Body Language of Dogs
I have talked about the body language of dogs a few times on my blog, and I think this picture should help a lot of people, and hopefully save children and dogs a lot of pain.
Dogs, as well as many other animals, communicate very clearly, but its the people who don’t take the time to understand the animal. Dogs actually make facial expressions–think I am crazy, go ahead–but its true. This dog truly has a furrowed brow.
If you have a dog, stop and make a surprise expression at your dog and see if he or she responds. Chances are he or she will stop, look at you and appear to be hesitant. Yes, dogs pick up on our emotions, too.
And their body language is also very clear, if you learn what the signals mean.
You just have to take the time to truly get to know your companion animal to see it.
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I get so angry when I see pictures of cats with clothes on. They always look furious, or at best resigned. So disrespectful.
Posting “Keyboard Cat” videos should be a hate crime on par with posting Mohammad cartoons. Both punishable by death. The “first amendment” MUST have some limits.
If your cat rips your face off for dressing it in clothes and making it look like it’s playing the piano, so be it.
The future must not belong to those who chase the LOLcats clicks.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the dog looks like he feels threatened. Is that right?
Yes, the dog is uncomfortable. The picture may look cute with the child eye to eye with the dog but the dog doesn’t see it that way. The little human isn’t reading dog body language so what’s a dog to do?!
Dogs do have very clear expressions. if your dogs are close to you a lot, you can’t miss seeing them. They, also, have strategies to get their way. That is how they survived in the wild.
I hate to see a small child make an ugly face and get eye to eye with a dog, especially, a dog they don’t know very well. I don’t know why, but children are bad about doing this. Dogs seem to take this action as an hostile, challenging act. We all need to teach little children to stop doing this and watch children around big dogs. Little dogs can bite, too, but they don’t do as much damage.
Maybe the child thinks of a dog as a similar sized playmate. Whereas the dog is more than likely more mature than the child. They don’t understand each other’s body language. I think children can be taught to know when a dog is getting uncomfortable.
Dog body language is always so plain to me. It amazes me people can ever misinterpret what they are conveying. I think people maybe come a crupper with it because they forget you have to look at the whole package of behaviours for context because many expressions and body languages do double or triple duty.
eg – a tail wag – dogs tail is waggling like a maniac, maybe he’s really happy to see you, but equally maybe he’s scared and it’s appeasement. You have to look at the other behaviours that accompany it.
Is the tail high set wagging? He’s happy to see you and he’s feeling confident. Play bow in there with that waggle too? – soo happy to see you and wants to play!
Tail low, looking away or down, lip licking, maybe sniffing the ground, crouched and making himself smaller, this is appeasement. He wants you to know he means no harm, he’d like a peaceable relation with you, but he’s feeling insecure. Go a bit slow with him, let him interact with you on his terms (angle yourself sideways, don’t look directly, let him come in for a sniff and a pat).
If his tail is wagging slowly, back away – he’s NOT happy and he’s letting you kknow in no uncertain terms, pay attention and back off. If this is accompanied by a hard stare, and the corners of his mouth pulled forward, maybe hackles, back away and avoid eye contact, whether he’s confident (tail up, leaning forward, maybe standing on his toes a bit) or scared (tail low, weight back a bit) either way he could easily move in for a bite.
Unfortunately some dogs can learn to hide their expressions of aggression or fear, EG: If a dog growls say, when he is resource guarding, and is punished for it, he could learn to not growl anymore. You lose a valuable pre aggression warning sign if that happens.