Why Dogs are Scientifically Adorable as Hell

As I was perusing the internet recently, I came across all these articles talking about "puppy dog eyes" and why your dog can make that face that makes your heart melt and you end up sharing your pizza with your four-legged friend. I was curious so I hunted down the actual paper (authored by Juliane Kaminski, Bridget M. Waller, Rui Diogo, Adam Hartstone-Rose, and Anne M. Burrows) to read because you can never trust blogs (except for this one). Let's dive into it.

We all know dogs are awesome and better than cats (sorry cat people). Part of it is that dogs are so damn expressive and just love you no matter what. Cats on the other hand have resting bitch face and couldn't give two fucks about you (or so it seems). But why do dogs make people feel all warm and fuzzy and the feline fuckers don't? No clue, this post isn't about cat, its about dogs. More importantly, its about doggy eyebrows.  

Now, dogs and humans have had a solid 33,000 years to really solidify any relationship between the two species. As a result of this time, dogs have gotten really good at reading cues that humans give them, whether its pointing at something (I do this all the time with my foot when I drop food on the floor, the dog just goes to it) or even just looking in a direction. Furthermore, have you ever noticed that when your doggo can't figure something out, they look at you with that face and you have to go help them? Yea, wolves don't do that. So something magical has happened in that 33,000 years to really form a link between dogs and humans.

Enter oxytocin. Oxytocin is nicknamed the love hormone because it makes you feel really good and smushy when you see something cute. Its the same hormone that gets released when moms look at babies. Interestingly (weird word to type), the exact same process happens when humans look into the eyes of dogs AND when dogs lock gazes with humans. So when a human looks at a dog, they get happy and when a dog looks at a human, the dog gets happy. Then a loop starts where dog looks at human, human at dog, dog back at human, human back at dog, and all the while both are just falling deeper in love with each other. Additionally, humans love puppy-looking dogs. Floppy ears, big eyes, big ol noggins, those are all puppy traits and some of the most popular dogs (think Golden Retrievers) just look like over-sized puppies.

FANCY SCIENCE TIME: When an organism retains juvenile traits into adulthood, that organism is known as a paedomorph. Paedo- from the Greek meaning boy or child and -morph meaning shape or form. No one knows where morph came from..

Image from TAP

This is where the actual paper goes into a lot of detail about dog face anatomy and data collecting procedures, all of which I find to be pretty interesting but you may not so if you think that would be cool, I highly recommend checking out the actual paper (I think from now on, I'm going to abbreviate "the actual paper" as TAP). The results of some dog and wolf face dissections, as well as video recordings, led to the following conclusion: dogs have this magic muscle that wolves don't called the levator anguli oculi medialis, abbreviated LAOM. This magic muscle allows doggos to raise their inner eyebrows, resulting in an eyebrow shape that resembles that look you get right before you cry. But it gets better.

Humans get a lot of information from each other from eyebrow movements, even when you don't realize it. That's one of the hypotheses for why we still have eyebrows even though we've lost most of the rest of our body hair (at least some people...there are some hairy mother fuckers out there). Dogs, having this extra muscle that wolves don't, are able to have much more expressive faces than other critters, with eyebrows moving as much as Nathan Lane (for the older crowd) or Emilia Clarke (for the Millennials). 

Not only have we bred dogs together that led to the formation of a muscle that lets dogs make sad faces, when they lift their little eyebrows, it makes them look even more puppy-like (which we've already talked about the oxytocin cycle). Even better, it shows more of the whites of their eyes (FANCY SCIENCE TIME: whites of the eyes are known as sclera) and its been shown that the more sclera an organism has, the more humans like it. That's why googly eyes are so cute. 

Basically, to sum things up, dogs have a muscle that wolves and some other animals don't that let them make sad faces, which makes them look like puppies, and make their eyes more trusting. Even shorter of a summary:

Why Your Favorite Animal Sucks and Mine is Better

Welcome to the very first, non-book related post on Biology for Bastards!

Enough of that shit, here's why you're wrong and I'm right.

According to a SUPER scientific Google search, Americans' top five favorite animals are:
1. Tiger
2. Dolphin
3. Dog
4. Horse
5. Lion

Now it's my expert opinion that those animals suck and everyone is missing the real hero/heroine out there. Let's start at the bottom and work our way up, proving why those animals are undeserving of the title before I tell you about your new favorite animal.

5. Lion = Nature's The Beatles (Fine, but definitely overrated)

Lion's are frickin' chumps. First off, the females are expected to do all the hunting and taking care of the children while the male just sits there and licks his balls. Secondly, is there anything less cool than that mane? Male lions all look like a bunch of rejects from the CATS musical or, even worse, some 80s hair band. Then there's all the lies... King of the Jungle? What jungle? Lions live in the damn savanna, which is definitely NOT a jungle. And before you bring up the Lion King (which, I remind you, is a children's movie) did you know that lions suck so much they didn't use lion roars in the movie, they had to use tigers instead? Yea, you got kicked out of your own movie. Next.

4. Horse = Helpful Jerks

...How...?

Without horses, the world wouldn't look or work the way it does now...probably. Super important for a lot of stuff but also kind of annoying. Walking around on those hooves which are really just their middle fingers so they're in a constant state of flipping everyone off (that's science). Sure they can run and pull stuff and whatnot, but they also let people ride them. I don't know about you, but if someone wanted to ride me, we would have to have a long talk before it happened and a safe word would have to be established. Not with horses though; you just jump on and they take you wherever you want to go. Are they helpful? Yes. Are they worthy of being your favorite animal? Fuck no.

3. Dogs = Man's Best (Needy) Friend

Yea...that's about right

I love my dogs. I have two of them. But there are also days I want to let them loose into the wilderness because they're so god damn needy. You know how human babies do nothing but eat, shit, and cry? Wouldn't it be great if we could have an infant for fifteen years? Let's get a dog. Sure, they're fun to have when they want to go on a walk, or play, or snuggle, but then they eat shit, vomit on your bed at 4 am, bark at absolutely nothing, and can't make up their mind to save their lives.

 Also, I'm pretty sure the evolution of dogs goes like this: 

Human: Hey dumbest wolf out there, want to be my friend? You can eat my garbage...

Wolf-Dog: Um...sure!

Human: Wow, you really are dumb

Wolf-Dog: Um...sure!

2. Dolphins = Rapists of the Sea

Sweet porn stache 

Dolphins rape people. Argument over.

1. Tigers = Pretty cool, but not cool enough

Neither of us knows what is happening here

I'll admit it, tigers are pretty cool. They eat people, and swim, and actually live in the fucking jungle unlike those liars at number five. But let's be honest with each other, how likely are we ever to see a wild tiger? They might as well be a unicorn as far as we know. And at the rate they're disappearing, give it fifty years and they'll be as real unicorns (sad, but true.) 

So what should your favorite animal actually be?

THE MOTHER FUCKIN' VIRGINIA OPOSSUM (Didelphis virginiana)!!

Don't believe me? Tough shit, you're wrong. Good God these creatures are amazing. Where do I even begin? Nipples? Penis? Fire? The 27th President of these United States? Rabies? Teeth? The Joy of Cooking? 

So the opossum (don't you dare forget the "o") has the most teeth of any North American mammal (50), one of the shortest gestation periods (science for pregnancy) out there at 13 days, is North America's only marsupial (mammals with a pouch), need I go on? Even if I don't, I will.

Notice that scary dick on the left

As North America's only marsupial and therefore the American kangaroo, it can give birth to up to fifty babies, affectionately called joeys, at once using its magical pseudo-vagina. I'm not kidding. Boy opossums have a terrifying-looking two-pronged penis and as a result, lady opossums have two vaginas. But when it comes time to have its babies, a magical portal between the two vaginas opens and the babies come out of this third pseudo-vagina (also known as the Central vaginal canal in the image below)

Once born, only thirteen babies get to survive because lady opossums only have thirteen nipples. Twelve are arranged in a circle and then lucky number thirteen is right in the middle. Like a bull's eye of teats.

Ok, enough talk about opossum sex (which I'm sure tickled some of your fancies a little too much). On to how they're resistant to a shit ton of stuff. Snake venom? No problem. An opossum doesn't give two shits, or even a shit for that matter, if it's bitten by a venomous snake. The amount of fucks it gives about snake venom is so low, people are actually studying it to see if we can make a universal antivenom out of its blood. It's that bad ass.

Good job on this one Disney

On a slightly different note, remember Old Yeller? The book and movie about the dog that goes rabid and the family had to kill? If you had a pet opossum and not a stupid dog (see point three above), you wouldn't have to shoot your pet because OPOSSUMS ARE IMMUNE TO RABIES! Suck it Old Yeller. An opossum's body temperature is too low for the rabies virus to survive so the likelihood of you running into a rabid opossum is less than the likelihood of seeing a tiger that isn't in a cage (see point five above). In other words, opossums are indestructible.

Which happens to bring me to my next point. If you're familiar with the story of Prometheus but not the story of the opossum and fire, you need to stop being so "I only learn about white people stuff" and get your brain into some Mazatecan folklore. The Mazatecs were a group of people indigenous to Mexico and as their legend states, the opossum stole fire and carried it on it's tail, which is why opossums today have hairless tails. When's the last time you heard of a dolphin bringing fire to humanity? Never? Exactly.

From the 1962 version of The Joy of Cooking

Last point of today (believe me, I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and...) has to do with William Howard Taft and how he liked to eat. So around the turn of the 20th century, eating opossums was a big deal. There were recipes on how to properly prepare the glorious animal in the Joy of Cooking all the way up until the 1960s. The way President Taft works into this story is he was a big dude; the man liked to eat. At a fancy state dinner in the south during his presidency (which ran from 1909-1913), the President was served the classic dish of "Opossum and Taters" which was a roasted opossum served on a bed of sweet potatoes. It was a huge ass opossum and Taft ate the whole thing. After this, his marketing team tried to get the Billy Opossum to be a thing to compete with the Teddy Bear (named after Theodore Roosevelt, Taft's predecessor) but people liked Roosevelt more so the Billy Opossum (sadly) never took off.

So there you have it, the short version of why you have shitty taste in animals and why the Virginia Opossum should be everyone's favorite. Still disagree with me? Doesn't matter, because I'm right and you're wrong.