Fetchers Dog Care

In this, the second in my series of articles about communicating with your dog, we’ll start to get into the meat of the issue.  We need to start by breaking this problem down a bit.  Obviously, communication is all about transmitting and receiving information.  Therefore we have three main areas we need to focus on: How do dogs send information, How do we send information to dogs, and What is the content of the information.  We’ll tackle these one at a time and then connect them together into coherent system.

The best, and most obvious, place to start is how dogs communicate with each other and, by extension, with us.  Before we discuss what we can know we need to first discuss what we can’t.  Scent plays as important a role in canine communication as language does in ours.  It is impossible to know how extensive scent communication in dogs is or what percentage of total communication it occupies but there can be no doubt that it is the primary conduit for vast amounts information. Therefore we have to deal with what we can perceive, namely body language.

Dogs help us in the sense that virtually everything in their heads is broadcast through their bodies. Once we are tuned in to their body language we can almost always extrapolate that to their thoughts. Now most of us recognize the broad categories of canine body language: submission, play, dominance, fear, etc. It’s the subtleties and context we usually misinterpret. Here’s a for instance I hear a lot.

Clients approach me all the time about dogs, usually small but not always, which follow the owner around and bark incessantly. More often than not they report that the only way to quiet the dog is to pick it up or in some other way give the dog something.