01/18/2025
Closed mouth can = 🛑 or ⚠️ or ✅ Look to the rest of the face, body, and context to determine if a dog’s closed mouth is an indicator of stress/discomfort, of if they’re just them at their relaxed baseline. The two look very different once you know what to look for.
One helpful indicator that can’t be expressed in photos is when a dog’s mouth CHANGES and goes from panting to closed (and vice versa). Did something just happen that the increased tension could be in response to? We see this a lot when dogs escalate in stress or discomfort—they go from panting to a tight tense mouth. Often this brief moment of increased tension and closed mouth can be the only precursor we see to a snap or bite 😳 So it is well worth paying attention to.
An example: when I used to do behavior evaluations in an animal shelter, we would note when a dog would stop panting and close their mouth during handling/touching. Say a dog would be panting as we ran our hand over their back, and then closed their mouth as we got to their legs and paws. We’d stop at that point because we could tell the subtle signals that the dog was getting uncomfortable and we did not want to push them to a bite. Missing these subtle signals (including others like whale eye, weight shifting, flat ears, etc) is unfortunately what can get people bitten. That is why educating on these topics is so important.
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