A new observational study shows that dogs communicate a democracy by coordinated sneezing. This is a breakthrough in understanding how dogs hunt in packs and how communication between wild dogs take place. The group of dogs here are wild African dogs not domesticated dogs and we know dogs are pack animals.
At first Walker and her colleagues aimed to understand how dogs in Botswana mark their territories, but the researchers were intrigued by an odd habit of their study subjects. “We all started questioning, ‘Why are these dogs sneezing so much?’” Walker says.
Like humans, a wild dogs sneeze with a short, sharp burst of air from the nose. Sometimes dogs sneeze at rest. But most sneezes occur during the pre-hunting ritual known as a rally.
In a slightly related topic, humans also yawn contagiously but it was shown to not be due to empathy.