Description of the behavior of dogs by experienced & inexperienced people

How people interpret dog behavior has always fascinated me (heck, how *I* interpret dog behavior fascinates me, heh).

A few years ago, I noticed a couple outside a coffee shop allowing two unknown dogs to greet on leash, nose to nose. This is what the two dogs looked like:
– Standing up on tippy-toes
– Stiff body posture
– Ears pulled forward 
– Hackles up on both dogs
– Tails flagging (waving fast, with one dog who had a still lower tail and a fast moving tip) with tail arched as high over back as physically possible (both dogs were 20lb mixed breeds).

Both were about the same size, height and body structure. I noticed that the dog closest to me appeared ready to take on the other dog, he was leaning forward more so than the other dog, was a lot more tense. Because dog fights are scary, nasty things, even if they last for three seconds, I tried to politely tell the couple they might want to distract their dogs, to avoid a fight.

Oh, but they’re wagging their tails. They’re just happily greeting each other!

Plus they gave me nasty looks as if I was trying to disrupt the order of things. No sooner had I shrugged my shoulders and was about to walk past them, the dog closest to me had had enough of the staring contest. He launched his teeth into the other dog. Screaming ensued, chaos! horror! END OF THE WORLD! Both owners tugged at the leashes, separating the dogs to check them over. No bite wounds, no punctures. I am always amazed at how, more often than not, dog fights are more about finding ways to shove and push and convey messages without doing bodily harm. I’ve seen more damage on my dogs after an intense play-wrestle bout.

It highlights how even people with dogs can be insensitive or ignorant of the signals their dogs are trying to convey. We mess things up majorly. We ignore subtle cues, goggle at overt cues as if they came out of nowhere, and we blithely confuse play behaviors with aggressive behaviors with fear behaviors. What I’ve wondered is what kinds of behaviors do people, both dog-savvy and dog-ignorant, easily comprehend and what behaviors do people constantly confuse.

Recently, researchers from Italy and the UK published a study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science entitled “Description of the behavior of domestic dog (Canis familiaris) by experienced and inexperienced people”. This is, by no means, the end-all study on how people perceive dog behavior. It is a jumping point for further research, and the discussion includes all the ways in which this study could be improved upon or if there were possible issues with the results provided.

Regardless, the results are interesting.

The study involved nine taped video sequences between two dogs. Eight dogs* were filmed during their first contact with a “stooge dog”, a mid-age female Border Collie. She was, for all intents and purposes, the “control” dog, although she was used as the “focal” dog in one interaction. The focal dog was always kept stationary, on leash, as the stooge dog approached. Filming occurred in public parks and time of taping started 10 seconds before the Border Collie entered the camera’s frame until the end of the interaction. For the safety of the dogs and owners, aggressive contact interactions (as predicted by the experimenters) were not permitted. Unfortunately, no video was available, which would make reading this study a lot more provocative!

Recordings were then shown to sixty observers who were categorized as dog trainers, veterinarians, dog owners (>2 years) or non-owners (no dog ownership). The viewers saw each video twice, once without sound, once with sound. Subjects were asked to rate the behavior of the focal dog towards the stooge dog. Specifically, they were asked to rate indifference, fearfulness, confidence, friendliness, submissiveness, defensiveness, playfulness, aggression. Observers then had to choose one of the behavioral styles as the primary style and further define what behaviors made them select that particular behavior style.

Indifference, fear, friendliness and play solicitations were easily identified. Actual-play behavior, confidence and aggression were behaviors that people, especially non owners, had a difficult time correctly identifying.

For example, when both dogs were engaged in actual play, only 30% of observers correctly identified the predominant behavior as “playful”. 43% identified it as aggression and 20% as confident behaviors. When viewers were showed a clip of a confident dog, only 38% correctly identified the behavior as confidence, while 43% identified it as friendliness (and the two can very well overlap, as the researchers discuss). What I found interesting is that 38% of people correctly identified aggression while 33% of the viewers, when shown the same clip, identified the behavior as friendliness and 13% as confidence.

90% correctly identified indifference (eye aversion, sniffing, sitting still, positioning body away from stooge dog), 73% correctly identified friendliness, 62% correctly identified play solicitation, 67% correctly identified fear (although 10% identified it as indifference) and 53% correctly identified defensiveness.

The researchers asked people to identify the primary body part they used to measure behavior. 23% used the tail, followed by muzzle-related cues (19%) and large body movements (18%). Tail movement, e.g. tail wagging, was used 75% of the time over position of tail and frequency of tail movement. And generally speaking, tail movement was associated with friendliness and play. Observers strongly associated barking with aggression, including when watching play behavior. People considered growling a more defensive behavior, biting was associated with aggression and play, and showing teeth was mainly described as aggression or defensiveness. Sniffing was generally associated with friendly and confident behaviors. Pulling on the lead tended to be primarily associated with aggression and confidence. Ear position was the least used cue.

When showed the actual play clip, biting, herding, piloerection, standing over/showing teeth were all considered aggressive, while an upright stance and straining at the lead indicated confidence. And when showed the aggression clip, barking, bouncing, ears erected/forward, tail wagging were read as signs of playfulness!

The researchers then discuss some of the limitations of the study (you can purchase the study and read for yourself).

So how do we get non owners and novice dog owners (with little education on behavior) to understand cues better? People still rely on highly generalized behaviors to identify behavior; e.g. a wagging tail indicates a friendly dog; hackles = aggression; barking = dangerous, etc.  I find it a little disconcerting that people (novice dog owners included) mistake aggressive behaviors for friendliness.

For fun, tell me what you see in this pictures:

Pic A (Click for larger, result from “barking dog”)

Photo by: v i p e z

Pic B (click for larger, result from “dog play”)

Photo by Lou Musacchio

 Pic C (click for larger, result from “dog play”)

TimothyJ

 Pic D (click for larger, result from “dog fight”)

tymesynk

Pic E (Should be obvious!)

  mccun934

 * Cross breed, Greyhound, Boxer, Labrador Retriever, Springer Spaniel, German Shepherd, Border Collie, Cross breed

Bad dogs, bad behavior and three people I have on speed dial

by Joanne Brokaw

Bandit, Bailey and Scout

It’s been a wild week here at The Funny Farm. Lots of barking, a little biting and even some blood. That’s because yesterday morning, very early, two of our dogs got into a tussle and while trying to separate them, darling husband was bit.

A friend told me this week that I ought to write about what happened and how we’re dealing with the situation because there are probably other people out there dealing with the same problem.

And if we’re being honest here, other people might have given in a long time ago. I know, because I’ve volunteered at an animal shelter and seen dogs come in and never leave because they’re “bad” or “aggressive” or they’ve “bitten” someone and need to be put down.

So starting tonight, I’ll be blogging every week about our “bad dogs” - or rather, our dogs’ bad behavior – and how we’re dealing with the situation so that other dog owners will realize that they’re not alone, that there are resources available, and that really, they don’t have bad dogs. They just have dogs with normal (and OK, sometimes bad) behavior that needs some redirection.

Understand that I’m not a dog trainer or dog professional. I’m a writer with three dogs, an insatiable curiosity about dog behavior, genetics, and communication, and about 20+ years of experience as a dog owner at all ends of the spectrum – from totally clueless to mildly educated and still learning. I can’t give advice, but I can tell my own stories and track down answers to your questions.

We’ll start with what happened this week.

Darling husband and I had been out for a few hours, gone to pick my mom up at the airport in Buffalo for a flight that arrived at 11 PM. It’s rare that we leave the house together, especially at night, or for that long. In fact, it’s rare that the dogs are really even home alone, since I write from home.  When I’m out, it’s maybe an hour or two running errands.

When we left Sunday night at around 9:30 PM, there was no barking or excitement. We got the dogs settled like normal and then quietly snuck out, leaving the lights and TV on. This may have been our first mistake, and it’s something we’ll talk about in the weeks to come as I learn the proper way to deal with separation anxiety.

When we came home, the dogs were obviously overjoyed to see us. By then it was 2 AM, but they were barking and howling and jumping. We let them outside and I bent down to pet Bandit and Bailey. That was my second mistake; I don’t normally respond to their exuberant welcomes until they’ve calmed down. But it was late, I wanted to quiet them so they didn’t bother the neighbors, and darling husband was with me and he and they have a welcome home routine.

But very quickly – and I mean very, very quickly – I could see that we were about to have a dog fight on our hands.

When I use the phrase “dog fight”, I don’t mean two aggressive dogs fighting to the death. I mean two dogs who normally get along just fine, whose excitement levels have quickly risen into the red zone, who both are after the same thing (in this case, Mommy; one dog was jumping on me, another pulling at my sweater to get my attention) and who lose their minds for a minute amidst their very excited emotions.

In the blink of an eye, Bailey snapped at Bandit, Bandit snapped back, and they were on each other.

When the dogs are play fighting – or as we call it, playing Wrestlemania – we let it go. We’ve learned over the years that growling, wrestling, and even some biting aren’t necessarily fighting. It’s the way dogs play and interact with each other. And we’ll talk about that in the coming weeks, how to tell when it’s play and learn why interfering in play fighting can actually be harmful to the dogs’ relationships.

But this is beyond playing, and we’ve dealt with it before. We’re learning to recognize what triggers it and the best way to defuse the situation. In fact, I was able to see it coming, but I’ve yet to learn what to do in those few seconds before it erupts. So they got into it. I quickly grabbed Bailey’s back end and darling husband reached for the scruff of Bandit’s neck – just as Bailey was going in to grab Bandit.

The whole incident lasted about two seconds, but when it was over Bailey was limping from where I’d grabbed her leg; Bandit had a bare patch of skin on his chest where Bailey had grabbed his fur while we pulled them apart; and darling husband’s finger was bleeding profusely.

Long story short, darling husband required four stitches to close the wound on his finger, and we had to report the incident to our local village animal control officer. Bailey is quarantined in the house for 10 days, and we’ll have to appear in village court to explain what happened. She didn’t mean to bite darling husband or even Bandit; it was just a heat of the moment explosion between two dogs who were stressed and competing for the same thing, one of them a puppy who hasn’t learned impulse control, the other an adolescent who can control himself but had clearly reached his limits at that moment.

Any of this sound familiar to you? Separation anxiety? Dogs with super high energy and excitement? Maybe you’ve even got a biter on your hands? Dogs that wrestle and tussle and growl with each other? This is the stuff we’ll be talking about every week.

For now, I want you to know that what happened between our dogs is not unusual, and it doesn’t mean we have bad dogs. And neither do you.

But I also want you to understand that this is not a situation you handle alone, and that you need to make sure that you have resources in place before you need them so that you’re able to work with your dog – rather than give up.

First thing yesterday morning, I called our regular vet. I wanted to make sure that the wound on Bandit’s chest wasn’t infected, because while it wasn’t bad – it was very much like a rug burn, oozing some blood but no puncture - he was licking it a lot. (The verdict: I had put antibiotic ointment on it, which he promptly licked off. I reapplied it; he licked it off.) We also talked at length about what happened and how we handled the situation and what might have triggered it. We know our vet well, and she knows our animals well, so her advice was definitely helpful.

The second call I made was to our trainer. Yes, we have a regular dog trainer, someone we talk to and take classes from and call when we have questions. She also knows our dogs, and she is very, very good at working with situations like this.  She gave me great advice to handle things right now (like getting the dogs used to an interruption cue, making a list of the things that seem to rile Bailey up, and using a supplement to help calm her down), she let me cry, and then suggested which training class we should get Bailey into, mapping out a long term plan of action that would help us and the dogs learn to manage living together so everyone is happy.

The last person I called was our other vet, a specialist in Chinese herbs and acupuncture. She’s seen Bailey for her hip dysplasia (more about that in a minute) and the herbs Bailey takes are supposed to help “cool” her “heat” and reduce the inflammation in her joints. I wanted to make sure that the doctor didn’t want to make adjustments to the herbs, and that the amino acid our trainer wanted to add wasn’t duplicating or interfering with the herbs. She was completely supportive of the addition to Bailey’s supplements, and wants to follow her progress, too.

And so today, 24 hours later, we’re a little on edge but things are settled down. Bandit and Bailey slept together last night like always. They played together today on those rare moments Bailey was allowed out, and while Bandit is a little wary around her, we’ve got some tools to manage the immediate situation and a plan of action for the long-term.

And after that long story, here’s what I want you to take away:

1) Find a vet and a trainer, both of whom you trust and like. No matter how many dogs you’ve had in your life, every dog will benefit from training and socializing with other dogs and people. That’s because every dog is different, with different needs and different ways he communicates those needs. Just because you understood your last dog doesn’t mean you’ll have a clue what’s going on with your new one. And when there is a problem or a question – and there always will be – you’ll have at hand both a medical professional and a behavior professional familiar with you and your animals.

2) Bad behavior does not equal a bad dog. When Bailey was about four months old, she started snapping at me whenever I tried to pet her any place near the back half of her body. Had I not been mildly savvy about dog behavior, I might have written her off as aggressive. But I realized right away that the snapping and growling was completely inconsistent with her normal temperament. So I talked to the vet, who suggested that when Bailey was spayed they also x-ray her hips. Turns out that in addition to a chronic urinary tract infection that took three months to clear up, Bailey has mild hip dysplasia; touching her back end or legs was probably painful, especially after a day of puppy romping, running and jumping. The shelters are full of dogs like Bailey. Good dogs who don’t know any other way to tell their owners that something hurts, and who end up paying the price for the miscommunication.

3) You are not alone. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’ve screwed up, that everyone else knows something you don’t, or that you’ve got a devil dog on your hands while everyone else’s dogs are so lovely and clean and well-behaved. If talking about my dog problems helps even one owner understand that they can have a better relationship with their dog, or keeps one dog from being dropped off at the shelter because he can’t communicate what he really needs, I’m willing to share all of my mistakes and screw ups.

Besides, those of you who read my column in The Christian Voice Magazine or read my blog, Notes From The Funny Farm, already know my life is an open book and I know some of you breathe a sigh of relief when I admit my failures and faux pas. So let’s open the book and help our dogs, too.

4) It does get better. Believe it or not, much of the behavior that we’re dealing with in Bailey is what we also dealt with in Bandit. Bailey is just a little more fiesty, and we have three dogs with three different personalities to work with now, rather than just two. When I look back at our first year with Bandit, I have to laugh. I spent the months after I brought him home crying and questioning and second guessing my decision to get another dog. Now? I can’t imagine life without him. (And if you want his perspective,  you can read Bandit’s blog, It’s A Dog’s Life.)

So there you go. The first “Bad Dog Files” – I don’t even know if we’ll keep that column title, but it does seem fitting. Next week, we’ll talk about … well, let’s see what happens with Bailey, Bandit and Scout between now and then. But I’d like to start with separation anxiety, since I think that may be at the heart of Bailey’s problems.

In the meantime, if you have a question, email me at contact@barkaroundtown.com.

Dog Behavior Training MN | The Dog Whisper of MN | When Did People lose those sense of Humanity?

Beyond Dog Behavior Training in  Minneapolis, MN | Deeper than Minnesota Based Dog Psychology  | Above Dog Breed Prejudice and MN related BSL.

Know your self, understand your ethical code. Consider what fate lies ahead when people forget, become distracted, neglect the very essence that makes people,  human.

The most Simple concept or idea is often the most difficult to master in practice.

This post was inspired by a wildly popular Pit Bull advocating picture that a good friend of mine, Steve, posted on Facebook today. I put my own words to it.

Accepting and understanding that as a society, we need to allow the truth to saturate our minds, grant your self the opportunity to become open minded by stepping outside the generalized or force fed opinion/idea by an undereducated publics’ mass idea and put to work the God given right of free will. Independent from a cookie cutter belief system. Grant yourself psychological and ethical freedim by utilizing your own personal experiences, rather than relying on someone else to form an opinion for you based on skewed facts, lopsided statistics or a charismatic speech. (media and the news, extremists etc)

Something my dad has spent a lot.of time teaching me and 28 years later, I think it has sunk in, on how to be a man. this is a synopsis of what my dad has been trying to teach me through my immature ways, in my own words. I hope this helps.“Doing the right thing is hard. The wrong thing is easy. If you want to be a good person, don’t half ass it, people will be able to ”

I understood this as, you will earn respect by the hard work you put into being a good person every day.

Peraonal Validation is the seed of taking pride.in your life and clocking in with your morals every day. There is no vacation from this. You do or you don’t. This doesn’t mean you can’t though. Pride in your self is habitual. It involves consistency. Effort, a drive, a chip on your shoulder. This is the sole motivation you need to be who you should be. As a human, a man, a woman, child, dog cat or anything. Ethical behavior transcends logical reasoning, since it seems and is proven, that people can always justify their logic no matter what.  It just happens based on the actions  of your day to day essentially.

One of life’s most challenging objectives is looking beyond self preservation or personal gain. Though, be selfish enough to want to become successful in your life, relationships and goals. At the same time be selfless enough to create a ripple effect into your networks, socially and professionally as this is proven to have that domino effect on your local environment as a whole.

Step up to teach those who don’t understand while being willing to learn when you are unsure.

Below is the Facebook post:

Its an unfortunate reality for America’s general societal belief stews in a prejudice that prevails and allows a biased perception to out weigh truth and the true nature of a certain creature. I hope, as humans, we become better than that. Not.net for Pit Bulls, but all dogs, people, animals and living beings. I hope, one, the fog lifts and perceptions change, allowing us as a species to prevail honorably. I hope. -Robert Cole, The Dog Whisperer of MNFellow human and advocate for animals who walk on 4 legs or two. Not 8 though… No love for spiders….

Robert Cole
The Dog Whisperer of MN

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