Your behavior clashes with your dog in more ways than you think. Learn how and you’ll be much better friends.
Oh, how we love those snuggles, tail wags and face licks. Coming home to your dog’s enthusiastic greeting would lead to you to beleive that your dog felt nothing other than pure love for you.
What if you found out that your dog spent a good amount of their time tolerating annoying and sometimes offensive behavior from you? You might look at your relationship differently. In fact, this is the case for most dogs who live with humans. It turns out dogs may be our most tolerant friends.
It is probably not a stretch to imagine that dogs relate to other dogs in ways quite different from humans. When we greet other humans, we shake hands or hug. Dogs sniff each other’s rear ends.
In fact, from a behavioral perspective dogs interact with each other in ways that are almost completely opposite to the ways humans relate to one another. Sounds obvious right? So why then do we demand that dogs relate to us in human ways?
If you look at most human-dog relationships, you will find that for the most part humans act like humans, and they often expect dogs to act like them as well. So lets look at the ways that your behavior may be off-putting or offensive to your dog.
These Arms
The next time you are around a dog, watch the ways that they use their fore limbs. For the most part dogs use them to run, dig and occasionally swat at a toy. Anatomically dog paws aren’t all that different from humans. Functionally they are worlds apart from human arms. So it is no surprise that people have adapted behaviors that involve the use of their hands and arms. We are capable of handshakes, hugs, slaps and gentle caresses of a cheek. We can pitch, twist and manipulate objects in ways that dogs never could.
And so it is that the use — or more accurately the overuse— of our hands is one of the ways that we can really offend our dogs.
Let’s set aside the fine dexterity of the human hand, and look at a more simplistic behavior: the simple arm around a shoulder. We do this to people we like and love alike. This gesture can signal friendship, protection, sympathy, adoration and love. In the dog world, and arm over the shoulder of another dog is a sign of dominance, and is generally an unwelcome gesture.
If you watch dogs at your local dog park interacting with other dogs, you’re likely to see one or more dogs attempting to throw a forelimb over the shoulders of another dog. If you see this, watch how dogs respond. It is rarely a good interaction. This gesture is one way that dogs establish dominance and submission.
Yet, day by day we sit next to our dogs and throw a casual arm around their shoulder. We think we are being affectionate, but dogs seen this as a power grab, and while they may not show outright aggression, they are certainly irritated by the gesture.
In the working dog world, where dogs are trained rigorously to perform tasks, many trainers feel that the use of their hands with their dogs is a detriment to their training. Many experienced handlers of dogs use their arms minimally with their dogs.
Pro tip: When petting dogs that you don’t know, approach from below and aim to pet under their chin rather than going for the top of their head. This makes your gesture much less threatening.
With that said, there is no reason to stop petting your dogs. Most dogs adore ear scratches, belly rubs and pats on the butt. It is the overuse of your hands that may annoy or offend your dog. Consider the liklihood that you pet your dogs more for your own enjoyment than theirs, and keep the use of your hands to a minimum.
The Mouth That Moves
If dogs could talk, the things they’d say. In fact dogs do not talk, and from a communication perspective canine’s use of vocalization is relatively simplistic. Barks, growls, whimpers and howls all are used to communicate amongst other dogs, but in comparison to other animals this vocal communication is not very complex. And yet, many dogs are forced to live with arguably the most vocally complex animal than has ever lived.
Humans are so adept at vocal communication that some spend their lifetimes studying it. Because of this, we have become entirely reliant on vocalizations to communicate our every feeling. Between humans, this level of reliance on verbal communication is required. Our brains actually develop specific areas devoted entirely to the interpretation and production of verbal communication.
To dogs, the human reliance on verbal communication is an ever-present challenge. Although dogs cannot speak our language, that doesn’t mean they don’t try! Much of their very existence depends on the things we human say to them. “You hungry girl? Want some food? Who’s a good boy, you want to go for a walk? Bad dog! No barking! Get down. Get out. Lay down. Come here boy! Off the couch.” It’s a wonder we don’t drive our dogs mad with the many things we say. While most dogs don’t completely break down, many do silently shut off to the endless jibberjabbering of humans.
Back to the topic of training dogs, one of the first things that trainers do with new dogs owners is to train them to not use their mouths so much. It makes sense too. When we humans want something, for example, we ask for it verbally. If we don’t get the reaction we want, we assume we weren’t heard and go on repeating ourselves until we get what we want.
Dogs have a much more economical approach to the things that humans say. It is true that dogs cannot understand our language, but they certainly can learn our words. When we say things like “Ball” or “Walk” dogs have learned that those words have very high value to them. Often this is because the word is tied to a behavior (ie. the word “walk” is actually tied to the behavior of going for a walk). Dogs are very good at cataloging high value words that actually result in a worthwhile results.
On the flip side, dogs catalog low value words. Possibly the most challenging word/action/behavior in the dog training world is the recall — getting your dog to come to you when called. Many dog owners struggle and often fail at training their dog to “come” when called. More often than not this is because dogs have deemed the word “come” as low value, and this is often because the word “come!” is overused. The more humans repeat a command, the less valuable it becomes.
And so it goes, dogs find themselves constantly trying to make sense of a language they will never fully understand. All the while, we humans go on blabbing our mouths. Do your dog a favor, say less.
Face to Face
Another hallmark behavior of humankind is face-to-face interaction. Kissing, nuzzling, hugging and snuggling often involve mouth-to-mouth, cheek-to-cheek or face-to-face interaction. For humans, in the right situations, this is a welcoming and often exciting behavior.
For dogs, being face-to-face is outright rude behavior. Occasionally, dogs will go snout to snout during an early greeting, but that is rarely long lived. Often when dogs are positioned face-to-face for any length of time, a fight is not far off.
Humans are notorious for — and somehow unable to resist — pulling dog’s faces close to their’s in greeting. During a road trip through Wyoming, my wife and I were out near Devil’s Tower letting our border collie stretch his legs. A nearby couple came over to chit chat with us, and the woman seemed immediately attracted to our dog. Without warning she walked straight up to him, grabbed him by the cheeks and pressed her face up against his. Within seconds our dog nipped her. Actually, it was more a nose bump with a little sniffing noise — a remarkably gracious way for him to say “Get the hell away from me lady!” The lady laughed it off as no big deal. He hadn’t actually bitten her after all. My wife and I both looked at each other and chuckled as we knew we were sharing the same thought: “She had that coming!”
The fact is, dogs do not interpret the behavior of a human pressing their face to their’s as anything other than weird, scary and potentially threatening. As we touched on in a previous section, dogs do not use their hands to block or push away other dogs or humans from getting to close, so they use their mouths. Most dog bites, as scary and dangerous as they can be, usually aren’t aggressive behavior, they are just the only way a dog has to establish boundaries.
There is nuance to face-to-face behavior, of course. Dogs will often go face-to-face with other dogs during play or casual interaction. It is in the subtlety of the behavior that makes it ok between dogs. This subtlety is something humans will never be able to grasp, so it is not worth trying. Another difference is face licking amongst dogs. This is one instance when face-to-face interaction is tolerated between dogs. Face licking is often a sign of submission and is so tolerated by dominant dogs.
It is somehow very difficult for humans to resist face-to-face interaction with dogs. It seems to go against our very humanity to not kiss or nuzzle our dogs. From their perspective, they would be just fine foregoing the kiss in favor of something more appropriate like a game of tug.
As mentioned above, the intent of this article is not to tell you to stop kissing your dogs or talking to your dogs. Rather, the purpose of this article is to help you see the behaviors that may be offensive to your dog, and try to lessen them. Dogs are incredibly tolerant, so they are willing to put up with the occasional kiss on the forehead, or your endless yammering. It is your job to try to act in ways that are pleasant and agreeable to your pup. If you must hug your dog — and sometimes you just must — do it infrequently, and keep it short.
Dogs are incredible animals. They have actually evolved a sense for coexisting with humans that dates back tens of thousands of years. But that does not mean that all dog-human interactions have been peaches and roses.
More than likely, dogs have evolved the ability to tolerate human behavior. After all, docility is one of the primary traits that distinguishes a domestic dog from a wild canine. There is no denying the bond that humans and dogs have. Many a good dog devotes their lives to doing right by their human. The least we can do is to return the favor.
If you are interested in a deeper dive into dog behavior, we strongly recommend Patricia McConnell’s page!