Understanding Canine Facial Expressions and Body Postures
This article offers tips to understanding the facial expressions and body language of dogs especially those that indicate that the dog is anxious or uncomfortable.
Filter by Category: Canine Body Language
Dog Body Language 101
Animals speak all of the time, as spoken through their body language, but many times their messages are misunderstood or go unheard. As a result, a dog may be placed in a situation or interaction where they’re uncomfortable, but if polite requests for help or requests for space go unheard, their body language and behavior may escalate to a louder shout (think: lunge or growl) to get others to listen.
Human Perception of Fear in Dogs Varies According to Experience with Dogs
To investigate the role of experience in humans’ perception of emotion using canine visual signals, we asked adults with various levels of dog experience to interpret the emotions of dogs displayed in videos. The video stimuli had been pre-categorized by an expert panel of dog behavior professionals as showing examples of happy or fearful dog behavior. In a sample of 2,163 participants, the level of dog experience strongly predicted identification of fearful, but not of happy, emotional examples.
On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals
With On Talking Terms With Dogs you can learn to recognize these signals and use them yourself to interact with your dog. Norwegian dog trainer and behaviorist Turid Rugaas has made it her life work to study canine social interaction. She coined the phrase calming signals to describe the social skills, sometimes referred to as body language, that dogs use to avoid conflict, invite play, and communicate a wide range of information to other dogs and also humans.
Canine Behavior: A Photo Illustrated Handbook
Reading canine body language is an important part of living and working with dogs. These outstanding photos and detailed explanations will improve dog-reading skills for canine professionals as well as enthusiasts. Bonus! The ebook version is in full color.