I'm assuming it's trying to listen to the music in the headset? I don't really see dogs tilt their heads like that unless they are trying to listen for something.
I pet a fox once (took him to a rehab facility and didn't have a box to hand, so I essentially swaddled him.)
Just as soft as you'd imagine...he also kept trying to lick the perfume I'd put on because I was on my way to a date when I had to scoop him up.
They are, however, pretty stinky by nature, outranked only by badgers.
(Asphalt - a placeholder name so rehabbers don't get attatched lol - recovered well from his car accident. He was released at a much more suitable site, as his former habitat was being felled for new build apartments. He left a huge poop in the crate before he left.)
He was a difficult patient had to be bribed with chicken innards to do physio. I try not to have favorites but between him and a mimicking crow with a truly impressive vocab...sometimes I did 😆
(Eta my colleague at the time was the one doing the real work! I was just his taxi service/registered him. My work tended to be with smaller critters!)
We didn't end up together....however, I did marry the guy who went along with all my crazy rehabs over the years since then. Hedgehogs, a crow, a pigeon, 2 feral cats, and over 30 emergency fosters of domestic animals. He's got a big heart and knows when to say "yes ma'am" and grab the supplies :)
One time a wild duckling got caught in a plant and left behind by it's mother, so I freed it and herded it towards the rest of the family. It weighed basically nothing and was perfectly fluffy. ❤️
I took the risk once. The vixen let me scratch her face for twelve seconds before making off with my blueberry pop tart. She later came around my apartment complex with a kit. Like 2am. I tried to bribe them with more food but she was more protective with her kit
There's a book called "The Master and his Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist that talks about the different functions of the brain hemispheres. Creatures will survey an item using different eyes to use the different hemisphere's of the brain. VERY broadly speaking one is more detail oriented and the other is more holistic according to him. I wonder if this is us watching that in action as the dog tries to work out WTF is going on.
I'd read somewhere that due to the position of the ears on their head and the fact that they often hunt small prey, the head tilt is a way of placing the ears on two different planes so as to better pinpoint the source of sounds.
Yeah that probably makes more sense with the ears being pricked up and all. Not sure how that's going to help the little guy work out what's going on here though bless him!
I don't really see dogs tilt their heads like that unless they are trying to listen for something.
They don't do this when they're trying to listen, they also do this when they are processing thoughts in their head.
Edit: My apologies /u/PowerSamurai, turns out it can also be caused when they're trying to catch the sound from a different angle. Edited part is bold.
Yep. I've watched my dog do the exact same thing when he's putting together things. She's trying to comprehend but it just isn't connecting. Lol. My dog does this a lot when he watches me drive. He knows I control what's going on, he just hasn't quite worked out how yet.
They are trying to figure out if I am going somewhere they want to go (e.g. starbucks) and should run and get the leash. Or if it’s somewhere they will hate (e.g. the vet) and they should hide
No, they absolutely do. Humans do the same thing. Most mammals do the same thing.
Mammalian auditory cortex, and the nerves that feed it, are pretty bonkers. They intake a ton of information about the spatial qualities of a sound and process it as quick as you hear it. In some mammals, this developed all the way into echolocation.
By turning your head, or bobbing, or whatever, it's sort of like refocusing your eyes or something similar. You change the position of your ears or pinnae or whatever slightly, and then as you hear the same thing but in a slightly different way (because you have moved your head, but the source of the sound maybe has not moved) you gain more information about where the sound is coming from, and its quality. I know it doesn't seem like a lot of new information from a head tilt, but you'd be amazed at the cortical processing that happens.
So, when something new happens and Dog is curious about it, you get the head tilts, too. Just like with humans. But the core of it is changing your head position, where most of your sensory things reside, to snag a new visual or auditory perspective on something.
I know it doesn't seem like a lot of new information from a head tilt, but you'd be amazed at the cortical processing that happens.
Not that hard to believe honestly, I've once made this test where you can put two sheets of paper in front of your ears and then speak because we usually hear ourselves where the sound of our own voice comes from a different angle than it does for others. So what you do is you create a wall in front of your ears to force the sound to travel around the wall before it enters your ears and the result is the voice you'd hear when you record yourself, while the voice you hear when talking sounds very different.
I used to whistle in a high pitch to my dogs, anytime I did this it would make my dogs tilt their heads which I found funny and that's why I did this from time to time, basically it's an information they already experienced at some point in their life yet it always leads to the same reaction.
I also looked it up again with the information you provided and turns out you're correct, it can also be caused in order to get a different sound ("for optimum sound collection") so let me edit my other comment and apologize to the user.
Thanks for your insight mate, it's people like you why I am on reddit.
Former metal guitarist here: I tilt my head when I can't hear something, too...which is most of the time. Wear ear protection, kids. Tinnitus isn't very fun.
Yeah, my dog does this when you try to have a conversation with her.....she will look you straight in the eye and move her head like this, like she actually trying understand wth you're saying.
I don't think it's for sound. Their snout is a blind spot for them. Dogs read faces the same as humans do. When you're talking at them they will also do this to read your face better.
it's for sound and also for stuff other than sound (facial expressions, hand actions, mysterious bags on the ground, etc.). Source: my dog literally right now and the thousands of dogs I've interacted with. Google isn't the only or ultimate source of information.
My dog does this when I push the button to turn the car on and all the dash lights turn on. Also listening for food to drop when we're in the kitchen so he can perform his vacuum duties.
The head-tilt does change the angle of the eyes and thus can help with 3D perception, which is where tilting the head when not understanding something comes from. Might work the same for the ears, not sure.
Don't think it would happen normally to that extend, esp since the dog does not seem to really look at the stuff on the table, so I assume it just gets commands off screen.
The head-tilt does change the angle of the eyes and thus can help with 3D perception
This would be true if dogs only had one eye, but two eyes are enough to get all the 3D information an animal might need. Head wiggling won't help any animal that already has forward-facing binocular vision (like dogs and humans and most mammalian predators).
Might work the same for the ears, not sure.
This is exclusively what the head wiggle is for, yeah. It works for people too. Next time you're outside at night in a place with a lot of trees, go outside and listen to the insects for a bit without moving your head and see if you can place them in 3D space around you. Then cock and turn your head. If you do it right, you'll hear all of the insects as being at about ground-level before moving your head, but cocking your head will usually reveal that the sound is actually coming from above you. It's always a fun party trick to show people this on camping trips.
The vision enhancement relates to how their snout impacts their field of vision. Tilting their head changes the position of their snout relative to their focus and lets them see differently.
Dogs don’t talk, saying any of their behaviors are “exclusively” for anything is overstating our understanding of their behavior.
It's pretty obvious someone else is off camera and most likely has a treat or something in their hand. You can tell the dog is focused on something that's off camera. This is basically a skit.
I can't be sure bc you never know, but I've used a lot of similar looking ear protection and they do not produce sound. Again, it could be some new fangled tech I haven't personally worked with, but those look like very standard ear pro to me
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u/PowerSamurai Feb 17 '26
I'm assuming it's trying to listen to the music in the headset? I don't really see dogs tilt their heads like that unless they are trying to listen for something.