One of Jamie’s Rules is “Enjoy little pleasures like a wood fire.” Part of having a closer relationship with your dog is to understand its “little pleasures” and help it experience them. Here’s Jamie enjoying one of her favorite things:

Jamie was also very thoughtful about “where to be.” Sometimes, like Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian Shaman, Jamie would walk around until she found just the right place, and just the right angle, to flop down. She seemed to get great pleasure from experimenting and finding the “perfect” place. Sometimes, it would be to get some fresh air, or to lie on a cool surface on a warm day. Another time, at Lake Arrowhead, it would be to get positioned to watch the squirrels running on our deck. On one very warm day, she plopped herself down in front of a fan to enjoy the cooler air.

Here is one of my favorite photos of Jamie. She’s enjoying “The Pinnacles” a small range of mountains near Lake Arrowhead.

I’ve written about Callie’s “stinky” toy (security object) and how she can spend hours snuggling with it, or gently “gumming” it. But sometimes she brings it to me as a way of initiating play. She will hand it to me (with her mouth) and then we “hand” it back and forth. Sometimes, it becomes a very gently form of tug-of-war, but it always stays very gentle.

Become more aware of your dog’s little pleasures, and help it enjoy them. It will help you build a strong relationship with your pet.

The second of Jamie’s Rules (from “My Doggie Says… Messages from Jamie”), is “Ask for the things you need.” Here are a few of Jamie’s other rules.

Dogs are pretty good at asking for the things they need, but sometimes we have to “listen” pretty hard to get the message. Their messages are usually sent with body language, not verbally, although a loud bark works for some things.

Here’s Callie saying, Please come play soccer with me. The messsage here is not real hard to understand, but it caught me totally by surprise the first time she did this, because she was just eight weeks old, had just arrived at our house, and we had never played soccer before. How did she figure all this out?

Callie, still only eight months old, is learning how to ask for things. One day, for example, as we walked by the big water dish in the kitchen, she dragged me over to it so she could get a huge drink of water. I had to “put two and two together,” but the message was, “I need fresher water in my crate.” She had a water dish in her crate, but she felt that the water in the kitchen was fresher — and it was.

Jamie took “ask for the things you need” to its sublime limits. She had lots of ways of asking if she could stop, on our morning jog, to retrieve a pine cone. Usually, she would just stop by a pine cone and make eye contact. Other times, she would stop and “point” at the pine cone. Either way, the message was pretty clear.

Callie can jump up on our bed, but Jamie had ACL surgery, so she couldn’t jump up. She asked to be lifted up by doing this:

Jamie also became a master at getting people to scratch her in her favorite places. She would snuggle up against a visitor’s leg, for example, inviting an ear scratch. Or she would push her nose into someone’s hand, asking for a nose scratch, or, even better, a chest scratch.

Jamie also got very good at asking to go outside to go pee, or asking for a puppy treat, or for her dinner. All of these were done with body language, so we had to pay attention and learn what she was trying to tell us.

Finally, Jamie was a pretty good “route planner.” She knew all of our jogging trails, including the ones at Lake Arrowhead. Here she is saying, “Let’s go toward the boat dock so I can play with my water “Floppy” (floating frisbee toy).

Anytime your dog does something a little different, you have to stop and think, “Is my dog trying to tell me something?” “Is it asking for something?” What’s the message? To “hear” what your dog is “saying,” you have to become observant. Try putting doggie-two and doggie-two twogether. It’s fun.

I was the speaker at a local event yesterday, and a member of the audience said, “Didn’t you write a book about how to talk to your dog?” (I get this question often.) My answer was, “No, it’s about your dog talking to you!”

It’s important to remember, if you want to have a close relationship with your dog, that relationships — and communication — work two ways. You talk to your dog, and your dog talks to you. The problem is, you and your dog probably speak different languages.

“My Doggie Says… Messages from Jamie” is a collection of photographic (color) examples of the messages my Golden Retriever, Jamie, sent as part of her every-day communication. The point of the book is that, by observation, you can learn to understand your dog’s messages, which are almost always sent by “body language.”

Much of our training (and reading) about how to work with our dogs focuses on teaching them to respond to certain commands, like “sit,” “stay,” “down,” “speak,” etc. Callie (Jamie’s successor) is going through this “puppy kindergarten” training right now (Lomita Obedience Training Club) The focus here is on sending messages to your dog, including using a “clicker” to tell your dog, “A yummie puppy treat is on it’s way!” The clicker reinforces the puppy treat reward for good behavior, and it is becoming an important part of sending messages to your dog. (Here’s a good article on “clicker training.”)

But the other side of communication is learning to listen to what your dog is saying, which really means observing your dog’s behavior and figuring out what messages it might be sending.

Here, from 101-dog-training-tips.com, is a good article on the subject of dog communication and body language. Once you get better at understanding your dog’s body language communication, you will also get better at using your body language to communicate with it.

For example, when your dog or puppie jumps on you, you can try to correct it by yelling “no” or “wrong,” but the “dog body language way” is to either turn away (expressing dissatisfaction) or follow the advice of this article from The How-To Lounge. It suggests grabbing your dog’s front paws and forcing it to stand on it’s hind legs, which it will not like. You release the front paws after a few seconds and say “OFF.”

To have a closer relationship with your dog, make sure you’re speaking (and hearing) it’s language.

For our newer readers, this is a repeat of the introductory post, so you get the flavor of the My Doggie Says… blog. I’m travelling. Back Thursday.

Does your dog talk to you? Can you tell what it’s saying? I spent the last five years photographing my Golden Retriever and capturing some of her body language messages. The result is a book titled My Doggie Says…: Messages from Jamie. How a dog named Jamie talks to her people. The web site for the book is www.mydoggiesays.com. In this blog, I plan to share some of the stories from the book. Also, everywhere I go these days, dog-lovers want to have fun conversations about their dogs and how they “talk” to their owners. So I plan to share some of these stories, too. You will also meet a four-month-old Golden Retriever puppy named Callie (short for Callaway) (short for Woodland’s Callaway Hole-in-One). I will post pictures of Callie as she grows up. One of Callie’s favorite things is to play soccer. I’ll post some pictures of Callie playing soccer in the next few days.

Please share your “dog-talk” stories with me and the other readers. Our pets communicate with us more than a lot of people realize. My Doggie Says… has helped a lot of people become more aware of their pets’ communications skills.

Happy Dog-Talking!

Callie is the first dog we’ve “crate trained.” Here are a few articles on how to crate train a dog: “Crate Training a Puppy or Adult Dog.” “Confinement and Crate Training,” the San Francisco SPCA.

We’ve been very pleased with the results, but we weren’t sure what the “end game” would be. Does Callie have to live in the crate forever? When would she be free to run around the house? Will she want to go back to the crate on her own?

Well, the last two nights answered some of these questions. We decided on Friday night to let Callie sleep on our bed. So we left the crate door open, and, sure enough, she jumped up on the bed and slept on the corner where Jamie used to sleep. Here, from My Doggie Says…, is a picture of Jamie sleeping on our bed:

Callie did just fine, except for bouncing off the walls — and me — for the first two or three minutes. But she settled down and had a good night’s sleep on the bed.

Last night was different. She jumped around for a few minutes and finally settled down on her corner. But, at about midnight, Barbara asked, “Is Callie still on the bed?” I took a look, and she wasn’t. She had jumped off the bed and snuggled up in her crate!

This made me feel really good about the crate. She obviously sees it as “her” place, and she was comfortable sleeping in it, even though she could go anywhere in the bedroom. This also started to make me feel better about the “end game.” So maybe there really will be a time when Callie has the run of the house & yard but will choose to spend some time in her crate because it’s “her home.”

Then, at about 2:00 in the morning, Barbara (asker of all questions), said, “Is Callie still in her crate?” So I checked (being the answerer of some questions) . Callie wasn’t on the bed, and she wasn’t in her crate. She had snuggled by the sliding glass door, with her nose right in the open crack of the door — getting lots of nice fresh night air.

I thought this was wonderful. One of my doggie fascinations is, “How do dogs decide where to be?” One answer is certainly “near nice fresh air.” But this is another topic.

And then, when it was time to get up, we noticed that Callie had moved to the floor by Barbara’s side of the bed. Callie had an adventurous night — starting to sleep on the bed, moving to her crate, then some fresh air and, finally, snuggling up close to Barbara.

Somehow, it all felt really good. It validated some of the crate theory — that she liked it well enough to choose to sleep there for a while. But it was also fun to see her making her own decisions about “where to be.”