groups because each member of the group's urge to bite has to be kept under careful lock and key, otherwise there would be contstant bloodshed. Yet wolves are very social; they live together in almost complete harmony; dominance displays are rare, particularly in comparison to hunting and affiliative behaviors. And even when pack members actually do exhibit social friction, there's rarely any real biting. Wolves are even capable of sharing food, eating side-by-side, once their prey has been killed. This is pretty remarkable given the neo-Darwinian view that nature is a cut-throat, dog-eat-dog enterprise.
Tension and Release
I see all canine behavior as a process of tension and release. When emotional energy builds up in an dog’s system, it creates feelings of tension, pressure and stress, which need to find a release through external behavior. For wolves the most complete and most satisfying form of release comes either through biting prey or copulating. Since only the breeding pair are allowed to mate, and since wolves only mate once a year, for most members of the pack the most common form of release comes through biting and eviscerating a large prey animal, though they do get some release of tension by sublimating their urge to bite and channeling it into things like playing, “grooming,” and other affiliative pastimes.
If much of a wolf’s social behavior is based on sublimating the urge to bite, the domestication process for dogs is based almost entirely on it. The proto-human, proto-dog dynamic was based on one simple rule: dogs that bite humans don’t live long enough to mate. That was a key aspect of the artificial selection process that created the modern dog. So dogs took what was already a natural aspect of the wolf pack dynamic—sublimating the urge to bite into pro-social behaviors—and expanded on it exponentially in their relationships with us, though oddly enough, wolves are far more adept at sublimating their urge to bite than dogs are.
Other Things to Consider
It’s also been suggested that dogs like to lick our faces because that’s how wolf pups get their parents to regurgitate a meal when they come back to the den. While this behavior has been observed in wolves, the reason behind it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like taking a decal from one behavior and sticking it onto another. Dogs are very practical and context-oriented. It would be very unusual for a dog to take a behavior specifically related to her parents, and somehow apply it to human beings. For one thing dogs move through space on the horizontal axis. Humans are vertical. There’s no way a dog could mistake a human being for another dog. Also, dogs don’t just lick our lips, they lick our noses, our ears, our hands and feet. Plus, the more stressed a dog is, the more he tends to lick. Dogs also lick us a lot more when they’re going through puppyhood than they do when they’re adults. Why? Because puppies feel a lot more oral tension than adult dogs.
There’s one more thing to consider. When we smile at another person it’s considered a signal of good will. But to a chimpanzee a smile communicates fear. Similarly, when a puppy sees your big human head coming toward him, a part of him reacts with fear, and that part wants to bite you. But dogs make a living with their hearts. They have strong feelings of love and affection for their owners. Plus, they retain the genetic knack of maintaining group harmony at all costs. So when your dog sees you come leaning in for a kiss, he usually sublimates his urge to bite your nose, and licks you instead. Then, over time, as he accrues more and more feelings of trust on top of the love he already feels, he finds that licking you actually feels good, not just because it releases his unresolved feelings of tension or stress, but also because of how it makes you feel—our feelings are very important to our dogs; they’re like the sails and rudders dogs use to navigate their way through their relationships with us.
Honor Me With Your Bite
In the Mike Nichols film, Wolf, Will Randall, a meek, downtrodden New York book editor (played by Jack Nicholson), is bitten by a wolf one winter night in Vermont and a few days later finds himself becoming more and more in tune with his primal nature. He can smell things like tequila on a co-worker’s breath from clear across the building. He can hear people talking from several floors away. He can read and edit whole manuscripts without his reading glasses.
Worried that the changes he’s experiencing may have also caused a nocturnal blackout, Randall goes to see Dr. Alezais (played by Om Puri), an expert in ancient animal lore. Toward the end of the interview the aging Dr. Alezais reveals that he’s been told that he’s dying. However, he thinks that if Will Randall were to bite him, he might become strong like the wolf and live forever.
“I can’t ask you to transform me with your passions,” Dr. Alezais
says. “I can only ask you to honor me with your bite.”
My Dalmatian Freddie (1992 - 2007) was punished for biting when he was a very young pup. This created some fear-based behavioral problems later on that took me a while to unravel. However, once I did, I observed a funny, and very sweet side-effect to the new emotional freedom he felt once his fears were gone. Before I resolved them, whenever we came home from our walks, he would wait at the top of the first landing, and as I came up and got close to him, he would lick the tip of my nose.
Oddly enough, though, once I’d helped him resolve his fears, whenever we came home and I got near the top of the landing, instead of licking me he’d slowly incline his head toward mine and use his front teeth to lightly pinch the tip of my nose. It was thrilling; it often gave me goose bumps. He used his teeth so gently and so precisely, it felt to me as if he was re-establishing an emotional connection between us that had previously been lost.
That’s the simple, dog-centric genesis of why dogs lick us: it’s a way of sublimating their urge to bite. That’s why Freddie licked me when I reached the top of the stairs, back before his fears of being punished for biting went away. It’s also why he replaced the less satisfying release he got from licking me, and started giving me those tender little love bites on the tip of my nose. He finally felt free enough to share a tiny bit of his deepest and most primal nature with me.
He honored me with his bite.
LCK
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
