Do dogs and other intelligent animals (cows, etc.) blink to communicate?
Cats are known to blink as a form of smiling.
I believe I have also noticed that the dogs and cows here often look and blink at me when they are upto something.
E.g.1: when one of the dogs is play fighting and dominating the other dog, it looks at me and blinks, as if to communicate that it is all good fun.
E.g.2: there was a rambunctious puppy once who insisted on playing with the cows. One of the dominant cows decided to play with it. She repeatedly - but very gently each time, toppled the puppy over with her horns. The puppy would give a little yelp and go right back at the cow. While the puppy was fully engrossed with the cow, the cow looked at me from time to time and kept blinking with a funny expression on her face. I had to assume the cow was playing with the puppy and this was her way of laughing.
Has anyone noticed anything similar, or am I making things too anthropomorphic?
Edit/update:
I found a very interesting paper which concludes that spontaneous eye-blinks have acquired a role in social communication, similar to grooming, to adapt to complex social living during primate evolution.
If this applies to primates, I wonder if it might also apply to other social animals. Especially because voluntary blinking is a very basic, and could possibly form a basis of proto-communication.
The paper I mentioned above makes a reference to another paper which states
the interblink interval was prolonged in dairy cows during feeding and neck licking, in pre-ruminating bison, and in wolves watching birds. Based on these results, Blount concluded that these blinks have a central rather than peripheral origin.
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