It’s been well demonstrated that dogs need to know who’s in charge. In a wolf pack situation, there’s an alpha animal. In a family home, the owner needs to be boss. But isn’t there more to owning a dog than getting it to obey?
“My Doggie Says… Messages from Jamie” is sort of a “Rosetta Stone” that can help you learn how to understand some of the messages hidden in your dog’s behavior. Why did Fido do that? What’s he trying to say? If you can learn to “decode” some of these messages, you can have a much more meaningful relationship with your dog.
So what is Dog Listening?
It’s mostly about observing your dog’s behavior and figuring out what it’s trying to tell you. Have you ever seen your dog do something that didn’t make a lot of sense at the time? Sometimes, if you work at it, you can figure out what your dog is saying.
Here’s a recent example. Yesterday, I took Callie on her morning jog by myself, because Barbara had an early meeting. When we reached the road that leads to the golf course parking lot, Callie made a big right turn and started to cross the street into the parking lot.
My first reaction was, “Why in the world did she do that?” But then I realized that Barbara always takes her through the parking lot in order to get out of the street traffic for a while. Duh! Callie was just saying, “Can’t we go this way? This is how Barbara and I usually do it.” Both Callie and Jamie seem to remember every route they ever took, and they are quick to re-trace old paths.
So why care which way Callie wants to go? I think it’s good for a dog to be part of a relationship. Sometimes we do it Callie’s way. Sometimes we do it my way. I don’t see anything wrong with letting her call some of the shots. I think it’s good for her self confidence, and it make our activities more of an interaction than “I command and you obey.” Instead of a master/slave relationship, our relationship becomes more like two friends sharing an experience.
How do you break doggie code? Here are a few tricks.
Your dog’s breeding has a lot to say about what it has to say. Callie’s a golden retriever. If she starts to run toward a stick, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that she’s probably saying, “May I please retrieve that stick?” So keep in mind the things that your dog was bred to do.
There are probably also some things that your dog just likes to do. For example, Callie loves to play soccer in the back yard. So when she sticks her nose through the crack in the sliding glass door to the back yard, it’s easy to see that she’s saying, “Hey, Fred, could we please play a little soccer?”
Another good place to look to break doggie code is the recent past. Dogs are pretty good at remembering things. Barbara’s been letting Callie carry a small rubber baseball on her jog, so when Callie stops in the middle of the street and looks at Barbara’s fanny pack (containing the ball), it’s pretty obvious that Callie is saying, “Could I please carry my ball now?”
Sometimes, you have to stop and think, “What are the possibilities?” My adventure in learning to “listen” to Jamie started with a mysterious “wuuf” in the middle of the night. (A “wuuf” is a special doggie version of “woof.”) I couldn’t imagine what she was trying to say. So I went through a list of alternatives. She didn’t need to go pee, or she would have run to the door. Same thing if she wanted to chase our neighbor’s cats; she would have run to the door.
Finally, I realized that, because of her ACL surgery some months earlier, she couldn’t jump up on our bed any more. So I lifted her up onto the bed, and, sure enough, that’s exactly what she was asking me to do.
Dog Listening can be very rewarding for you and for your dog.
