Signals
Ears, eyes and face, posture, voice.
Ears turned back toward a person out of shot — a pointer to where attention is, not a statement of mood.
Photo: Kate / Pexels
Ear, eye, muzzle, posture and voice. The vocabulary is larger than the folk version of it, most of it reports direction of attention rather than mood, and the part that has been coded most carefully is the face.
4 entries
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Ears
Independently mobile and pointed at whatever has attention, which makes them the most readable signal on the animal.
medium read -
Eyes and face
Tension around the eye and muzzle, and the facial coding work that has made this measurable.
medium read · settled -
Posture
Weight, height of the head, and which foot is resting.
short read -
Voice
A small vocabulary doing a lot of work over distance.
short read
Every entry separates what is observed from what is inferred, and says where the science is contested. The full index of entries lists all twenty-two.