New research reveals dogs blink more when watching their owners blink, especially female owners. Brian Crisp reflects on 15 years of missing his dog’s not-so-subtle signals.

I need you to sit with me for a moment in the particular horror of this realisation: somewhere out there, a very patient Border Collie has spent the better part of a decade and a half attempting to have a conversation with me, and I have been standing there, arms folded, blinking like a man who’s forgotten how his own eyelids work, contributing absolutely nothing to the exchange.

Researchers at the University of Parma have found that dogs increase their blink rate when watching a video of their owner blinking, but not when watching a stranger do the same thing. In other words, your dog isn’t just closing its eyes because eyes get dry, the excuse humans have been using for this exact behaviour for millennia. Your dog is, quite possibly, replying to you.

And here’s the detail that’s causing genuine domestic tension in my house as I write this: the dogs blinked considerably more enthusiastically at familiar women than familiar men. My wife has not stopped mentioning this since I told her. She’s taken to blinking slowly and meaningfully at our dog across the living room like she’s just been handed a secret decoder ring, while I sit there feeling like the bloke at the party who’s just realised everyone else learned the dance moves years ago.

The science, for those who came for facts and not my marital humiliation

The researchers sat dogs down in front of video screens and showed them footage of their own owner, plus a couple of total strangers, either blinking on a steady rhythm or simply staring blankly ahead like they’d just been asked to do their tax return. The dogs blinked back significantly more when it was their actual owner doing the blinking, and barely reacted at all to the strangers. Whatever this is, it isn’t just “dogs like watching eyelids move.” It’s specific. It’s personal. It’s, dare I say it, relational.

What the scientists couldn’t quite pin down is what the dogs are actually trying to say with all this blinking. They tested whether the dogs were synchronising their blinks with ours, like some kind of interspecies Mexican wave, and found the timing wasn’t quite tight enough to call it proper synchrony. So it’s not Morse code. It’s something softer than that. The researchers landed on the idea that it might function as a kind of quiet social signal between dog and owner, the canine equivalent of a nod across a crowded room that says “yes, I see you, we’re good.”

What this means for the rest of us

I’ve spent a fair amount of time since reading this trying to remember whether I’ve ever blinked at my dog on purpose, and I genuinely cannot recall a single instance. Not once. Fifteen years of what may well have been a perfectly good ongoing conversation, and my side of it has consisted entirely of me forgetting the other party was even talking.

So here is my genuinely earnest, only slightly ridiculous suggestion. Next time your dog is looking at you with that particular expression, the one that says “I have something to tell you and it is almost certainly about the fridge,” try blinking back. Slowly. Deliberately. With feeling, even, if you’re that way inclined. You may not know exactly what you’re saying. Neither do the scientists, for what it’s worth. But apparently your dog will know you said something, and given how little credit we tend to give them for reading us properly, that seems worth the effort of a slightly theatrical eyelid.

I, for one, will be spending this evening making direct, meaningful eye contact with a dog who has, it turns out, been trying to talk to me the entire time. Fifteen years late to the conversation feels like exactly the sort of thing that happens in my house.