Dog body language: reading the quiet signals

He snaps while being brushed, he no longer wants to walk, he has turned “suddenly aggressive”. In my consultations it almost always turns out that there was nothing sudden about it. The dog had been announcing it for weeks — just with parts of his body nobody looks at.

In my consultations I often see the same pattern. Someone describes a problem — the dog snaps while being brushed, he no longer enjoys walks, he has turned “suddenly aggressive”. And when we go back, it almost always turns out that there was nothing sudden about it. The dog had been announcing it for weeks. Just quietly.

Dogs communicate constantly. They just do it mostly with parts of the body we do not look at.

We only hear the loud things

The human vocabulary for dog language is astonishingly small: barking, growling, tail wagging, perhaps flattened ears. Four words. With those we try to understand a creature that uses its whole body — the corners of the mouth, the eyelids, the weight on the front legs, the rhythm of breathing, the muscle tone in the back.

The awkward part: the four loud signals stand right at the end of a long chain. When a dog growls, he has said something quieter five or six times before. We did not notice, so he had to get louder. And because the loud thing worked and the quiet thing did not, he learns something we never meant to teach him.

Calming signals — the words hardly anyone knows

There is a group of signals with which dogs take tension out: out of a situation, out of an encounter, out of themselves. The Norwegian dog trainer Turid Rugaas coined the term calming signals for them. They are tiny, often lasting less than a second — and once you know them, you see them everywhere:

• Nose licking. A quick lick over the nose with no food nearby. The most common signal of all and the most overlooked.
• Yawning. Not tired — tense. Particularly noticeable at the vet, in the car or when visitors arrive.
• Turning the head away. The gaze goes to the side, the body stays. It means: “I want no trouble here.”
• Suddenly sniffing the ground. In the middle of an encounter the dog lowers his nose. That is rarely an exciting trail, usually an evasive manoeuvre.
• Walking in a curve. By nature dogs do not walk head-on towards each other. Steering your dog straight at another on a short lead forces him into a posture that counts as a threat among dogs.
• Freezing. The whole dog goes stiff and still for a moment. That is the most serious signal on this list — and the one after which things often happen fast.

A single nose lick means nothing yet. It gets interesting when signals pile up or always appear in the same situation. If your dog yawns every time the child hugs him, he told you his opinion of hugs long ago.

A wagging tail is not a smile

This is the most stubborn misunderstanding of all, and it regularly leads to bites, especially in children. Wagging does not mean joy. Wagging means arousal. Whether that arousal is positive or negative, the tail alone does not say.

What matters is the how: a low-set tail swinging broadly and loosely, with the whole rear end joining in, is something different from a high-set one quivering fast and stiffly in a small arc. To humans the second looks like a joyful greeting. To another dog it is a statement.

And as always: the tail is a word, not a sentence. It becomes unambiguous only together with the mouth, the ears, the shift of weight and the gaze.

The “guilty look” is nothing of the sort

Everyone knows it: the dog crouches, flattens his ears, looks up from below — and you are sure he knows what he has done.

That is exactly what was studied. In an experiment by the cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz (Behavioural Processes, 2009) owners were partly lied to: some believed their dog had helped himself to a treat although he had not. The result was clear — the “guilty look” did not depend on whether the dog had done anything, but on whether his human told him off. It is not a guilty conscience. It is appeasement towards a human who currently seems threatening.

This is no quibble. Anyone who believes their dog understands the punishment goes on scolding. The dog learns only one thing from it: when my human looks like that, things get unpleasant. What was broken he never understands.

Growling is information, not insolence

When a dog growls he does exactly what we should want him to do: he warns before he acts. A growl is a set of instructions — this is where my limit lies.

Training the growl away removes the warning, not the reason for it. What is left is a dog that at some point snaps without warning. And then people say he reacted “out of nowhere”. No dog reacts out of nowhere. He was simply taught to leave out the preface.

The better response is unspectacular: take the growl seriously, defuse the situation, and afterwards work out calmly why the limit lies there.

What I check first as a vet

Here lies the difference between my view and that of a dog school — and it is the reason I am writing this article at all.

When a dog’s body language changes, most people think of training. I think first of pain. A review by Daniel Mills and colleagues (Animals, 2020) looked at the cases that end up in behaviour clinics. The result: on a cautious estimate, around a third have a painful condition as part of the picture — in some analyses the share is as high as 80 per cent. Most often it involves the musculoskeletal system, the digestive tract and the skin.

That matches what I have seen in thirty years. The dog that snaps while his harness is put on often has no aversion to harnesses but pain in his shoulder. The dog that turns “stubborn” in the evening sometimes simply has arthritis that is worse in the evening — I write about that in more detail in arthritis in dogs.

Hence my urgent advice: before money goes into behaviour training, the dog needs a thorough check-up. You can only train what is not pain.

The baseline is the only yardstick

Everything written here is worthless without a point of comparison. There is no universal dog language, there is only your dog and his deviations from his own normal.

How does he look when he is well? How does he lie? How fast does he breathe in his sleep? How quickly does he come when you go into the kitchen? Anyone who knows these normal states sees changes weeks earlier than someone waiting for symptoms. That is exactly what learning animal communication is about too — the beginning is no secret knowledge but looking closely.

Where you can start tomorrow

Take a week and a single word: the nose lick. Simply notice when your dog briefly licks his nose with no food involved. Write down the situation — while being stroked, when visitors come, in the car, when you are on the phone.

After seven days you have a list. And that list shows you where your dog feels tension you knew nothing about. That is more insight than most guidebooks deliver — and it comes from your own dog.