It surely makes you happy to see your pet with a wide grin, whether it be at snack time or during a belly scratch. Their mouth opens wide, their lips pull up at the corners, and their tongue lolls out. It makes sense that your pup is expressing their happiness the same way you would. But do dogs smile like we do? What about laughing?
Why do dogs smile?
Just like us, there a million things that can make your dog happy and cause them to “smile.” And what makes one person—or dog—smile is different from what makes another smile. Maybe your dog is really excited for you to return home from a long day at work, and they love to stick their head out the window while driving down the street. They seem calm, relaxed, and happy—why wouldn’t they be smiling?!
The grin you see on your dog’s face may be your pup’s attempt at making you happy. After all, dogs are tuned in to our body language and emotions. Smiling isn’t something dogs do naturally to communicate with other dogs, but they quickly learn how effective it is with us. The response a dog gets the first time they smile is enough to cement the act into the dog’s body language vocabulary. They can deploy that smiling trick at any time.
Additionally, some dogs will appear to smile if they are showing submission to their human counterparts. This relates to the dog being in a relaxed muscular state.
Do dogs smile?
There isn’t a definitive answer to whether dogs smile, but any facial expression they make along the lines of a happy grin is probably indicative of a relaxed dog, so the association between happy dog and smiling is not far-fetched.
Your dog might look like they’re smiling, but it’s probably not in the same way you would do it out of happiness. It’s true that a relaxed open mouth in dogs typically occurs in positive settings. But your dog might actually be panting, which can look like a smile, but is more about the relaxed muscles in the muzzle and open-mouth pant than an actual smile, as humans perceive it.
This panting is often accompanied by a loose body, a gentle but enthusiastic tail wag, a relaxed face, and what can only be described as an adoring gaze. And, just as when humans do it, their smile involves showing some teeth.
And as mentioned earlier, your dog’s smile or panting may be a simple learned response. This doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with their happiness but smiling like humans do isn’t natural for dogs. After all, how would we know for certain that our dogs are smiling out of joy? Our pets can’t talk to us, and with our anthropomorphizing tendencies, it’s possible that we misinterpret what we see on dogs’ faces.
