Do you ever find yourself intentionally blinking when you notice other people blinking? It’s as if we all have something stuck in our eyes at the same time. A new study published in Royal Society Open Science found that dogs appear to have the same reaction when seeing other dogs blink, which suggests that blinking may be a form of non-verbal canine communication. They also observed increased blinking in response to tension around other dogs or with their human companions.

What fascinates me most about this form of communication is that cats also appear to communicate by blinking (Humphrey et al., 2020). You can have a really deep conversation with a cat just by blinking really slowly. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I am trying to communicate with my cat. It is possible she is simply falling asleep from boredom. Cats are so hard to impress.

I wonder if my dog and cat are plotting to take over the world when they blink at each other…

Sources:

C Canori, T Travain, G Pedretti, R Fontani, P Valsecchi. If you blink at me, I’ll blink back. Domestic dogs’ feedback to conspecific visual cues. Royal Society Open Science. 12(2): 241703, 2025.

T Humphrey, L Proops, J Forman, R Spooner, K McComb. The role of cat eye narrowing movements in car-human communication. Scientific Reports. 10: 16503, 2020.

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Categories: Pets

Tags: animals, Blink, cat, communication, dog, science