Laymen and experts alike often say that a dog wagging its tail is friendly, but it's not. This is the same mistake as insisting that a cat is angry by wagging its tail. Whether it is a dog or a cat, wagging the tail only expresses one emotion, that is, a state of psychological contradiction. In the way animals communicate, almost all tail wagging back and forth means this.

When an animal is in a contradictory state, it will feel the pull in two different directions at the same time: it wants to move forward and at the same time it wants to retreat; or it wants to turn left and turn right at the same time. Since the two thoughts are in conflict with each other, the animal will stay put, but psychologically tense. Its body (or parts of it) will obey one of these desires and start moving in one direction, but then stop and move in the opposite direction. This phenomenon triggers a range of specific forms of visual cues in the body language of different species, such as neck twitching, head bobbing, tail flicking, and the proverbial tail wagging.

What's the mental state of a dog when it's wagging its tail? Basically it wants to stay and go away. The reason for wanting to leave is simple, because of fear. But the desire to stay is more complicated. In fact, there is not only one reason for wanting to stay, but several, it may be because of hunger, friendliness, hostility, or other reasons to want to stay, which is why there is no single label for tail wagging. The visual signal of wagging the tail must be interpreted in the context of the current simultaneous action. The following examples will help clarify the issue:

The puppies do not wag their tails at a very young age. The earliest recorded observations of tail wagging were in 17-day-old puppies, but this is rare. About 50% of puppies wag their tails by 30 days of age, and this movement is fully mature by 49 days of age (these are average numbers and vary by breed). The first time a puppies wag their tails occurs when a mother dog is nursing her puppies. As the puppies line up in the belly of the bitch and the bitch starts to breastfeed, their tails will start wagging violently. Such behavior could easily be interpreted as a puppy's friendly joy. But if that's the case, why didn't the tail wag appear earlier, such as when puppies were two weeks old? At two weeks, breast milk is just as important, and their tails are already well-developed.

In that case, is there anything missing from the above interpretation? The answer is conflict between puppies. At two weeks old, the puppies snuggle up to keep each other warm, comforting each other, and competition has yet to emerge. However, by 6 or 7 weeks of age, the tail wagging is fully evident, and the puppies have reached the social stage of bullying and fighting with each other. In order to get food from their mother, they have to get very close to the puppy who has just been biting and chasing it. Such a situation can lead to fear, but the desire to enjoy the food in front of you overwhelms the fear. So when bitches nurse their puppies, they are in a state of conflict between hunger and fear - wanting to stay where they are for a big meal without getting too close to the other puppies. A dog wagging its tail for the first time in its life is the result of such a conflict.

The second situation where tail wagging occurs is when puppies are begging for food from adults. At this time, the same contradictory state as above occurs again. When the puppies leaned to the adult's mouth for food, they were again forced to get closer to each other.

Later in the adult stage, when they reunite after separation and greet each other, tail wagging is added to the reunion signal. Friendship and unease collide at this time, resulting in emotional contradictions. In addition, courtship is accompanied by a tail wagging, as sexual attraction and fear can occur at the same time. And most importantly, tail wagging also occurs during certain provocative moves. In these examples, the dog wagging its tail is hostile, but also fearful, still a contradictory state of two emotions at the same time.

There are various variations on the characteristics of the tail wagging motion. In more docile dogs, the rocking motion is loose and the swing is wider. In aggressive dogs, the rocking motion is stiffer and the swing is smaller. The lower the status of the tail wagging dog, the lower the tail position. Confident dogs wag their tails with the entire tail straight. All of the above can be observed if you pay attention to the encounters of dogs (or wolves) in various social situations. Why is tail wagging so often misunderstood and labeled as friendly? The answer is that we are more familiar with human-to-dog greetings than dog-to-dog greetings. If we have several dogs, they are usually together all the time, but every day we repeat the drama of leaving them and reuniting, so again and again we see friendly, obedient dogs greeting their owners. In their eyes, the owner is the dominant member of their group. In this case, the dog's primary emotion is to see the friendliness and excitement of its group leader again, but this attraction is slightly disturbed enough to induce a paradoxical tail wagging response.

It's hard to accept the fact that we always think our dog loves us with all his heart and no other emotion. Dogs love and fear us, and we are less interested. But consider the size difference between us and dogs. The height of our upright bodies to dogs stands as a tower, and that alone should worry them. In addition to this, we are dominant in many ways, and their survival depends on us in many ways, so it's not surprising that dogs have mixed emotions about us.

Finally, in addition to being a visual signal for dogs, tail wagging is thought to transmit an odor signal as well. But unless we see the world from a dog's point of view, we cannot understand it. A dog's anal glands emit individual scents, and tight, violent tail wagging regularly squeezes these glands. If the tail is straight (as in a confident dog), then the rapid waving of the tail will cause a sudden increase in anal gland secretion. While our human noses aren't sensitive enough to detect these scents, to dogs, those scents are very important. The additional effect of scent is also an important factor in making the simple and ambivalent repetition of tail wagging a place in canine social life.