Communication between dogs and humans has taken place over tens of thousands of years because we have been living together and we have helped each other in our efforts to survive. Over that long time we have learned to correctly interpret each other’s communication signals, and so it is of greate interest to know how do dogs socialize.
By understanding something of how a dog feels we can respond more appropriately when we have a dog that has missed critical socialization in its puppyhood. And we can communicate better when it comes time for training.
Dogs can communicate confidence, alertness, or threat by increasing their body size, pulling themselves up to their full height, and increasing the tension of the body muscles.
A well known example of communication using the body is when the fur around the neck and along the back bristles and sticks out. This happens when the dog feels fear, surprise and when it needs to communicate aggression and stress and also makes the dog look bigger.
On the other hand, dogs make themselves seem smaller to other dogs and humans by lowering their body and their tail and flattening back their ears to avoid conflicts or during stressful interactions.
How Do Dogs Socialize – A Tale of Tall Tails
The tail helps to communicate a dog’s inner state. It is held high to communicate confidence, arousal, or the dog’s willingness to positively approach another individual, for example greeting and playing , whie it is held stiff to express a threat or the individual’s anxiety.
Although dogs often use the same signals for human communication as for dog–to-dog communication, these signals can mean something different (for example, direct eye contact with humans).
We have to remember that not all the signals that a dog makes are under its voluntary control. When a dog experiences an emotional state, for example anxiety, it releases a specific body odour into the environment. This odour may not even be detectable by a human.
But even though it is involuntary, this odour signal is received as a communicative signal by another dog because it informs them about the sender’s inner state and it can produce changes in the receiver’s behaviour.
A tail held low or tucked between the limbs signals fear, anxiety, or trying to please – here, it helps to decrease the individual’s body size.
As everyone knows, dogs wag their tails loosely from side to side to communicate friendliness or their excitability.
Fast movements of the tail, on the other hand, express different inner states according to its position: a tail held high communicates confidence, a low wagging is generally associated with anxiousness and nervousness.
There is now evidence that the direction of tail wagging movements is also directly involved in dog-to-dog communication. For example, when dogs look at their owner or someone else they have positive feeling towards, their tail moves more towards the right side.
On the other hand, when dogs look at something that has bad emotional associations, ( for example, an unfamiliar dog with a clear confrontational behaviour), a tail wagging more to the left appears.
Dogs seem to be able to detect these tail-wagging details and what they mean, and so they can deduce the emotional state of other dogs.
At close range, dogs can also obtain and deliver information about their inner state through their facial expression, modifying gaze, ears, and mouth position. Recent research has discovered that dogs produce facial expressions as an active attempt to communicate with others.
Dogs usually stare at other individuals to threaten them, while they avoid making eye contact to be pand to decrease the tension during an interaction.
Dogs can use their eyes in a way that helps them understand other dogs better. They do this by looking at the whites of their eyes and by evaluating how willing the other dog is to make eye contact. This allows them to get information about the other dog’s intentions.
The Ear Language of Dogs
Dogs can pull their ears back in a number of ways depending on their emotional state.
It is important to consider breed differences when studying the “relaxed” position, as some dogs have more flexible ears than others. This information can be used to better understand how an animal is feeling.
When a dog is excited or scared, its ears can be pulled back in different ways.
When a it’s feeling scared, its ears can be pulled back, and when really scared, they can be pulled so far that they disappear.
When an animal is excited or interested, their ears may be held slightly forward.
Mouth: the shape of the mouth and the degree it is open which conveys important information about the individual’s aggressive intentions and its stress state
When a dog has a mouth that is open it often can mean it has aggressive intentions and is in a stressful state.
and vice versa: a mouth that is closed often means a less aggressive intention and a less stressful state.
Dogs usually pull back the corners of their mouth (“long lips”) when they are feeling stressed.
The corners of the mouth are drawn forward (“short lips”) in aggressive displays and how much it is open increases according to threat intensity.
Dogs can display other different behaviors to communicate their inner state.
Some of these behaviors include turning their head away from a stimulus, they lift their forehead paw to indicate uncertainty, or they lick their lips to communicate their intention of wanting to please .
Although we can describe all of these different behaviors separately, to understand an individual dog’s emotional state correctly, you need to take into account all of their communication behaviours, as well as their body language and other signals.
All of these behaviours need to be considered when interpreting an individual’s emotional state.
Dog–human communication has received growing interest and research over the past twenty years. In particular, several studies investigating dogs’ comprehension of human visual signals revealed that dogs are tuned into human visual communication. Puppies already show a high sensitivity to human-given cues in an early stage of their development Puppies will naturally follow where the human is looking , body postures , and pointing to find a target location. The gesture of the human seems to be more important for the dog when working out what a human’s thoughts are according to experiments.
Dogs are good at understanding the communicative intent of humans. This is because they can recognize signals that humans make to communicate between each other, which are a common element of human interactions. They are also able to recognize which of these signals are directed to them. This shows a high degree of adaptation to the human social environment.
Eye contact is one of the most important of human communication signals. It is often displayed in a variety of contexts, which makes it a good “request of help”.
Puppies and dogs show a spontaneous tendency to gaze at human faces and make eye contact in many circumstances. For example they do this when trying to do unsolvable tasks or to beg for food from humans. Because this is a fairly constant feature of dog-human communication it has has been interpreted as a “request of help”.
These aspects of the behavior show that humans and dogs look at each other in a way that helps to build a relationship.
This type of communication is beneficial because it helps to create a social bond between humans and dogs.
[1] depends on the contralateral side of the brain [13], left–right directions of tail wagging are consistent with Davidson’s laterality–valence hypothesis about the specialization of the left side of the brain for the control of approaching behavioural responses (right-wag for positive stimulus) and the main role of the right side of the brain for the control of withdrawal responses (left-wag for negative stimulus) [14].
[1] depends on the contralateral side of the brain [13], left–right directions of tail wagging are consistent with Davidson’s laterality–valence hypothesis about the specialization of the left side of the brain for the control of approaching behavioural responses (right-wag for positive stimulus) and the main role of the right side of the brain for the control of withdrawal responses (left-wag for negative stimulus) [14].