What Your Dog Actually Thinks About You (This Will Change How You Act)

Here's an uncomfortable truth that the dog world doesn't talk about enough. Most people who own dogs don't actually understand dogs and I'm not saying that to be harsh, I promise. I'm saying it because it matters and I want to help. You can love a dog completely, you can provide for them, walk them every day and still fundamentally misread who they are and what they need. I've been working as a canine behaviorist for years and I will tell you that the single biggest skill that separates a good dog owner from a genuinely exceptional one isn't the training methodology they use, it's whether or not they can actually read the animal in front of them. So what I want to do today is break down exactly how you start reading your dog properly because once you have this skill and it is a skill, it can be learned, everything else becomes easier, your training improves, your relationship improves and honestly your dog's welfare improves. So let's get into it. The first thing I want you to understand is the concept of the whole dog. When you're trying to read a dog you cannot look at one thing in isolation. I see people do this all the time, usually with the tail. The tail is wagging, they think the dog is happy, job done. But tail wag tells you almost nothing on its own. A dog can wag its tail and be incredibly aroused and on the verge of serious reactivity. A dog can wag its tail and be deeply anxious. The tail is one instrument in an orchestra. You need to hear the whole thing, you need to be taking in the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the posture, the weight distribution and the tail, all of it simultaneously and you need to be reading it in context. Context is everything. The same signal can mean completely different things depending on the situation that the dog is in. Now the second thing I want to talk about is this concept of arousal and this is something I come back to constantly in my work because it is so fundamentally important and so chronically misunderstood. Arousal is not the same thing as happiness. Arousal is just the dog's internal activation level and dogs can become over aroused in positive situations just as easily as they can in threatening ones. In my experience, the dog that owners describe as really excitable or just really loves people are often dogs running at a level of arousal that is genuinely uncomfortable for them. Now take young Reginald, my German Shepherd for example. Reggie's got a kind soul, genuinely one of the softest, most sweetest dogs I've ever had. But when he was younger and that arousal level crept up, his signals would shift. The softness went out of his eyes, he'd start moving differently and if you weren't paying attention, you'd miss it entirely because on the surface he still looked like a happy dog. That's what makes arousal so deceptive. Learn to monitor it, watch for the shift. The moment the dog stops thinking and starts just reacting, that's often a really key indicator. The third thing and this is perhaps the most important point that I'll make today is learn to recognize stress signals before they escalate. Now the dog training world talks about stress signals and calming signals and rightly so, but I think the conversation often stays quite surface level. People learn a list of signals, yawning, lip licking, whale eyes, ears back and they think that's it. But what I want you to do is go deeper than that. I want you to start recognizing your dog's personal stress profile because every dog expresses stress slightly differently. Take my two dogs as an example. Uncle Sully is an incredibly driven, working line Labrador. All dogs can display stress signals but he is the type of temperament, the kind of breed, the kind of characteristics that he's almost incredibly stoic. His stress signals are there but they're very, very subtle and if we didn't have such an intrinsic bond, a great relationship where we can read each other, it'd be really easy to miss situations that he might be finding a little bit uncomfortable. My German Shepherd, young Reginald on the other hand, is kind of the polar opposite. There is no missing when he's uncomfortable. He gets fidgety, he gets a bit nervous, his body language signals stress incredibly easy, the ears go back, the tail will tuck. He'll start trying to offer appeasement gestures and appeasement behaviors to try and guess what it is that's expected of him in that moment, regardless of what it is that's kind of creating him to feel slightly uncomfortable. Makes it really easy for me to recognize and then makes it really easily easy for me to understand I need to step in and help him navigate this situation effectively. But the key point is that both of those dogs with the same owner display those things completely differently and it's important that you work out what your dog's stress profile is so that you can be as in tune with it with your dogs as I am with mine. Now I cover topics like this in significant detail inside my completely free canine companion course. I'll put the link in the description box below because I think it is genuinely one of those foundational skills that every owner needs before they worry about anything else. Training, recall, loose lead walking, all of it is built on whether or not you actually understand your dog and the dog that you're working with. Now the fourth thing I want to address is what I call the politeness signals and I think these are ones owners most consistently miss. Dogs are extraordinarily polite animals in a lot of ways, contrary to what a lot of people think. They do not want conflict, they go out their way to communicate discomfort before it ever reaches a genuine level of concern or escalation. A dog that looks away when you lean over them, that turns their body slightly, that does a slow blink or yawns as you approach, that dog is being incredibly communicative and actually very very polite. They're saying I'm not entirely comfortable right now and the response that most people give because they don't have that language is to continue doing exactly what they're doing that's creating that uncomfort. What does that teach the dog? It teaches them that those subtle signals don't work so they escalate and then suddenly you've got a dog that growls or snaps and the owner says it came out of nowhere. It never came out of nowhere, we just weren't listening or didn't know how to. The fifth thing I'll leave you with is this, start practicing observation as a daily habit. Not training, just watching. Spending 10 minutes a day doing nothing except watching your dog move through their environment. Watch them interact with other dogs, watch them when a stranger approaches, watch them when they're settled at home. You will start to see patterns, you will start to build an understanding of the individual animal that is completely unique to you and your dog and that understanding, that fluency in your dog's language is worth more than any training technique that I could ever show you because it means you can meet your dog where they actually are, not where you assume them to be. Look I've been doing this a long time as a canine behaviorist and the owners who see the most remarkable transformation in their dogs are almost never the ones who found the perfect training method or the perfect tools. They're the ones who learn to truly see their dog, read their dog, that's where it starts, it's where it always starts. So if you found this useful and you want to go deeper on understanding your dog, make sure you subscribe. We put out videos like this every single week that go into this kind of detail and again if you want to go deeper there's a completely free course in the description box below that you can check out right now.