Rogan doing his impersonation of a human smile

If you have a close relationship with a dog, you already know that dogs can empathize with others―it's just so obvious. But some people feel the need to prove it in the lab, so a team at the University of London took the approach of trying to see whether dogs would yawn when faced with a yawning human. Yesterday, they reported their findings in the BBC News, and it was pretty interesting. They found that 21 out of 29 dogs yawned after watching a human stranger yawn!

They made sure that it was more than just copying behavior by setting up a parallel experiment in which the stranger merely opened and closed his mouth, without actually yawning, and not one dog yawned at this. It's well known that dogs are extremely perceptive and sensitive to human body language, so it should come as no big surprise that they might react to a human yawn by feeling like yawning themselves, just as we do.

However, I think authenticity is critical here. I tried the experiment on my six canine buddies, but I really couldn't pull off that many genuine yawns, so I faked some of them. And my results reflected this: Only two out of six dogs yawned back at me (Dexter and Theresa, the two most reactive dogs of the pack). The others just kind of stared at me with a look of concern on their faces. Oh, and Sunny couldn't stand to have me sitting across the room gazing at her―she kept running to put her head in my lap, so I'm not sure how to rate her reaction.

For years, I've been using a variation on this activity to induce calmness and sleepiness in my dogs. When they're a bit hyped up and I want them to settle down, I'll kind of blink at them with sleepy, droopy eyelids and talk to them in a sleepy voice, and they instantly start to look sleepy too. And again, it's not just copying, because they are likely to then roll over and fall asleep. It's pretty cool. I even used this technique on my late cocker spaniel, Rogan, when a friend was taking his stitches out.

But now I'm going to go out on a limb and go one better on the subject of dogs' amazing abilities. Call me crazy, but I believe that not only can dogs empathize, they can also sometimes even read our minds, at least the images in our minds.

Wait! Keep reading. Just hear me out. You be the judge. How else can one explain the following experience, which happened to me almost 20 years ago:

My beloved dog Druzhok had recently died (he was the first one), and I missed him so. He had had the unusual ability to smile and snort like a laughing human. It was so cute and endearing and funny. So one day, I was sitting on the kitchen floor, lamenting to my then-husband about the fact that I was never going to get to see that smile again, when my cocker spaniel, Rogan, suddenly ran into the next room and grabbed an old tennis ball with the felt torn off of it. He then proceeded to chew the ball in half and position half of it in his mouth with the round side down and his lips curling over the edges of the rim. This had the effect of making him look like he was smiling (take a look at the photo). Then he put his face right up to mine and started snorting! If he had had a bubble caption over his head reading, "Look, Mom! I'll smile for you!" it wouldn't have been any more obvious what he was trying to convey.

If that wasn’t mind-reading (not to mention empathy), then I don’t know what is.