Stanley Coren - Animal Communication: How to Speak Dog

okay oh I wanted you to use this thank you good afternoon and welcome on this soggy day in late May it's a tremendous it's really quite fantastic on alumni weekend to see as many bright faces young and old here today I'm Blake Hanna I'm an alum UBC I graduated 1982 from the solder School of Business in the MBA program I sit on UBC's Alumni Association Board of Directors and on behalf of all people involved in alumni here on campus we welcome you one of the things we've learned in our research around alumni is that they really like to come back in lifeline lifelong learning opportunities and to engage with peers and friends so that's part of the objective of this weekend I think we have a fabulous opportunity this afternoon to do some lifelong learning and normally I try and introduce people without notes but when you see professor Stanley corns CV and some of the accomplishments I felt it important to make sure that I got them correct so if you'll pardon me I'm going to read some of the accomplishments first of all best known perhaps in the public for his best-selling dog books doctor corn is also well respected researcher and he did his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and went on to Stanford where he did his doctorate in psychology he's well respected and well published in the scientific and the research arenas he is currently the professor of UBC's department of psychology it is also the director of the human neuro psychology and perception perception laboratory here on campus in addition to being a psychologist and a researcher professor Koren's life is filled with dog related activities and let me recount just a few he has his own national TV program on the life network called good dog he's also given numerous interviews of which I'm sure you've seen some and has been the subject of many programs and articles you may have seen on CBS's Good Morning America the NBC Today Show Canada a.m. CDC's national news the CBS national news CBC's v the state NBC's Dateline 20/20 Oprah and the list goes on he currently lives with an old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel names Vinci a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named dancer a young beagle beagle named Darby and I think with permission an orange cat I think it really belongs to his wife Joan named Loki so please join me in welcoming and celebrating professor emeritus stanley coren thank you you shouldn't okay everybody hear me you shouldn't applaud in advance I might turn out to be a bomb all that stuff which he said is simply because of the fact that if it's a slow news day they bring out dr. dog anyway today we're going to be talking a bit about animal communication and hopefully it'll give you a wee bit more information about what your dog is saying or trying to say or that sort of thing for me it all started with a dog by the name of lassie and the lassie who was most important to me when I was growing up yes I had seen the film and that sort of thing was the last see that actually appeared on the radio there actually was a radio show called lassie and the interesting thing about it is that all of the barking was done by the original lassie which was actually a male dog by the name pal and all the barks all the growls and whines and whimpers were done by a very talented voice actor but the thing which drove me crazy about lassie was that his family or his many families when they when they came to TV always understood what he was saying I mean lassie would go and you know barkat let's say June Lockhart who was the one of my favorite of the mums for Timmy and Tommy and Johnny in these films and lassie would you know go ruff rowf rowf rowf rowf and mum would say oh my god Timmy has been now playing in the tractor and he's gotten himself in trouble quick lassie go run down to the Johnson place and get doc Smith and I'll go see what I can do and you knew what was going to happen I mean lassie was going to run down to the Johnson place and all the Johnsons and the visiting dr. Smith was all going to understand exactly what she would say and to me you know this is drove me absolutely crazy because you know that time in life I had a little beagle by the name of Skippy and uh you know I mean he barked sometimes and sometimes he sort of yelled all the way that beagle sometimes dude which just tells us that his neurons are working but you know other than the fact that - his tail wagged and I thought that meant that he was happy and you know and he always he looked toward the dog bowl indicating that he was hungry I couldn't understand what he was saying and I ended up starting out for a lifelong quest to try to not be dr. Dolittle but just try to understand a little bit better how dogs communicate now the very first thing which you have to understand is that despite the fact that dogs are very complex and we have a tendency to humanize them they are not human and the language of dogs is not the same as the language of humans now you know human language everybody forgets there's a whole lot of here types of human language it's not just the sounds that we make although those are the ones that we tend to emphasize but we also have a written language we have gestures which we make and so forth the language of the dogs is a lot less like humans in that it does not emphasize sound as much as humans do and they do make meaningful sounds but you got to think about this their pack hunters and imagine that the leader of the pack you know spots a deer up over there and says to the to the rest of the pack you know hey guys there's a deer over there well guess what the deer has just heard this and they've lost lunch so the major form of language for dogs is body language it's going to be a gestural kind of a language now human beings do exactly the same kind of thing and we tend to underestimate just how important that form of language is so for example I'll give you a couple of statements and see whether you can figure out which of my badly drawn stick figures is in saying that so you know we won or how about I really don't want any of that how about welcome to my home and don't you forget that I'm still boss around here I know buddy has a difficulty with this sort of thing I mean it's it so obvious but we don't think about that as being part of language but it's the same kind of gestural language that the dogs are going to use now we also convey an awful lot in our expressions and one of the problems which dogs have is that their faces are not as expressive as our faces are and the reason is it because they have a muzzle and a muzzle is designed as a tool and a weapon so it's divided designed for strength not for flexibility we can do all sorts of stuff with our mouth which dogs can't do so the muzzle then serves as the dog's hands and as his weapons and therefore it's stronger than our mouth is ah but it's not as flexible so we don't get as many usable expressions from the dog but you can still get things from looking at the dog's face and gestures so here's a relaxed and attentive dog and there are some real dogs which are relaxed and attentive and generally speaking the characteristics are that the the brow is unfair oh the eyes are neither staring nor slit or nor slitted closed and the dog's mouth is closed once we start to get into the issues of anger where the dog is threatening which is a dog is expressing its dominance things start to change first of all the eyes begin to open more and the mouth begins to open to show the weapons the teeth in this particular case you begin to get some farrowing of the brow here's a primate giving exactly that kind of expression and there's another primate giving another one of those expressions in another form of threat occurs when the dog is being very fearful and he's basically saying you are frightening me but if you try anything I will fight and here there are some characteristic differences notice the shape of the mouth is different we'll come back to that in a minute so there it is in and the eyes are slightly hooded in this case ears are down unfortunately we primates can't do very much in terms of ears when I was very young actually I had a friend who lived in our neighborhood when he would get excited he's ears would flip forward like this I always wished that I had that ability anyway and there we have another primate who is expressing exactly the same thing if the dog is being fearful and submissive we're going to see the eyes start to close slightly it looks as though there should be pulled back at the corners the wrinkles are gone from the brow and the ears are down and that sort of thing so here's some very unhappy worried dogs in this case the dogs have ears and that's a and with this flexibility of ears comes the ability to convey information much better than we can because areas are not mobile and in the wild all canine ears are sort of pricked so that makes them really quite visible and so they're really good signals it's only us sort of screwing around with the the breeding of dogs that have produced LaPierre dogs in the first place and but the ears are really good signal so this is a secure and confident dog notice the ears are straight up they're not to the side they're not to the back they're not glued leaning forward or whatever else as the dogs gets insecure and worried those ears start to go down and the first sign that a dog is beginning to get uncomfortable is the fact that that V between the ears starts to open up so if you look at a group of dogs like this I mean if you know what to look for you can tell which of the dogs are most insecure in this particular situation I mean you can pick it out over there this one is showing all sorts of signals that in fact is a very unhappy dog over here and this one is gone I've done this before for 18,000 times kind of thing now LaPierre dogs uh I mean they still have the same musculature it's just that the the designs are a lot more subtle so this is a relaxed dog and as the dog becomes mildly aggressive instead of those ears going slightly forward they begin to flare out to me it looks sort of like you know those those pictures of a charging elephant which is doing the same sort of thing and if the dog is submissive it's almost as though they there's a weight which has been hung on the ears which seems to sort of drop them down and if we can look at that in a real dog so there he is relaxed and this guy is basically saying I am boss around here and this one is there again so you get that kind of thing you can think of a lot of things that go on in dog language as being sort of a thermometer which tells us where they are in terms of their social state and that's a pretty good prediction as to what they're going to do so if we have a thermometer and it's graded not in in degrees but in terms of sort of emotional climate where the top of the of the thermometer is dominant and confident the middle is relaxed and content and the bottom is insecure and fearful then what we use instead of a column of mercury is the height of the dog's body and tell the way he carries himself so if you will a dominant and confident dog is going to carry his tail high a relaxed and content dog his tail is just it done neither high nor low it's sort of just in a in a nothing kind of a position relative to his breed and if the dog is insecure and fearful the tail is going to be tucked under so here we have the classic example of a terrified dog with his tail tucked and running like hell and this is a dominant parade from a dog the dog's tail is held horizontal or higher and he's basically saying you know you elected me and you're going to have to be stuck with me because I'm boss kind of a thing now everything has to be modified on the basis of the fact that you know right here in Canada the CKC recognizes over a hundred and sixty different dog breeds and some carry their tails high like a beagle over here and some carry their tails quite low like some of the sight hounds this this is a greyhound this is this greyhound over here the dog's name is Shayna actually but what we're talking about is sort of you know the typical dog which tends to hold his tail in a in a mid-range and everything else is sort of judged relative to that I mean this guy's tail will go down if he gets upset and that sort of thing sometimes the the tail has different messages other than just dominance so in this particular case you get this a lot in females which called flagging where the tail goes way up in the air looks very cat-like in its way and she holds it virtually vertical and she turns away from the dog and looks back over her shoulder it's sort of hi sailor you want to buy me a drink kind of a thing I mean of course dogs are more demure than that okay if we look at increasing dominance and aggression here we've got a very relaxed dog and as the dog becomes more aggressive first of all he's going to start to lean forward on down these front legs his tail is going to start to rise his body's going to stiffen mouth is going to close and as he gets more and more aroused that tail is going to go up the fur is going to get bushier and so forth if the dog is getting very fearful he's going to start to lower his body so the weight is actually going back at this point the tail is going down and eventually he's going to lower his whole body in this instance and basically what's going on over here is very simple you know when the dog is being fearful he's basically trying to look smaller so that he's less of a threat look at me I'm just a little puppy don't hurt me kind of a thing and you can clearly see this in a whole lot of other animals it's very similar in cats so here we've got increasing aggression so just pick one of the lines and you can see that the cat is making himself look look larger and is putting more of a lean forward on his body and as the animal becomes more fearful you can see that he starts to cringe down making itself smaller and smaller now obviously you can get some strange combinations you know he's becoming more increasingly aggressive I'm going to go after you if you hurt me while trying to look smaller and eventually you get to some bizarre postures like the typical frightened Halloween cat kind of thing um so when a dog is very frightened or insecure I mean they cringe they go down into that sort of puppy like status um here we've got a relaxed dog his ears are up there neither forward nor back his head is high that's that relaxed tail and his mouth is slightly open with his tongue exposed keep that in your mind for half a second so there we got a relaxed and confident dog there's another one and there's another one now the important thing over here is look at that mouth and notice that the tongue is out over the front teeth and that is the closest that we have to a smile in dogs and that this is not a new scientific finding we have we being scientists academics and that sort of thing have found toys from the 18th dynasty and later in in Egypt which look very much like some of our classic toys today for kids they're sort of a little animal on a platform with wheels designed to have a string so you sort of drag it along and they have some of them have a dog with its tongue this huge tongue coming out like this and don't ask me the Egyptian word for it because I don't remember but basically translates to the smiling dog twice so they were recognizing that at that point in time so in human beings are of course that is our smile but in dogs that is is their basic smile um now humans can use smiles if for a whole variety of different expressions so for example we have masked anger of course I'm not upset with you dear kind of a thing or forced an insincere politeness oh yes you're welcome any time you want to come here an attempt to soften criticism well I'm not trying to be harsh now and reluctance compliance you know which is sort of like oh if you insist kind of things for dogs smiles are just smiles I think there are no nuance it's okay it comes in one flavor black or white price now when the dog becomes alert and attentive that mouth is going to close so that's what a relaxed smile is gone the eyes are going to open up a bit the dog is going to lean forward a little bit sometimes you get it's a slight rise or a bristle in the tail that's a classic example of a very beautiful Golden Retriever relaxed and attentive that's an Orbitz vet and so these are classic examples of relaxed attentive dogs now aggressive signals in dogs don't always mean that the dog is trying to assert dominance and there are two major types of aggressive signals and how you respond depends on the type now this is this is really very important I mean I gave a series of talks to the post office because these people were all panicked about dogs and pointed out to them that one of the really bad things which happens is when people become worried or fearful or that sort of thing their brain closes down and they don't really start processing information well I mean but you know of course it's the case if dog is growling at you you know somehow or another to look at the nuances of let's see what he's doing with his eyes and his ears and it's what shape of his mouth but the important things here are this is a very dominant dog making an aggressive threat so his ears are going to go forward he's leaning forward and he'd be in to see the wrinkles on the nose and those body stance is very high and as the dough becomes more excited you begin to get a raising of the hair on the shoulders and the hips that's called those are called the hackles and that's a sign of excitement around so more than anything else so the body movements emphasize the dominance and the face tells us sort of the degree of threat which we're dealing with the very first thing which you have to worry about are the eyes I mean the uniform expression of dominance is to actually stare with wide eyes at somebody else and if you've got a stiff upright stance and that wide eyed stare this is a dog who is making a quite clear you know this is my neighborhood vacate it to please of response and that that's a pretty hard clear statement that dominance stare by the way is the main tool which a Border Collie uses along with a set of other threats I mean they have what is called a hard eye and they'll come and they'll stare at the sheep and the sheep Jose oh.hello in that direction and if it if the animals don't move the border collie you know carries through the threat I mean he'll make a direct charge toward the tortoise the herd and if that doesn't work you'll even nip so I mean they're there they're very bright dogs but don't expect them to be sort of very tolerant in the sort of thing if the mouth opens wider it means that the dog is starting to show his weapons and the wider the mouth opens the more of a threat you're getting now in this particular case we're looking at a dominance threat and you can see first of all that you begin to dou viens develop wrinkles right across the top of the snout and that usually is the first sign that the dog is going to at least contemplating a snap or a bite but notice the shape of this mouth and that's really important that's a wide-open C shaped mouth and that is the classic expression of a dominance threat this is a guy who is who is basically saying I am the boss around here why are you challenging me kind of a thing and here are sort of typical dominance threats from these dogs you can see their mouth is open very wide you can see the teeth but you can't see very much of the gums and at the same time the eyes are quite wide open the dogs are making that staring motion edge'able now the Year ears usually stay up until a moment before the dog actually attacks when those years flip downward somewhat you know that that bite is coming and that's sort of a protective response and these are sort of universal across canines so these are the wide eyed stare this is a wolf a little timber wolf he's an open mouth threat the ears are up and forward and he's got that stiff stance with a raised hackles and you do start to get the tail tend to Bush out and in German Shepherd type dogs actually they'll develop a little kink in the tail which is part of their whole dominance display now dogs often stare at people um in order to control our behavior okay you've all seen this right okay um and humans interpret this is begging okay and you know we all right here's a cookie right and as soon as you do that the dog in fact knows that in fact he's won the dominance game and he's a higher rank than you are so you got to be careful about these sorts of things for fear of grab based aggression the dog starts to be lower himself remember he's more frightened the cackles are up and so forth but the eyes are going to be a slightly different shape they're going to be more tear shaped and you're going to see more of the gums in over here it's almost as though you are pulling the corners of the mouth back so it's no longer C shaped it's sort of an elongated shape so this is a fear aggressive dog dogs are cursorial animals which means swift running and they're their goal in life is to stay sound and say you know out of trouble and given their druthers they would prefer to run rather than to engage in a fight any lowering of the body is going to be your mark that the dog has some fear some insecurities involved in this sort of thing so you can see this dog is this is a pretty impressive looking threat if you don't know what you're looking for but it's an elongated mouth in the back of the body is lowered so we're looking at fear motivation and what you're looking for specifically are the ears down is the weight off of the front feet is it back like this in some way or another and you have to watch that face here we've got two dogs which are showing fear-based aggression the important thing to note is those ears are down they're not up and forward as they are in that dominant dog the mouth seems to be pulled back you can see so it's sort of an elongated and in this particular case you can see that the eyes are beginning to show that sort of almond shaped thing so you're pulling them back at the outside campus so they sort of develop these sort of teardrop of shape and very often if the dog is highly aroused and very afraid you'll see the gums on this so this is a quite a fearful growl of so I know you're all saying to yourself if thing is growling at me to say oh look at the dog's mouth shape and look at if you're not moving okay and you are standing Stockstill you got plenty of time to assess that okay because the dog is not going to respond if you don't move all right that's that that's one of the bottom legs in this thing anyway so the trick over here is to look at the mouth and the ear so here's increasing fearfulness notice the mouth is going to start to get elongated slightly and the ears are going to go down and here's the mouth and as you get more and more likely aggression you get the mouth opened wider and wider if a dog is already down and somebody comes over and threatens him uh you know the dog is much more likely to give a sort of little threat growl but not stand up or do anything like that because changing its posture can be looked at as sort of expressing dominance so let's ask the question I mean here we've got the two dogs this is your dominant aggressive and that is your fearful aggressive dog up and you can tell by the eyes the mouth ears which is the greater threat well you know the the trick is a dominant dog is saying back off give me space I'm boss around here if you back off and give him space he says he told you okay end of story end of situation however if you've got a fearful dog that dog maybe he's totally swamped by emotion he might in fact be dealing with a situation where he's in fear of his life and he might take it if you start to move away quickly as his opportunity to use the old the best defense is a good offense kind of a response so this guy worries me a hell of a lot more than that guy does this guy I can negotiate it with okay this guy have to think about each thing which I do if a dog has been an aggressive state for a long period of time you'll start to see foam that is not rabies okay yeah so don't we rabies is not a real problem in but if you see a dog who is showing this he's showing fear aggression with all this phone I this is a dog that I am not going to approach until he calms down if the dog is being stressed what we find is the is going to have the eyes are going to be slightly hooded you'll see dilated pupils because they really are aroused the dog is going to start to pant his ears are going to be back he's going to lower his body and his tails and he might start to sweat through his paws in addition to sort of this lowered body though we see something which I call sort of the crescent moon stance the dog lowers his body his tail is down his eyes are squinted okay and the years are low I mean this is all the pattern which I've been talking about but they curve their body okay so that their rear as well as their front portion is more curved toward the threat and that's a good sign of stress and anxiety you know if you wonder why this is the case this is because it takes one movement to flip and now his rear and his front are in alignment and he's pointed away so he can run remember these guys prefer to run as a dog because we're stressed his internal temperature begins to rise and so you start to get a whole bunch of other stress related symptoms so you get rapid shallow breathing the dog will start to pant sometimes you'll get some drooling with them and you'll see wet droplets of saliva and the dog dogs don't sweat through their skin the way that we do the only way a dog can cool himself off when he's overheated is by panting or he sweats through the paws and so you'll sometimes see sort of wet paw prints in the first day of dog obedience class you know the beginners dog obedience class it looks like every dog is coming from the rain because there's all these sort of wet little paw prints around another sign of stress is this Paul lift and that's really quite typical at it basically as a sign of insecurity and you sometimes get yawning so you sometimes get the poor lift and yawning and and that yawn is again a sign of stress in the dog here we're getting a dog's more and more fearful so this is a fearful dog who's being very very submissive he's not a threat to anybody he but his ears are back but his his forehead and his muzzle are going to be very smooth no wrinkles in that the mouth is usually closed but sometimes the dog will lick at the air or look at the face of the dog who's threatening or the person and again here we can see the beginning of that pour lift the degree of submissiveness is determined by just how the dog's body posture is so the lower that rump being lower than the shoulders is a clear submissive signal so you can see that this guy is much more worried than this one is who has its tail he'll and this guy is a lot more worried than the other dog now you can get a reverse of this which is with a head being lower than the rear that's also submissive but it's it's it's less somewhat less so so you start to get this the head is held lower than the head of the other animal but it's not you know you're terrifyingly kind of submission if a dog is already in the lower position he usually remains so if another dog comes over because to break that position D is often viewed as a challenge and if you get a seated dog you'll sometimes see them if they're worried they go into that little slump just think of that as sort of the seeded version of lowering the body that we saw when you're standing dogs will respond to just about a - just virtually anything which they think is alive with the same signal so this dog has been slightly frightened by this goat so he goes into the typical posture look at me oh just a little puppy don't hurt me kind of a thing the dog who's of lower state is the one who is sort of recognized the other guy his boss will very often lick at the face of the higher status animal and and we tend to tell our kids you know well the dog licking your face that's a dog kisses but are they kisses in the wild he got a member I'm a mommy dog or mommy wolf in this case and I have to bring some food back to the den the thing is that I don't have any shopping bags or shopping carts to bring them back so what I do is I just Gorge myself with the food and I come back and what happens is the pups lick at my face and I barf it out on the ground and so the puppies then get nice warm partially digested food and all as well so licking the face for young dogs is is really food solicitation and you see it all the time I mean and older dogs put up with it they'd have if the dog is old enough they don't do any barfing for them but what's happened over evolutionary time is that this licking has now become a sort of a social ritual so if a young dog comes in like that you know the other dogs have to bend over and sort of lick his head or his ears sort of acknowledging the situation and if the if the fearful dog or the one who's very submissive can't get to the other door sometimes lick the air in front of them so with what that kind of thing so what is this dog saying right you know I love you could be I respect you as if you were my mother you know I'm just like a little puppy I know he'll take care of me most likely it's you know how about a little snack if dogs licks our kisses then dogs seem to love just about everybody they lick just about everybody it's really quite indiscriminate if you get too confident dogs together what you get is this sort of sniffing which occurs at first you can see these guys neither of them is backing down no body posture indicating any submission and then it sort of turns into this mutual but sniffing kind of a thing generally speaking of dogs its dominant dogs that sniff the butt of the non-dominant a dogs but in this case they're equally dominant probably the most extreme fear which you can get is where the dog rolls over you might get a sprinkle of urine the dog averts his eyes he exposes his belly his tail is tucked in like that this is a dog you know you know don't kill me please don't kill me kind of a response and it's a you know any sort of a threat can cause this and very often with puppies they do it a lot because they're threatened by just about everything which sort of towers over them so they're always sort of rolling on the ground and showing their belly ah the Nobel prize-winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz was one of the people who looked at social signals in dogs and he was one of people who noticed that you know non dominant submissive frightened dogs will tend to roll on their back and then he suggested something which is that if if humans can use could possibly use this to express the fact that they are dominant now I mean I loved Konrad Lorenz --is work and the books which he wrote for general audiences like King Solomon's ring and man meets dog and that sort of they are wonderful things even to to read but he was wrong okay I mean that's the bottom line here the you'll see some people people like Cesar Millan on television who cause of the dog whisperer you know and some other people teaching what's called the alpha role where if you've got you know to express your dominance over the dog you roll them on his back you stand over them making eye contact with a dominant stare and sometimes they say to growl at the dog uh you know it's it's it's based on on an erroneous reading of the situation you know if I walk over to this beautiful lady over here and I put a gun to her head and I say tell me you love me okay what's he going to say I love you okay does she love me no okay it's just that you know she has been forced into that expression into that particular linguistic expression and that's the problem with us I mean the problem with this is you are basically forcing the dog into that position but he's no he doesn't believe it you know yeah you got him on his back this time and furthermore you're making a whole bunch of mistakes first of all you are saying that physical violence is allowable in this relationship so that means if you can physically force this dog into a into a position then the dog can respond with physical violence and he's going to respond first to your kids because you know he's more apt to win that particular fight and sometimes it's just plain dangerous I mean you know Cesar Millan has this this show on the National Geographic Channel in the States and the first time that I saw it I was absolutely astonished because it opens up with do not try this at home excuse me right you know why the hell are you giving advice to people as to what they should do with their dogs and then you but this they do not the reason is you try this with a big enough dog or an aggressive dog you know you're going to get your face chewed off there is a gal on one of our gulf islands I will not identify the island because it only has one dog trainer there and you know we were called in uh as part of one of my shows uh to this woman Jeremy and she's she was 105 pounds maybe you know wearing heavy wet clothing and stood about this high and she had two of the biggest Rottweilers I've ever seen in my entire life the girl was a petite hundred and thirty pounds and the boy was close to 15 pounds higher that bigger than that and he was black as coal I mean he looked like he was Satan's dog over there and this stupid dog trainer was saying roll them on their back and give the Alpha role well excuse me that Rottweiler has a bite strength of something like about six hundred pounds per square inch all right that's enough to crush your bones and you're going to have this little slip of a woman try to roll these dogs over in order to express our dominance it's not the way it works I mean I taught her did you hold a little piece of kibble and then you have dominated the dog okay um one of my favorite positions is this one this is the so called play bow the ears are up the mouth is open notice there's our smile again in this situation the front paws are bent down over there and it's usually accompanied by a sound these are dogs of different ages all doing the same kind of play bell and here's the play bark it's sort of a her rough okay I love giving that one that is a play bag that was a company a play bow by a mastiff which is owned by a doctor out in White Rock this dog weighs 230 pounds and plays with 25 found rocks the way that my dogs play with tennis balls but that that's his play bark so house I come from the bowels of hell doesn't it anyway in don't play it can get pretty rough I mean the same way it is with kids and so what happens over here is that every now and then you know they get excited they do something which could be interpreted to be aggressive they will go back into a play though enough to say oops is he kicked out of hand look we're just rigid teach it's just fun you know okay and so they will sort of begin to back off and that kind of thing I love fish this is a part of the wider why project this wolf found himself discovered by this is rather unhappy bison so he tried to defuse the situation with a little play bell it didn't work charging is is a dominant threat remember I pointed out to you that one of the things which he the border collie does is he runs that the the animals in order to move them alone so this is a dominance charge this is one which is is is much stronger because the mouth is open and clearly showing and this one you just don't want to mess with okay in play the dogs charge it's part of the game but they will keep that smile on their face okay so you'll get that I mean I I find it difficult to see how they're breathing over there but they make sure that that tongue is out over the front teeth to indicate that in fact even though they're running at you this is all in play our dogs will respond to human beings doing this sort of thing so you can very often get your dose do a play bell uh with my arthritis and my old age and that sort of thing if I got down like that I need a crane to pick me up but you can sometimes get the same effect by just sort of bending down and sort of slapping your your forearms against your knees and my dogs will do play Bal and then they'll take a bark and rush off in some direction for me to chase them highly unlikely but what about tail wagging you know well the first thing is there's a lot of myths about this a dog who's wagging his tail is not necessarily happy or friendly or approachable and he's not necessarily non-dominant he is also not necessarily a dog that will not bite tell waggy is communication and you must understand that dogs will wag their tail to anything which they think might be alive I mean it could be another dog you'd be a but if it could be a you know a bunny you know flooding across leaf the floor okay I know wag your tail said it but it is communication so you know suppose that that I have a hungry dog and I put some bowl of food down in front of him well he's going to wag his tail that's communication okay however we have the same situation same food same hungry dog and now however we're going to remove ourselves that were just going to leave a camera there and the dog might give a little excitement tremor to his tail but he's not going to wag his tail why because this communication it happen to communicate with I mean do you walk into a room and say hello walls I haven't seen you for a while good to see you ceiling yep still there you know no we don't do that up so uh he'll still eat the food but you're not going to get those sort of tail wags tails measure to aspects of the emotional or social thermometer the rate of tail wagging measures the excitement so rapid means that the dogs are aroused and excited and slowly means that they're depressed or lethargic and that sort of thing whereas the height of the tail which we already mentioned before indicates the dogs dominance status so a dog with his tail up in the air wagging like that is a dog which is basically saying I'm boss here back off give me space it drives me bloody crazy you know I see a mother this dog is giving this clear response say I left here you know he's good friendly dog fell over in Paden you know the kid rushes over like this to pet the dog and the dog base an air snap in their direction over there and and the woman is astonished you know well well the dog snapped at my child without any warning what the hell do you think that was you know it always virtually shouting you know back off give me space ah is there anything equivalent to happy tail wagging yeah it's that sort of tail way where the tail is held moderately low and it swings back and forth and seems to drag the hips with it and the rate is usually moderate to fast and that sort of thing but it's really a submissive signal I call it my fearless leader tail wag okay because it basically is a dog who say you are my fearless leader and you will take care of me and you will not hurt me and so on and so forth okay uh yeah I mean the dog is obviously not a threat and he's glad to see you and that sort of thing but he's also saying you know your boss there are status issues you know dogs have the mental ability of a young child actually about a human two-year-old and the super dogs the dogs in top 20% maybe a human two and a half year old however they have the social consciousness of concerns of a human teenager so they're worried about status who's moving up in the pack who's sleeping with who and that sort of thing um and for dogs the signals show up in a number of different ways literally the dog who is on top is the top dog okay so a Adamo dog will stand over another dog to indicate that it's you know his that he's in charge here a much more subtle signal which you see is when a dog will come and put its head over the shoulders of another dog and that again is a sign of dominance and you can also pick it up from other cues over here I mean he's got the dominant health thing he's considerably lower a much more subtle version of this is placing a paw you know you usually place it on your knee or or that sort of thing and this is a dog trying to display dominance I mean had dog comes over and he puts his paw on your knee and you look in those eyes and you see little buddy cute duck and you know the folks basically say I'm boss around here give me something to eat and you say you're so cute you give them something to eat he figures yeah I would know I just won this um sometimes you get two dogs and they're both trying to show these dominance and difference into these rearing matches it's really I mean very often there's no growly or anything but it does look like you know WWF wrestling as each of them tries to get on top um and but this this rearing behavior is one of the reasons why some people actually make problems for their dogs if people are not very secure about their dog they see another dog coming they tug on the leash to you know to bring it or close to them but that does what that raises the dogs front legs so that other dog who just sort of won't go to look what the hell are you doing why are you doing this dominance challenge right and so what will tend to happen under those circumstances is the other dog might in fact respond sometimes aggressively of dogs however do not seem to care about you know young two footed creatures who tend to jump on top of them and that sort of thing they should be really quite tolerant of our kids and that sort of thing they don't read those as being dominance displays I had this woman who was very concerned that her dog was homosexual because he was mounting male dogs and that's what and if that has nothing to do with sex okay a dog amount another dog females will mount other animals just to express social dominance so dogs mount just about anything they want to express dominance do and so what is this dog say it's the same thing as the paw and you kind of a thing a lot of behaviors which we engage in where we allow the dogs basically sleep on top of us or that sort of thing are actually sending the wrong message to the dog because it's basically saying that we're accepting their dominance um it's very important for dogs to to be able to calm things down because they're pack animals and if there's any conflict animals can be hurt and and this reduces the efficiency of the pack so there are a lot of signals which we which are used by dogs to sort of bring the the challenge level down and we usually refer to these as calming signals so part of it is you know you can sort of you can anticipate some of them I mean if a direct stare is a threat so you don't stare you look away so these two dogs I mean they're they're seriously trying not to make eye contact and sort of thing in these sorts of things these are in early in obedience classes I think dogs do this a lot in some cases dogs actually closes eyes and sometimes you'll get that body curl so that you get that sort of that submissive body curl put the closed slitted eyes as he tries to look away a variation of that that submissive lick is is also the sort of nose lick so that the dog is basically saying you know I'm not a threat and you you tend to get that quite a bit again in puppies more often in others yawning remember was a sign of stress so you can sometimes use that to say to a dog that you are not a stress stress part a threat blaa blaa blaa so that's what this dog is doing and you know we instruct people that sometimes it's useful to just yawn if the the dog seems to be challenging they will take that as a submissive gesture we also use the sit a lot because a dog who is sitting is not a threat but he's also not afraid he's not lowering himself so most dogs will you know you can get your dog if your dog is reasonably stable to sit even when he's being threatened by another dog because they'll accept that you know you're not saying that I'm some sort of wimp cause it's it over here and the other dogs will take that as non-threatening and but also non fearful so they tend to leave them alone um very often what you find is that adult dogs when they approach puppies if the puppies respond at all fearfully they will immediately sit they stop their approach they just sit and they allow the puppy to then come and approach them and this is basically saying look I'm not a threat it's all you know it's all okay kind of thing uh there's something else this is not like a human sort of a thing but in the face of threats sometimes dogs do things which look absolutely bizarre this dog is running toward you over there showing a dishonest thing and the other dog the dog who's being challenged suddenly stops and starts sniffing at the ground or pawing at the ground and that sort of thing so you can see you begin to wonder what's going on over here these guys are approaching with great threat and this guy's oh yeah well look there's something interesting over here and that sort of lack of concern is also a lack of threat and it's read that way and these guys will slow up and then they'll come over and they'll sniff at the same place so when you got here shortly now it is really important okay we've talked about the body postures between the main body postures in terms of dogs have you ever wondered why dogs and cats you know don't get along well part of the reason is because because of miscommunication dogs and cats tend to use exactly the same signals but very often with very different meanings some tact facial signals are very similar to those of dogs so there's our relaxed cat and there's our fearful cat does he get the same sort of slitting in the eyes and same elongation of the mouth however there are some postures which are quite different an attentive cat opens his eyes very wide and tends to hold his ear slightly forward and that that's your typical kind of a thing and dogs can easily misinterpret that as a dominant challenge some signals are very ambiguous to dogs for a cat they when they're about to attack something they develop what I call for my kids you know airplane ears they take their ears and they bend their ears forward to sort of form this thing like airplane wings and in fact in a wild this is used as as a definite communication so some wild cats like Lynx is in on and that sort of thing will have special markings on the back of their ears which only show at this time when they're basically saying you know don't push me charlie kind of a thing so that turned ear is in fact a threat but of course to a dog that looks much more submissive another thing is that for a cat the most friendly gesture that he can make is this very high tail carriage and it's usually associated with the cat then coming over and rubbing himself against you and that sort of thing but that's easily seen as a dominance challenge by dogs so you know the cats trying to be friendly and the dog says hey well you're trying to push me around and snaps at it and that cats never going to trust another go of as long as he lives on the other hand an aggressive cat is going to carry us to ello and that's similar to the two the insecure dog kind of a signal so the dog thinks it's safe and he comes over and he gets a face full of you know fangs and claws and the cat tends to wag its tail mostly when it's stalking or when it is giving a signal a danger and aggressive signal which of course for dogs is a submissive thing so you know the dog comes over the dogs giving this cat is giving what to him as a submissive signal you know he gets several holes in his nose he's never going to you know to trust another cat as long as he lives a cat Roly onto its back is often part of an attack sequence if if their prey is very big they roll over grab the head of their prey with their front paws and their mouth and then use a bunny kick to try to disembowel them so a dog sees what it interprets is it's this incredibly passive role comes over to investigate it next thing you know you've got a very unhappy dog who will never trust another cat um when dogs and cats live together however the good news is they learn each other signals uh but they learn the signals for their cat not for the neighbor's cat okay you know they'll say well this stupid animal hasn't learned how to speak doggish okay so you've got a really bad accent so I'll accept it for him but not from that one over there right okay so uh we've only talked about one aspect of language it's just like in human language you know there are many aspects I mean we could talk about a spoken language we can talk about written language we can talk about gestural language and that sort of thing and I've just talked about sort of the body language which dogs use and you know it is in fact you know if you take all the aspects of canine language you can get a really rich pattern of communication about what's going on inside your dog head your dog's head but you know I asked Lassie that first picture which you saw which was Lassie next to a camera well that was last seen number eight also have a picture of Lassie number eight kissing negligence quite lovely I also have a picture of Isabella Rossellini kissing me and you tell me which one impresses your kids and your grandkids more right well um but anyway I asked lassie could she sum this up for me and she said however eloquently your dog may bark or how precisely he may wag his tail he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor thank you all if we had a few minutes left for those would like to remain and have questions to ask I think for were to be available for a few minutes if some questions so please feel free to sit around and aspirin take a lot of material where skin like but like you just thank go to the happy universe for a very engagement talking specialists thank you very much we questions yep couple of questions here secondly how do you read a dog that has no snout like a Pekinese but how do you read a dog that has no snout like a tiki knees okay you want to know how you read a dog who like there's a push faced a pug a peek that sort of thing actually their mouth signals are exactly the same just a little bit more subtle you have to look a little bit better it looks like looking for the signals and the lopped ears so for them I tend to use how much of the gum is exposed it's an easier signal than just how we long gave it the mouth is I've adopted two cats from the BC SPCA as adults and a year apart and they seem to be trying to figure out who is the top cat nobody's getting hurt but in a relationship between two cats is it can they each sort of hold their own or is there going to be one that's always in charge um question here is you know how do you read the dominant signals and cats and determine which one is sort of uh there are a couple of things that use understand between dogs and cats okay the first thing is that the average dog is as bright as a human two-year-old that means to say that he can actually recognize some place in the vicinity of a hundred and sixty-five signs signals sound communicative sounds that sort of thing and the super dog those are the ones in the top twenty percent can recognize in excess of two hundred and fifty and by the way for those of you a linguist will tell you if you've got 500 words and the basic grammar of the present tense you can fake it in a language okay so you know that that's pretty extensive in this on the other hand cats are equivalent to approximately a human 18 month old okay so that they can understand someplace in the vicinity of about 35 to 40 signs signals and that sort of thing and the super cats yes there are super cats if you anybody wants the border collie of cats there's a cat called the Maine cat and he is as bright as a dumb dog and but but it's not your wee little kitty cat over here he's a 23 pound cat I mean that's substantial kind of a thing up so their range of social signals is considerably weaker and that tends to mean that the the dominance relationships which they establish are also much less stable so you can get cat you know you get Felix over here who pushes around tabby okay and uh and Felix also can push around Molly the cat but you get Molly party Felix pushes around tabby and Molly pushes around whatever the third cat is and that third cat can push around Felix okay so they're unstable it's not a nice linear kind of a thing and it changes a lot okay so it's not quite as stable just want a couple in the back here so we'll come up here hi I have a doctor seems I can tell Tom even during this summer we set back the clock somehow he can recognize it and he seemed sorry I didn't catch it so we can tell time oh yeah dogs I mean dogs arrest what you know look at you the wristwatch over there and say excuse me I only read digital or something like dogs do reacted to long periods of time but they're responding to what's going on around them so changes in traffic which occur at different times of the day changes in light levels it's very very common that right after shift in daylight saving time that a dog is sort of you know saying hey wait a minute aren't you supposed to have fed me an hour ago kind of a thing so they're really responding to sort of the activities around it's not that they're responding time per se um you mentioned that forcing a dog into submission isn't the best way to do it and we have a fairly large dog and have also noticed that doing anything by force isn't the way to make them learn who's more dominant but I mean you mentioned kibble or treats obviously is the best way to be dumb and over your dog but would you have a suggestion for especially for larger dogs without physical force how you start to express like we're the dominant ones and you're not yeah people have to understand that you know I met Konrad Lorenz okay he was a dear man right he was very German and Germans basically believe that there is a hierarchy okay and and if you know if you can't negotiate with the French then conquer France okay I mean that's sort of the way the game plays and it forgot that the individual who controls the resources is the dominant individual of what are the resources which your dog needs to live well the dog needs basically a safe secure place to be and food okay a little bit of food focuses a dog's mind and if you set up a situation where you know this is the way the way that we solve a you know dog people aggression problems is the dog's food bowl disappears he's not going to see that maybe for six months or a year every single piece of food which he gets every single piece of kibble is going to come from your hand or from somebody's hand okay but only after the dog responds to a command so it's lassie sick people two steps back lassie come Hipple lassie sit people Lassie down kibble okay what are we doing in this case we are setting up a pattern in that dog's mind that you control the resources which their life depends upon and they respond and they maintain their life how by listening to what you do or you want and doing what you want you might not like the current prime minister okay but you're not going to bite them okay because he controls a whole lot of resources which impact your life and so what you end up doing is establishing a way of thinking you don't need you know a big bat and you don't need a loud voice we teach kids you know little eight-year-olds who way maybe 45 to 65 pounds and we have them training Rottweilers which weigh a hundred and ten pounds without any problem whatsoever because if the kid has the ultimate weapon he's got that piece of food in his mouth and he takes that piece of food and the dog says sir okay and and that's the way you play it I it is it is a severe deficit in my own thinking okay I do not like force I do not like force in the relationships that we have with our animals it changes the dynamic it says things which I don't want if I am harsh to a dog and I can get away with it because I'm bigger than he is and that sort of thing one of my two-year-old grandchildren is not bigger than him so the dog has learned that harshness is allowed so my kid is going to get chewed I just don't even like to introduce that stuff into the equation if you don't introduce it into the equation it disappears for the dog's brain and that's the way I handle aggression ok let's take one more and then it will you had a question then we'll see if others may be just okay later yeah a murmuring one regarding dogs with likes a crop tails and regular dogs with normal tails do they have communication issues because I have a dog with a regular tail and it seemed like she would get confrontational with other dogs that approach and it seemed to happen more often with dogs or cropped tails but it could have been the breeds because they gonna be bigger dogs so the issue is if the dog does not have a good prominent tail it's one of the things which I don't like about cropping or docking dogs tails is it does limit the communication ability I'll give you an example it's one that I've written about elsewhere we knew a Labrador Retriever very nice lab and got along very well with dogs in sort of dog park kind of situations and then out on a hiking trip the dog you know got into trouble and damaged his tail and it had to be amputated so that it was you know only a little stump of about three or four inches left and after that the dog got into many more conflicts in the dog park simply because the signals were less clear so yes I mean the dogs with less prominent tails it's the same thing you know uh you know we do this for fashion and a drug you know this sort of thing drives me crazy I mean I had one young girl in one of my classes this year who had three studs in her tongue and he talked like this okay and and you know it was done for fashion and it's limiting her communication and you know is the same thing if we dock the dogs tails and you want me to understand you dear take it one or two of the studs out all right take one that one more you were going to take for that side you know devoted to him don't ever when dogs are engaging in dominance conflicts and we had somebody who had to Akitas in Kita's our big Japanese dogs which were designed originally for it as bar dogs and that's really another used in dog fights in Japan but anyway they uh they had to Akitas and they were quite edgy in that sort of thing and these are people who could not stand the the the interactions and they kept separating the dogs and not letting the dogs solve the problem and eventually one day they were out in the back and they tied one dog to a tree and the other dog killed it and the reason is because they never had a chance to work it out if dogs have a battle the battle normally lasts for maybe 30 seconds maybe a minute and somebody gets a hole punched in their ear and that bleeds like hell you know it's all over the place but then they don't do anything you know you've solved the problem for two three four years and in that sort of situation so I mean the bottom line is especially in the early interactions you don't interfere but if you've been interfering already then you've got more of a problem and the problem is usually worse if you're dealing with female globe's that if you're dealing with with with male dogs you know a female dog is called a and and and they are okay that's about the best way to put it male dogs if they've been prevented from working things out and they finally get an opportunity to work things out will solve the problem it might you know the battle might go a bit longer than it would go otherwise it might go two minutes or three minutes and you begin to start to worry am I going to have pieces of dog all over the place but they'll resolve it and that's the end of the thing female dogs if they have been prevented from working out their dominance relationships will very often fight to the death so you you let them work it out okay I mean yes it you know it seems bothersome in the beginning but you just let them work it out and you know if if you really want if you're really worried you're going to rend each other limb from limb you know you take a bucket of water and you dump it over their heads in the middle of it and then they both get very frustrated but at least they don't feel as though you have intervened you know God has intervened we had this local this local really bad rainstorm over here and they'll calm down for you know three four weeks or five weeks and then I'll go back at it again but not with as much intensity so you know you got to learn to sort of you know let them work it out and that's hard because we look at them we say they're our babies they shouldn't be doing that they should be nice and you know I want to stop this but you sometimes you do have to let that evolutionary ball roll to wherever it's rolling all right thank you

Channel: The University of British Columbia

Views: 124,625

Rating: 4.7021275 out of 5

Keywords: IKBLC, animals, dogs, psychology

Id: wqGMCyoG4iA

Length: 78min 17sec (4697 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2010