A dog’s actions: Bridging the canine communication chasm
My late dog and I didn’t always communicate with each other very well.
When I threw a toy and said, “Fetch,” he’d just look at me with an expression that I assumed meant, “Why should I fetch it, fatso? You’re the one who threw it.”
When he wagged his tail, I thought he was happy to see me. When he rolled over on his back, I figured he wanted a belly rub. When he licked my face, perhaps he was giving me kisses.
But apparently I was wrong about all those assumptions except, maybe, for the fetching part. And, according to experts, the failure to understand each other was mostly my fault.
“Ultimately, dogs understand us better than we understand them,” declared a canine expert in a recent New York Times column. “Over thousands of years of domestication, they’ve become really good at reading our emotions. But I don’t think it’s worked as much in the other direction.”
Take tail-wagging. It could mean the dog’s happy to see you, she conceded, but a lot depends on the wag. If it wags mostly to the left the dog is happy. Mostly to the right, not so much. If the tail goes mostly straight up and down, maybe your dog’s broken.
Rolling on its back could be a dog’s request for a belly rub. Or maybe it just felt like rolling on its back.
Face-licking isn’t necessarily a sign of endearment, although that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve always suspected that when my dog licked my face he was just checking to see how I tasted in case we ever ran out of kibble.
Which is pretty close to the truth, but less unappetizing. According to another expert in the column, “dogs often lick faces because they’re hoping to get a taste of what you recently ate.” This stems from the behavior of young wolves, who lick the inside of their mothers’ mouths so their moms regurgitate food for them. (Which doesn’t fully explain why my dog needed to lick my face to find out what I recently ate. He could have just licked the front of my shirt.)
Although I know a lot more now about what dogs are trying to tell us, I still have two questions: Are dogs loyal, and do they really love us unconditionally?
I’m guessing a dog will be loyal to just about anybody handing out food. And they’ve figured out that, to get free room and board for life, all they need to do is wag their tails once in a while. So they’re actually only pretending to love us.
Although, they probably appreciate us a lot more than cats do.