Darwin certainly viewed dogs as emotional beings, inclined to intense feelings toward their human

companions. In one of his later works, The  Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man,  Darwin
discusses in detail how dogs display that emotion. Early in this book, dismissing those who view
emotions as uniquely human, he points out how no living thing can outdo the dog when it comes to
indicating emotional connection: “But man himself cannot express love and humility by external
signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging
tail, he meets his beloved master.”

Darwin goes on to discuss in detail how dogs show affection. He comments on the movement of the
tail (“extended and wagged from side to side”), the ears (which “fall down and are drawn somewhat
backwards”), and the lowering of the head and whole body. Darwin comments too on dogs’
tendency to lick the hands and face of their master.

He notes that dogs also lick one another’s faces and reports how he has seen dogs licking cats “with
whom they were friends.” (I think Xephos would rather like to lick the face of our cat, Peppermint,
but Peppermint would never tolerate such audacious cross-species fraternization.) In his descriptions
of how dogs show affection, Darwin recognized a profound connection between the behavioral signs
of happiness that dogs show in human company and the underlying affection they feel for us.
Another of Darwin’s important insights was that dogs do not manifest happiness just by wagging the
tail; they actually display contentment throughout the body, starting with the face. Darwin was the
first author I know of to consider how dogs’ emotions register in their facial expressions—specifically
the shape of a happy dog’s mouth. What particularly interested Darwin was how happy expressions
could be surprisingly similar to angry ones. Thus, he noted that in a happy dog’s face, “The upper lip
is retracted, as in snarling, so that the canines are exposed, and the ears are drawn backwards.”
Darwin’s theory that the expressions revealing opposite emotions can mirror each other has not
stood the test of time as well as his more famous theory of natural selection, but he nonetheless
provided a useful impetus to the study of animal emotions. Happily, though Darwin was the first
scientist to study the rich topic of dogs’ facial expressions, he was by no means the last. In her
fascinating book For the Love of a Dog,  the renowned dog trainer and behavior expert Patricia
McConnell delves deeper into this absorbing phenomenon. She notes that “happy dogs have the
same relaxed, open faces as happy people.”

Surveying photos of people and dogs, she observes, “It’s as easy to

pick out the happy dogs as the happy people.” Her point is a good one; for anyone who has spent any
time around dogs, it certainly does feel easy to recognize, by its facial expressions, that a canine is
happy. Whenever I came home and Xephos bounded toward me, it certainly felt as if affection was
plastered all over her face. She seemed to be grinning whenever I opened our front door: the corners
of her mouth would be raised in what appeared to be a joyful expression, and her lips would be
pulled back from her teeth (even if not exactly in a snarling way, with apologies to Darwin).