Dog days of summer got you down? Try looking at your puppy. When they look back so does 33,000 years of evolution that’s taught them how to work the levers of human emotion.
We believe this has commercial applications. In fact, it’s working already.
Skeptical? Indulge us.
In a fascinating bit of lab work that explains much, researchers at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh recently published findings that dogs’ facial muscles have developed in unique ways in the millennia since the Middle Paleolithic when someone first befriended a wild wolf.
Some people would use a time machine to have dinner with Henry VIII. We’d like to go back 33,000 years just to see how disastrously comical the first attempts at petting wolves were. Then, at some point, they advanced. Like a dystopian Netflix show about artificial intelligence (AI), but with dogs.
In “Evolution of Facial Muscle Anatomy in Dogs” published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the authors zero in on special adaptations that made terrifying canines into cuddly frisbee-catchers.
For example, there’s the anguli oculi medialis, “a muscle responsible for raising the inner eyebrow intensely,” found in all dogs, but not in wolves. There’s a reason.
According to the research, using that muscle “resembles an expression that humans produce when sad, so its production in dogs may trigger a nurturing response in humans. We hypothesize that dogs with expressive eyebrows had a selection advantage and that ‘puppy dog eyes’ are the result of selection based on humans’ preferences.”
We at PYMNTS hypothesize that roughly 93% of executives from the pet supply industry will read that, activating their own eyebrow-lifting muscles as they think: “How do we monetize it?”
Silly. We’ve been doing it all along without knowing. Such is the power of doggy Darwinism.
Money, Mutts and Mimicry
Looking for a connection between the expressions on a dog’s face and stock market performance isn’t weird. Presidents and monarchs take advice from astrologers.
That said, we’ve all watched as pet eCommerce platform Chewy came from a trailing position last year to beat expectations in its latest filing. Our theory: Dogs are manipulating the market.
Not directly, but through their humans. You’re browsing, thinking, “$50 for a doggy swimming pool? No way.” Then you look down. Giving you “that look” is 50 pounds of puppy love. You click “buy” almost as if under some form a mind control. And that’s exactly what it is.
Now, scale it across an estimated 79 million dogs in the U.S. and do the math.
If just 1% of dog owners got “that look” and bought the $50 doggie pool, we’re talking roughly $39 million worth of product. Staggering potential. Good thing cats don’t like swimming.
Think consumers won’t do it? That’s what they said when laws went into effect ordering dog owners to pick up droppings in little bags. Now it’s routine, expected, unremarkable.
For all we know, that started with some commissioner’s dog moving its anguli oculi medialis.
“Dogs are more skillful in using human communicative cues, like pointing gestures or gaze direction, even than human’s closest living relative, chimpanzees, and also than their own closest living relatives, wolves, or other domesticated species,” the study found.
Additionally, it said, “recent research suggests that eye contact between humans and dogs is crucial for dog-human social interaction. Dogs, but not wolves, establish eye contact with humans when they cannot solve a problem on their own.”
A problem, say, like: “How do I get a human to buy me a pool on an eCommerce site?”
This all may seem mildly amusing, and of course we’re happy when eCommerce does well, but some people are bound to take it too far — and they are.
A jokey July 8 Op-Ed in Court House News titled “Let dogs vote” showed how dogs and their operatives won’t stop at moving markets.
“Giving dogs the right to vote and hold political office would be the simplest way to restore integrity to our state and federal governments,” it said.
Call us paranoid, but we suspect there was a dog in the room.
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