For the Love of a Dog (13 page)

This isn’t a problem, at least not if we respect our dogs’ attempts to stay out of conflict with one another. Some dogs appear to use a “look away” to defuse tension, and it’s often a sign of a well-socialized, friendly dog. Luke and Lassie both worked hundreds of dog-dog aggression cases with me, and they’d always turn their heads away when a defensively aggressive dog looked in their direction. If they had stared right back, the other dog would have erupted into low-pitched barks; by turning their heads, they were keeping things relaxed and avoiding the kind of staredown that sets dogs off.

Sometimes confident, high-status dogs turn their heads away from the submissive greeting of a lower status dog. In this case, it’s as if the dog is playing a canine version of hard to get, or communicating that they will favor the other with attention only when they feel like it. However, dogs may also “look away” because they are nervous themselves. A dog who tongue-flicks and turns his head away from an approaching stranger is communicating anxiety, and is not a dog who’s going to appreciate petting. Start noticing the orientation of a dog’s head when he’s meeting new people or unfamiliar dogs—you’ll learn a lot about how he’s feeling inside.

When humans frown, we move the centers of our eyebrows down and toward each other. Dogs frown, too, and it’s another relatively easy signal to read once you learn to look for it. It’s clear that these are important signals in social communication—in both species the muscles above the eyes are accented, by hair (in our case) and coloration changes (in the case of most dogs).
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Look at the photos of Lassie, who has the most expressive face of any dog I’ve ever had. When we’re on our way to the barn to herd sheep, elation flows like sunshine out of every pore of her body. Her mouth opens—heck, her entire face opens, in the kind of relaxed, joyful look that makes you happy yourself just to look at it. However, when she’s lying on the floor watching me pack my suitcase for yet another business trip, her eyebrows wrinkle forward in a stunningly obvious analogue of a human frown. Lassie frowns so much that one of her nicknames is Frownie Face.

Her oft-wrinkled brow is one of the reasons I believe that she’s not always a happy dog. Certainly she was a wreck when she came to me, after being raised by a mother (the canine one) who hated her puppies, and then spending her first year of life in a home with four small children and an overwhelmed single mother (the human one). Living at the farm did her a world of good, and after a year of working sheep, intensive training, and playing with her father, Luke (whom she worshipped), Lassie stopped compulsively spinning in place and licking anything within reach of her tongue. Eleven years later, at the mature age of twelve, Lassie still seems to take the world with great seriousness. If you took a photograph of her every five minutes, most of the images would show a dog with her eyebrows ever so slightly scrunched together. Psychologists tell us that people have a “setpoint” of happiness, based on both genetics and early experience, and I have no doubt that’s as true of dogs like Lassie as it is with humans.
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Some dogs rarely frown, so you might not see this expression in
your own dog. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pip or Tulip frown. Luke frowned on rare occasions, when I irritated him with a foolish command while sheepherding or when I called him off sheep when he didn’t want to stop working. He’d also tense up many of the muscles in his face when he was, I believe, anxious about something. In sharp contrast to the smooth, loose muscles of a relaxed dog, Luke’s facial muscles would visibly tighten over his entire head; the tension was especially obvious under his eyes. Look at the three photos of the dog named Gus in the middle of the book for a great example of the transition from “relaxed and happy” to “tired and grumpy.” Besides his mouth going from open to closed, the most obvious difference in the images is the tension of his facial muscles, especially under his eyes. The faces of worried or tense dogs look almost as if someone had drained the fluid out of them. They lose the full, smooth look of relaxed muscles, and give the face a worn-out appearance.

Ever had someone say to you, “Oh dear, you look so tired. Are you all right?” You may have wondered if that was an expression of concern or a comment about how bad you look (thanks
ever
so much), but the relevant question here is: What was it about your face that led someone to say that? In many cases, our faces get the same look when we’re tired as I described above in dogs. We describe exhausted or stressed faces as being “drawn,” as if someone has drained the rounded fullness of rested and relaxed tissue right out of them. Learn to see this same expression on your dog’s face, because exhausted or grumpy dogs can be at the limit of their patience. I don’t know how many times brokenhearted clients have told me that Barney had been doing
so well;
he’d handled the noise and chaos of the family picnic all day long, but just when everyone was about to leave, he fell apart and snapped, or nipped, or bit. As someone who loves social gatherings but finds them tiring, I have great sympathy for any dog who stays patient and polite all day long but finally has had enough after ten hours of commotion. I am grateful, as I suspect are my friends, that I have never bitten, but I know too well the feeling of being emptied of energy. If people could just see the signs of exhaustion or worry on their dogs’ faces, there’d be a lot fewer bites in the world, a lot fewer tears, and a lot more dogs living to old age.

There’s another facial expression you share with your dog, and that’s the expression of disgust. When people are disgusted they raise the upper lips (which makes the corners of the mouth appear lower), squint their eyes and turn their heads away. In extreme cases, they’ll wrinkle their noses. Dogs do the same thing, and you’d do well to recognize the look on your own dog’s face. I can’t tell you how often people in beginning dog training classes will reward their dogs by giving them a few happy slaps to the top of the head. It may make the owners feel good, but most dogs don’t like it any more than young children do, so they turn their heads away and look disgusted. Rather than reinforcing the dog for coming when called (for example), the owners are inadvertently punishing them. If the owners knew to watch for their dog’s expression, they’d understand right away that the dog didn’t like what he got for coming when called, and might well ignore the signal the next time he hears it.

I suspect the primary problem is that we do what feels good
to us
when we’re praising a dog, and often forget to pay attention to how the dog feels about it.
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Professionals learn to pay attention to a dog’s expression as they reinforce a dog for doing what was asked—if we don’t, then we can’t be sure we’re really reinforcing the dog. “Positive reinforcement” means adding something that makes the dog want to perform an action again (like giving her a tiny, tasty treat for sitting when asked), so by definition it has to be something that the dog really, really loves and is willing to work for. Rewards, on the other hand, are things that are handed out by trainers (or bosses and parents) that may or may not be something the receiver wants or cares about. You may get a trip to Hawaii for selling more widgets than anyone else that year, but if you travel all the time for a living, maybe you’d rather have two weeks at home.

Dogs can’t tell us what they want with words, but their faces speak volumes, so next time you praise and pet your dog for doing something you asked, pay careful attention to her face. The easiest situation to observe is when a dog is rewarded with pats on the head when she is in play mode. Just like us, dogs like to be touched and petted
some
of the time, but not all of the time and not in every context. We humans can
barely keep ourselves from reaching toward our dogs with our paws, because that’s natural to us, but most dogs don’t want pats on top of the head when they’re in play mode, any more than young boys want their mommies to come give them a hug when they’re on the playground. If you’re not sure what disgust looks like on a face covered with fur, spray some perfume on your wrist and put it right under your dog’s nose. We may love flowery and musky smells, but if dogs could make perfume it would contain the essence of horse poop and rotted squirrel. Let a dog smell some perfume and you’ll know right away how he feels about it. If he doesn’t like it, which most dogs don’t, he’ll pull down the corners of his mouth and turn his head away. You and your dog may be disgusted by different things, but you express the feeling in the same way. Keep that in mind when your goal is to reinforce your dog for doing something you requested.

I guarantee you that soon after you become adept at reading canine expressions, some dog is going to confuse the heck out of you. Innumerable trainers ask my opinion about perplexing expressions on a dog. One moment they’ll think a particular dog is fearful, because his commissure is pulled back straight to his ears in a fear grimace, but the next moment they think he’s not, because his eyes are cold and hard. Perhaps his ears are up while he’s leaning forward and barking, but his tail is down. “I just can’t figure him out,” they say. “I’m so confused.” If this happens to you, don’t feel bad; you’re not as confused as you think you are. If you think the signals are contradictory, they probably are. I’d estimate that over half of the dogs I’ve seen in my office exhibit some combination of emotions when they’re about to get themselves into trouble.

This mixture of signals suggests that dogs can experience two different emotions simultaneously. However, some neurobiologists argue that even humans can’t experience different emotions at the same time, although they can rapidly alternate between them. Temple Grandin, the brilliant, autistic expert on animal welfare, makes that claim in her book,
Animals in Translation.
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This is one of the most important books about animals written in the last century, so Dr. Grandin’s argument deserves careful consideration. However, it does seem reasonable to think that dogs can be ambivalent, just like people can. That’s the best explanation I can muster for the hundreds of dogs I’ve observed whose expressions and behavior suggested that there was an emotional battle raging inside their brains and bodies. Although we don’t yet have a definite answer to what’s going on inside them, it should be mentioned that ethologists have argued for decades that many signals used by animals to communicate express conflicting emotions.

Most commonly, I see what looks like ambivalence in certain aggression cases, those involving what I call alpha wannabe dogs—dogs who want to be in control of everything and everyone around them, but who are also fearful and have little confidence. This personality type can take some real finesse to work with, because once you successfully treat the dog so that he’s no longer fearful, you might be left with a dog who still wants to take over the house. Such dogs do best with a combination of classical conditioning to assuage their fears, a program that helps the owner teach the dog new behaviors, and an understanding that some dogs desperately need their owners to be benevolent leaders. (See the Chapter 6 references for problem-solving resources.)

No matter how good you get at reading subtle changes of expression, some dogs are going to make it harder than others. I think of Black Labradors as the iconic American dogs, because both Labs and Americans tend to have such emotionally expressive faces. I met an expressive Lab last week with a face so plastic he reminded me of the actor Jim Carrey, whose face can morph from extremes of joy to concern to anger in a microsecond. Other dogs—often individuals of breeds with fighting in their genetic backgrounds—are much harder to read. Fighters aren’t interested in letting you know how they’re feeling at the moment; it’s to their advantage to keep their emotions to themselves. Because of that, it takes a lot more skill to read changes in expression in these dogs, just as it’s harder to read the faces of people from cultures that value hiding emotions, not expressing them.

I compare the ability to read canine facial expressions with the skill of reading radiographs. My vet can look at a bunch of fuzzy white
blobs on an X-ray film and immediately focus on something relevant, while I’m stuck sorting out the dog’s intestines from her stomach. Great dog trainers can do something similar with the expressions on a dog’s face. The more experience you have, and the more relevant signals your brain has been taught to look for, the better you’ll get. You may not have the time or opportunity to work yourself up to complete literacy, but every one of us, no matter how skilled, can continue to improve his or her ability to “read dog.”
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Your dog’s vocalizations are also a good indicator of how she’s feeling inside. This book focuses primarily on visual expressions, but the sounds your dog makes also contain a lot of information. The barks and whines of our dogs follow the rules laid out years ago by Eugene Morton, who suggested that the vocalizations of all mammals follow certain general principles. Sounds related to offense tend to be low in pitch and “noisy,” like a low, growly bark, while sounds related to fear or appeasement tend to be higher pitched and more pure in tone, like the yelp of a frightened puppy. Excitement also tends to raise pitch, as anyone knows who has exclaimed “Wheeee!” as they sped down a hill on a sled.

Tulip barks deep and low when she hears coyotes, but as I run downstairs to put her outside, her barks rise in pitch. While I fumble with the front door, Tulip spins in circles and barks higher and faster, I suspect because she is excited and frustrated that she has to wait for me to perform my part of the job. As soon as I open the door and snap her collar to her tie-out line, her barks lengthen and lower.
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One of the most practical applications of this knowledge is the evaluation of playing dogs. It’s often difficult for people to distinguish exuberant play from a serious scrap, but you can use the sounds you hear as a good indicator. If you start to hear the dogs’ vocalizations become lower and more growl-like, don’t wait for the fight to break out. As we’ll discuss in a later chapter, dogs can become overly aroused during play, and end up fighting like out-of-control sports fans, so listen
for a change in pitch and redirect the players if things start to sound “offensive” or overexcited.