Maja has been sleeping for most of the evening after two really nice walks today. I sneaked up on her to give her a small pat, and she returned the favour by licking my hand. Suddenly I thought: why does she do that? Why does a dog lick someone's hand?
A short Google search seems to show - though not (yet) from authoritative sources - that it is a sign of submission and affection. As someone said: it is as close to a kiss as you can get from a dog. Awwwww... That is sweet :)
I find the following explanation more interesting, though, and taken into consideration that it comes from a first-hand source, this is probably correct:
Humans have believed for years that dogs show their love and affection by licking a humans face. If the humans ever find out the truth, they will be very upset. We don’t lick their faces to show love. We don’t lick faces to share our affection. We lick human’s faces to clean our tongues. Our tongues hang out a lot because we have to pant to stay cool. Our tongues get dry and dirty from the dust in the house; we pick up what your vacuum cleaner misses. So we lick faces to clean all of the dust and dirt off of our tongues. It leaves our mouth tasting better. We are relocating the dust and dirt, leaving our tongues tasting much better.
From: "A Dogs Life, the real story"
No comments:
Post a Comment