Dogs: no matter what the little rapscallions do, we can’t help but love them.
They love to steal things, simply just to show you they have it: whether it be socks, wrappers, bobbles or… false teeth.
Psychology student Anna Carolina Lima was visiting her grandmother in the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais, in southern Brazil, when suddenly, her dentures went missing.
Lima said: ‘As usual, she put her dentures under the pillow so as not to lose them.’
The 27-year-old helped her grandma search for the teeth, but after an extensive investigation, they were still nowhere to be seen.
As reported by the The Dodo, Lima said:
She was pretty desperate that she couldn’t find her dentures, She and my mom searched everywhere. They searched for hours.
Then, giving a whole new idea to Dennis the Menace’s Gnasher, Lima’s pesky pup Luna was found grinning away with the dentures in her mouth.
However, Luna wasn’t so clumsy as to give them up straight away. Lima said she’s a smart pooch, with a tendency to hide things she knows she shouldn’t have.
Lima added:
Hours later, Luna was playing around the house in the darkness and when I called, she came to me with a cute face and her tail wagging, jumping around, but she did not have them.
She is very clever, she picks things up and hides them.
It wasn’t until later that Luna revealed her treasure: Lima found her on the sofa with a mighty, toothy smile – unwilling to let go of her newfound toy.
Lima explained:
Later on, I found Luna on the sofa with the teeth in her mouth, biting on them and refusing to give them up.
I was eventually able to distract her and take them away, luckily they were not damaged.
There was no animosity towards the cheeky pooch – Lima said: ‘We all laughed a lot! We all love animals.
It’s impossible to stay mad at dogs for any period of time. They could have pissed on the bed, or ripped apart an important letter, and all would quickly be forgiven.
But did you know there’s a scientific reason for this, outside of them simply being our best buds? According to new research, dogs’ eyes have evolved in order to help them get on better with humans.
The research was carried out by researchers at the University of Portsmouth who compared the anatomy and behaviour of dogs with wolves.
Published in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study found that although the rest of the facial anatomy between dogs and wolves was the same, this solid muscle structure around their eyes was a feature only found in dogs.
As per the Independent, psychologist Dr Juliane Kaminski, who led the research, said:
The evidence is compelling that dogs developed a muscle to raise the inner eyebrow after they were domesticated from wolves. The findings suggest that expressive eyebrows in dogs may be a result of humans’ unconscious preferences that influenced selection during domestication.
When dogs make the movement, it seems to elicit a strong desire in humans to look after them. This would give dogs that move their eyebrows more a selection advantage over others and reinforce the ‘puppy dog eyes’ trait for future generations.
The next time you give in to the ol’ puppy dog eyes, don’t feel guilty – it’s evolution.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.