For the Love of a Dog (12 page)

Yawning can be another sign that your dog is uncomfortable. Yawns are often given by slightly anxious dogs, and all trainers and behaviorists
pay a lot of attention to them. Of course, sometimes dogs yawn when they’re waking up and are just sleepy, so don’t worry that every time your dog yawns it’s cause for alarm. However, paying attention to your dog’s yawns can help you understand her a lot better. Yawns themselves are an excellent to what have been called calming signals by a Norwegian trainer named Turid Rugaas, who’s written a fascinating book,
On Talking Terms with Dogs
. In it, she argues that many of the signals discussed in this chapter are used by dogs to calm other dogs, and she cites yawning as one of those. She even suggests that people try yawning themselves to calm their dogs in stressful situations. However, she agrees that yawns are produced by anxious dogs and are usually seen when dogs are being hugged, in veterinary clinics, or during stressful encounters with others.

This raises two interesting issues related to the function of many of the signals we’ve been discussing. One is that the same movement can have many meanings, just as a smile in humans can signal nervousness or joy. If a yawn is due to sleepiness or relaxation, then it makes sense that it would have a calming effect on others. If a yawn is the result of anxiety, then its effect on others is less clear. A second interesting question relates to the function of the yawn itself. Is the yawner, the “sender of the signal,” purposefully attempting to calm (or excite) another individual, or is the expression an involuntary result of the sender’s internal emotions? I suspect that the latter is most often the case, at least with signals like tongue-flicking and yawning. An anxious dog who is tongue-flicking or yawning is probably not intentionally trying to calm another individual—remember, we talked about yawns being involuntary, and tongue flicks might be as well. However, it makes sense that such behaviors can indeed be called calming signals, in that they are the opposite of the signals of a dog about to attack. Dogs who tongue-flick and yawn are not radiating the kind of “I’m not afraid and I’m about to bite you” message sent by a frozen body and hard, cold eyes. It makes sense that signals like yawns could influence the emotions of the dog who sees them, and so it makes sense to call them calming signals.

Yawns are an especially interesting signal, not only because they are usually involuntary but also because they are almost impossible to watch without yawning yourself. We’re still not even sure about the
function of yawning, but we know that watching others yawn elicits a yawn in return in most people. Even just talking about yawns (or writing about them for that matter) can cause people to yawn. In a perfect example of our emotional interchange with dogs, a yawning dog can set you off just as easily as a yawning person.

I hope no one ever uses Botox on dogs, because a dog with wrinkles around her eyes is a dog who’s glad to see you. The eyes of dogs are wonderful sources of information about what’s going on inside their minds. It takes experience to learn to interpret some of the expressions within a dog’s eyes, but wrinkles around the eyes are easy to see. Just like smiling humans whose eyes crinkle with delight, dogs who are happy to see you often have squinty eyes with lots of furry crow’s-feet around them. Look for the muscles around their eyes to constrict, just as ours do when we’re feeling happy or amused. Compare the eyes of the “happy face” dogs and humans in the photographs, and you’ll see that in both species, the muscles around our eyes are important parts of our expressions. My impression is that the more submissive the dog, the more his eyes will crinkle up, so I’m not sure that squinty eyes correlate as directly with happiness as they do in our species. It seems that the most docile dogs squint during greetings, an observation similar to the reports of wolf researchers, who include crinkled eyes as one of the many expressions of submission or appeasement.

On the other hand, dogs who are on alert, who are surprised or frightened, often have rounded eyes. In this they are not unlike humans, who round their eyes in fear or surprise. You can see clear examples of these emotions in the photo section, on the faces of both species. Pip used to be afraid of thunder, and when she leaped up into the bed after an especially loud boom, her eyes would be as big and round as pancakes. Rounded eyes are a sure sign that a dog is either frightened or highly aroused. Dilated pupils also correlate with fear or arousal, but they can be hard to see—sometimes the last thing you want to do is get closer to a dog to see whether her pupils are dilated— but you can always tell when a dog has rounded his eyes from their normal shape. Keep in mind that different breeds naturally come with
differently shaped eyes—Malamutes have almond-shaped eyes, while Chihuahuas and Cavalier King Charles Spaniels come with big, round ones. What’s important is how the eye changes from its neutral state. If you become acquainted with the appearance of your dog’s eyes when you’re hanging around the house together, you’ll be more able to see subtle changes in eye shape when you’re at the vet’s or meeting a new dog in the neighborhood.

There’s another quality about the eye that is important, but it’s harder to describe. Any one who has ever worked with aggressive dogs knows what I mean when I talk about a dog’s eyes turning “hard.” Clients often will describe a “cold” look in the eyes of their dog, right before he snaps or bites. This change is not about pupil dilation, and it’s not a change in color, but something about the eyes changes so that they harden like cooling steel. The look resembles what we call a glare from a human.
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Friendly, relaxed dogs have the soft, dewy eyes that we associate with babies and lovers, while dogs who are about to hurt you have the hard eyes we associate with cold-blooded killers. You may never have seen this look, from either species. If you’re lucky, you never will. When I first got serious about dog training, I spent a few years looking for it, and was frustrated because I thought I just wasn’t skilled enough to see it. Then a visiting dog turned to face me when I picked up something she wanted, and in an instant, everything changed. Her eyes, as hard and cold as a Wisconsin winter morning, seemed to cut right through to my heart. Long before my conscious brain said, “Oh, that’s the look!” my body had reacted by shooting adrenaline throughout, first stopping my heart for a moment and then sending it pounding like a hammer in my chest. In a perfect example of thin-slicing, my brain knew right away that out of all the signals coming from her face and her body, the only important one was the hardness in her eyes. I can remember exactly what they looked like to this day, although I have virtually no memory of anything else about the incident.

I wish we knew exactly what it was about the eye that physically changes, but all we can do is guess. Jeff Baylis, my major professor in graduate school, came up with the best hypothesis I’ve heard so far. It’s based on the fact that the eyes of mammals actually move back and forth all the time, so rapidly and so minutely that we don’t notice it. This is one of our brain’s ways of getting as much information as possible about the world around it. By moving back and forth, or triangulating, the eyes can continually send the brain information from two different perspectives. The shifts might be small, but they must be valuable, or else we wouldn’t spend so much energy on them. When this movement increases enough to be visible—something that usually happens during a seizure or some other electrical dysfunction in the brain—we call it nystagmus.

Perhaps the usual microscopic movement ceases when the emotions of a dog, or a human, change to pure anger. This hypothesis is consistent with our knowledge that an alerted brain stops dead in its tracks, just for an instant, before responding with a storm of electricity and chemical messages. We can reasonably speculate that there is an equivalent micropause in the body’s machinery, right before it acts on the emotion of anger.

Whatever causes this change in eye expression, don’t worry about training yourself to see it. If a dog’s eyes go cold and hard on you, believe me, your body will let you know. Just be sure to pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you, because it’s sending you some very important information. I’ll never forget calling the animal behaviorist John Wright after I’d seen one of my first clients. I was just starting out, and John had been working with aggressive dogs for several years, so I valued his opinion. I didn’t call for advice about a treatment plan; I called for solace, because I had become deeply afraid of a Standard Poodle whose eyes raised the hair on the back of my neck. Like many novices, I had a fantasy that my commitment and knowledge should preclude feeling afraid while working with dogs. That fantasy fell apart as the dog began to leap toward my face, higher and higher each time, without a shred of friendliness in his eyes. In seconds my body and brain were in complete agreement. “Be afraid,” they said. “Be very afraid.”

I had been afraid, and felt like a failure. “How could I be so scared
and call myself an animal behaviorist?” I asked John. “How could you call yourself one if you weren’t?” he countered. “The dog was threatening you, and your body knew it right away. Listen to your body when you’re working with dogs: it’s giving you invaluable information.” He was right. The dog’s eyes were as cold as flint, and now that I have seventeen years’ experience under my belt, I have no doubt that I was being threatened by a dog who was serious about hurting me. That case helped me learn to use my body’s wisdom to my advantage, and to welcome those signals rather than trying to suppress them.

Expressions of the eye may be the hardest to describe in words, but experienced canine behaviorists and dog handlers of all descriptions agree that they are key to the way we evaluate dogs. Psychologists tell us that humans read fear and anger mostly from the eyes, and happiness from the mouth. Certainly an offensive pucker is an important cue to anyone observing a dog, but nothing compares to the look of pure rage that can be expressed by a dog with hard eyes. If you encounter a dog who turns his head to look directly into your eyes, and whose eyes go cold and hard as he looks into your own, you’re much better off trying to ease the tension by speaking quietly and calmly, changing the focus onto “Walkies!” or “Dinner?” than you are confronting the dog directly. A direct stare with a hard eye usually means the dog is willing to fight, and unless you want to be involved in a barroom brawl with someone better armed than you, you’re better off finessing the situation until he calms down. I don’t want you to teach your dog that all he has to do is glare at you to maintain possession of the couch or the chewy toy, but those problems are better solved before a face-to-face confrontation occurs, not during it. If your blood runs cold when a dog looks you directly in the eye, listen to your body, stop doing what you’re doing, look away yourself, and change the focus to walks or dinner. Then put your energy into finding a skilled and understanding behaviorist to help you out.
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There’s another expression related to the eye that the pros look for when evaluating the emotional state of a dog, but that’s not intuitively obvious to the dog-loving public. Labeled “whale eye” by Sue Stern-berg, an expert on canine aggression, it appears when your dog’s head and eyes aren’t pointing in the same direction, so you see the whites of your dog’s eyes on one side or the other.
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Look at the photo of the dog exhibiting this expression and you’ll see what I mean. This nervous dog is so anxious about what he’s looking at that he wants to turn his head away, but he’s too afraid to take his eyes off the anxiety-provoking object of his focus. I see this expression most often in dogs who are fearful of strangers or of unfamiliar dogs. If you want to get a good look at this expression on a human, just go to a scary movie. When something terrifying occurs, you’ll see people turn their heads away, but keep their eyes riveted on the monster on the screen. Our rational brains may understand that the danger is confined to the screen, but our emotional brain knows at any moment the alien in the movie is going to leap out and attack us, so we need to keep our eyes on him at every moment.

Dogs appear to evaluate the situation in a similar way, because fearful dogs turn their heads away as if they can’t bear to face the monster, but keep their eyes riveted on whatever it is that has scared them. This expression is very different from the hard, direct stare of a confident dog. Either dog could cause all kinds of trouble, but the dog that shows you whale eye is telling you in no uncertain terms that he’s really, really nervous. You’ll do him no favors if you either ignore it or force him to confront his fears right then and there.

There is an exception to the caution about a dog showing the whites of his eyes. I’ve seen this same expression on the faces of completely relaxed dogs who appear, for want of a better description, to be purely and simply amused. Look at Luke’s face on the last page of photographs. His head is partially turned toward me and partially toward the camera, while his eyes are looking directly toward the lens. You can see the same look on the faces of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s dogs in
her author photo for
The Hidden Life of Dogs
. It’s not a look I’ve seen often, and I want to be crystal clear that I’m only guessing, but it looks for all the world to me like the dog is sharing a joke with the person he’s looking at. In Luke’s case, I suspect he was laughing at my hair.

While we’re talking about the direction of a dog’s head, it’s important to be aware of the times your dog goes out of her way to avoid looking directly at a person or another dog. You’ll see this when one dog turns her head away as she passes by another dog, perhaps if there’s tension between them or the dogs haven’t met each other yet. If you start paying attention to which way a dog’s head is oriented, you’ll discover that dogs spend a lot of energy avoiding direct eye contact with one another unless they are good buddies. The best place to see this is in a group photo of people and dogs: all the people will be looking at one another or the camera, while all the dogs are looking away from one another.