Dogs are such an incredible animal, and how they communicate to us is even more so. They’re always expressing themselves through body language, behaviour and their interactions with the world around them.
Whether they’re licking their lips, yawning, turning away from us, cowering, lowering their tail or wagging it to their left to communicate feelings of fear, anxiety or stress. Whether they’re bowing their forelegs, sneezing, presenting relaxed eye contact or wagging their tale to their right to express feelings of happiness, joy or contentment. There’s so much more to how dogs communicate to us that we brush off or miscommunicate, and they express themselves in so many more ways than I've described. They’re a phenomenal non-verbal being.
While we look for signs and seek to understand communication from our dogs, it’s not as often that we consider how we communicate to them and how they interpret that. Drawing on my own experience from meeting new clients and general discussions I’ve had on the subject, it appears that we’re more aware of how we communicate through our body language than our emotions.
Let’s reflect on body language first. We express an openess as we relax our jaw, neck and shoulders. As we stand tall, proud and confident with a forward chest, our dogs feel physically safe and in turn emotionally secure. Our soft eye contact and awareness of our dogs’ personal space reinforces their trust in us and reaffirms their respect for us.
However, when we stand over our dogs with tense body language that we express through our shoulders, neck and jaw and fixate on our dogs with a hard stare, we are immediately intimidating them. Dogs have a defence drive, and depending on their breed and upbringing, they will be more inclined to go into fight mode or flight mode. They will react to how we present ourselves. When speaking, our tone is also very important, and how much volume we use when we verbally communicate impacts our canine companions.
When our dogs have an accident in the house and we walk towards them, towering over them, pointing towards any accidents and raising our voice, they’re more than likely going to cower, pin their ears back and tuck their tails so that they’re almost pinned to their stomachs. This is when people tell me “my dog knew they did something bad”. No they didn’t. Your dog was on the receiving end of very negative body language and verbal communication. Your dog didn’t know they did something “bad” because dogs don’t have that understanding of what we deem right and wrong.
We can check in with ourselves and make sure to present an open, relaxed body language and inhale slow deep breaths while presenting soft eye contact and slow blinking to reassure our dogs that we’re not fixating on them, and that we’re not a threat.
Now, let’s talk about how our emotions affect our dogs. Whether we’re happy, nervous, sad or angry, our dogs smell our emotions. That’s right, they smell them. When we cry, when we sweat, when we exhale and through our hormones, dogs smell our emotions. The impact of our pheromones releasing through our body and our dogs smelling that is a major factor, and that’s how they make sense of those changes of how we’re feeling.
Through research and studies it’s been shown that dogs behaviour changes when exposed to the smells that indicate these changes that we communicate. During these experiments, it was clear that dogs heart rates changed as well as their interactions with people depending on if they were exposed to “fear odours” or “happy odours”.
It’s amazing to understand this and I find it so fascinating. It’s something that we can make note of when it comes to building the relationships we have with our own dogs. We spend so much time engrossing in our own dogs’ triggers that impact them emotionally, but we don’t always consider how our own emotions impact them. We can reflect on how we visibly and verbally communicate with them, but if our emotions remain the same during those interactions, what kind of impact are we really making?
Humans are an animal with an ego so intense that we yearn to feel superior to our canine companions and other animals, and we claim that we are far more intelligent than them. Yet we haven’t learned all there is to know about other animals, and accepting that opens us up to embarking on a journey of understanding dogs more and holding ourselves accountable for how we communicate.