And yet again, the Terrierman has me thinking – and this time I might actually have something to add to the musings of he and his emailer.
The post, in part, read as such:
I was bird-dogged to Heather's post just moments after responding to an email asking me whether I thought there was some genetic slippage in dogs as far as dog-to-dog communication was concerned. So many show dogs seemed somewhat infantilized in their behavior, while the working dogs were generally more serious and self-purposed. Could this be a genetic issue? Were modern dogs losing their ability to communicate as natural dogs?
Click here to read the rest of the post, and to get yet another link to a great photo series called Not Your Stick!
I found two different questions in his paragraph:
a) Are modern dogs losing their ability to communicate with other dogs?
b) Is there a difference between the behavior of “show dogs” and “working dogs”?
I will tackle each in different blog posts and try not to bore the hell out of you.
Are modern dogs losing their ability to communicate with other dogs?
In my opinion, absolutely not! They are born with a set of communication skills that are nurtured by their mother, reinforced by their siblings, and further honed by other healthy and functioning pack members.
It is one of the reasons I refuse to separate my older dogs from my puppies – I believe puppies need to know other pack members that may be caring for them in the absence of their mothers, and they also need the other pack members to learn and develop into themselves. A quick note here – not all dogs love puppies! I just happen to have a couple of males and another female who think OMGBABIES and that it is their job to clean up after them when they are tiny and teach them the finer points of tug-o-war and wrasslin’ when they are a bit older. I’ve also had a female who would rather kill a pack of puppies that were not her own rather than look at them. But I digress…
I believe that the decline in the ability of dogs to communicate with other dogs comes when a puppy is placed in a home where the owners are not dog savvy. Imagine if you will speaking English all of your life, and then you are dropped in a home where everyone speaks Greek, and any time you try to speak English, unless it is cute, is punished. Puppies are obtained the same way - without any knowledge of how a dog communicates, and for some reason, the older humans in the house expect the dog to be perfect. Cats and children can ignore the ‘pack leaders,’ but dogs that do the same are somehow defective. A dog that growls at a child because the child continues to ignore the dog’s body language that says “back off” is, in most situations, immediately branded a BAD DOG because the dog is just doing what it does best – communicates in doggie language.
Instead of learning dog language, we expect the dog to learn and know ours. Any expression of dog language that is ‘threatening’ to humans, i.e. a raised lip, a growl, hackles up, is immediately discouraged and the dog is punished.
I refer you back to the Not Your Stick game. How many humans would believe that Cole is being ‘selfish’? I daresay that many humans would interfere and become a referee to the game when none is needed. Cole is simply teaching Ernie the rules of his farm. If you want to stay here and be part of the pack, then you need to follow my rules – even if to an outsider they seem arbitrary and unfair. Eventually the older dog relented and Ernie was allowed to have a stick of his own – the game became That’s Your Stick (and the rest are still mine). We have the same sort of games in the Rat Pack – These Are My Toys, That Is Not Your Kitty (played solely by Rodear who will eat anyone who dares mess with HER white cat), This Is My Blanket, That Is Not Appropriate, etc. etc. and mostly by my alpha dog.
I believe that dogs are not losing their ability to communicate in dog language – I believe that humans are interfering with dogs to the point of dogs shutting down their natural instincts for the sake of harmony (okay, for the sake of saving their own hide!).
Dog parks are an excellent example of what happens when humans interfere with doggie language. I cannot take my pack of dogs to the dog park – why? It is chaos to the nth degree. My dogs go crazy because no one there is “behaving” like a pack animal should. All the manic running of several unexercised dogs whose doggie manners have been interfered with so much that they wouldn’t be able to function within a normal pack makes my dogs crazy – the “we need to remove these dogs from the gene pool because they are all psychotic” kind of crazy. The last time I went to a dog park I went with the Princess Lola, who spent her time glued to my side at a sit and just observing – it was all too much for her and her sense of propriety. A large husky mix decided she needed play (or something) and he came running over, skidded to a halt, and then stood over her, staring down at her. Lola took offense to this affront, and bit him. The owner came running over to see what happened and chastised me for bringing a “vicious” dog to the dog park. I didn’t even attempt to explain to this woman that her dog was the one being rude! It is the last time we went because the Dog Park version of unsocialized is WAY too different than mine.
Many years later I started watching Cesar Milan and how his pack had fun and socialized, and how the same maniacal dog-park style dogs coming into his pack didn’t know how to react or even ‘talk’ to the other dogs. There were several reasons for this – they had been treated as humans in their home, their owners did not know how to be a pack leader and therefore their dogs never learned what submission to authority meant, the dogs were completely spoiled and used to getting their way all of the time, and/or the dogs weren’t exercised enough so eventually their energy abundance turned off any level of the doggie version of rationalization they had. The great part about the stories on his show is that eventually the dogs are able to tap into their doggieness and remember how to speak the language of the pack – and they are always the happier for it – the mother tongue comes back and all can be right with their world again.
The above is one of the reasons I send puppy buyers and rescue dogs to their homes with at least two books – one being Cesar’s book How to Raise the Perfect Dog as well as the book The Other End of the Leash by Patricia McConnell. The two books offer incredible insight to the world of dog language, and I really appreciate how Ms. McConnell reminds us that really, we are apes and acting the ape around a wolf’s descendent is somewhat ridiculous – and I remind myself of that every time I try to get my dogs to try something new, or move this way or that way – or simply to just BEHAVE!
The post, in part, read as such:
I was bird-dogged to Heather's post just moments after responding to an email asking me whether I thought there was some genetic slippage in dogs as far as dog-to-dog communication was concerned. So many show dogs seemed somewhat infantilized in their behavior, while the working dogs were generally more serious and self-purposed. Could this be a genetic issue? Were modern dogs losing their ability to communicate as natural dogs?
Click here to read the rest of the post, and to get yet another link to a great photo series called Not Your Stick!
I found two different questions in his paragraph:
a) Are modern dogs losing their ability to communicate with other dogs?
b) Is there a difference between the behavior of “show dogs” and “working dogs”?
I will tackle each in different blog posts and try not to bore the hell out of you.
Are modern dogs losing their ability to communicate with other dogs?
In my opinion, absolutely not! They are born with a set of communication skills that are nurtured by their mother, reinforced by their siblings, and further honed by other healthy and functioning pack members.
It is one of the reasons I refuse to separate my older dogs from my puppies – I believe puppies need to know other pack members that may be caring for them in the absence of their mothers, and they also need the other pack members to learn and develop into themselves. A quick note here – not all dogs love puppies! I just happen to have a couple of males and another female who think OMGBABIES and that it is their job to clean up after them when they are tiny and teach them the finer points of tug-o-war and wrasslin’ when they are a bit older. I’ve also had a female who would rather kill a pack of puppies that were not her own rather than look at them. But I digress…
I believe that the decline in the ability of dogs to communicate with other dogs comes when a puppy is placed in a home where the owners are not dog savvy. Imagine if you will speaking English all of your life, and then you are dropped in a home where everyone speaks Greek, and any time you try to speak English, unless it is cute, is punished. Puppies are obtained the same way - without any knowledge of how a dog communicates, and for some reason, the older humans in the house expect the dog to be perfect. Cats and children can ignore the ‘pack leaders,’ but dogs that do the same are somehow defective. A dog that growls at a child because the child continues to ignore the dog’s body language that says “back off” is, in most situations, immediately branded a BAD DOG because the dog is just doing what it does best – communicates in doggie language.
Instead of learning dog language, we expect the dog to learn and know ours. Any expression of dog language that is ‘threatening’ to humans, i.e. a raised lip, a growl, hackles up, is immediately discouraged and the dog is punished.
I refer you back to the Not Your Stick game. How many humans would believe that Cole is being ‘selfish’? I daresay that many humans would interfere and become a referee to the game when none is needed. Cole is simply teaching Ernie the rules of his farm. If you want to stay here and be part of the pack, then you need to follow my rules – even if to an outsider they seem arbitrary and unfair. Eventually the older dog relented and Ernie was allowed to have a stick of his own – the game became That’s Your Stick (and the rest are still mine). We have the same sort of games in the Rat Pack – These Are My Toys, That Is Not Your Kitty (played solely by Rodear who will eat anyone who dares mess with HER white cat), This Is My Blanket, That Is Not Appropriate, etc. etc. and mostly by my alpha dog.
I believe that dogs are not losing their ability to communicate in dog language – I believe that humans are interfering with dogs to the point of dogs shutting down their natural instincts for the sake of harmony (okay, for the sake of saving their own hide!).
Dog parks are an excellent example of what happens when humans interfere with doggie language. I cannot take my pack of dogs to the dog park – why? It is chaos to the nth degree. My dogs go crazy because no one there is “behaving” like a pack animal should. All the manic running of several unexercised dogs whose doggie manners have been interfered with so much that they wouldn’t be able to function within a normal pack makes my dogs crazy – the “we need to remove these dogs from the gene pool because they are all psychotic” kind of crazy. The last time I went to a dog park I went with the Princess Lola, who spent her time glued to my side at a sit and just observing – it was all too much for her and her sense of propriety. A large husky mix decided she needed play (or something) and he came running over, skidded to a halt, and then stood over her, staring down at her. Lola took offense to this affront, and bit him. The owner came running over to see what happened and chastised me for bringing a “vicious” dog to the dog park. I didn’t even attempt to explain to this woman that her dog was the one being rude! It is the last time we went because the Dog Park version of unsocialized is WAY too different than mine.
Rats on the Run
Many years later I started watching Cesar Milan and how his pack had fun and socialized, and how the same maniacal dog-park style dogs coming into his pack didn’t know how to react or even ‘talk’ to the other dogs. There were several reasons for this – they had been treated as humans in their home, their owners did not know how to be a pack leader and therefore their dogs never learned what submission to authority meant, the dogs were completely spoiled and used to getting their way all of the time, and/or the dogs weren’t exercised enough so eventually their energy abundance turned off any level of the doggie version of rationalization they had. The great part about the stories on his show is that eventually the dogs are able to tap into their doggieness and remember how to speak the language of the pack – and they are always the happier for it – the mother tongue comes back and all can be right with their world again.
Tired Rat Terriers are happy Rat Terriers!
The above is one of the reasons I send puppy buyers and rescue dogs to their homes with at least two books – one being Cesar’s book How to Raise the Perfect Dog as well as the book The Other End of the Leash by Patricia McConnell. The two books offer incredible insight to the world of dog language, and I really appreciate how Ms. McConnell reminds us that really, we are apes and acting the ape around a wolf’s descendent is somewhat ridiculous – and I remind myself of that every time I try to get my dogs to try something new, or move this way or that way – or simply to just BEHAVE!
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