03/22/2024
Thought this was a great article found on someone else’s page.
🧐There is so much to behaviour than meets the eye. I often hear clients distressed, saying “ My dog has never behaved this way and don’t understand where it’s come from?”, and “He’s normally so good”.
Behaviour stems from emotions, and emotions are involuntary responses to situations and events, but they don’t just come from nowhere and can be prevented if you know what you’re looking at and how to interpret it.
When a dog behaves in a way that a human being finds inappropriate or rude, we forget that dogs are not human. Their behaviours are NORMAL for their species, and we as humans have unrealistic expectations of our dogs. We both ‘speak’ different languages, and understanding how your dog communicates will help you set them up for success and not put them in a position where they may display unwanted behaviours.
🪜The ladder of aggression is what can help you understand how a dog can escalate from what seems like a normal relaxed dog to all of a sudden barking, growling, being reactive and biting.
You may first notice your dog sending something called calming signals. This is not only to help them stay calm but to indicate to you that the dog is not a threat, and the messages should calm down a situation the dog is not ok with. This can be in the form of lip licking following a sneeze, excessive blinking, yawning, head turns to avoid. These behaviours will appear out of context and are to ideally defuse a tense situation.
If the messages the dog is sending are being ignored the next thing you may see are displacement behaviours. This is when a dog displays actions that seem out of place or unrelated to the current situation. This typically happens when the dog experiences conflicting emotions like anxiety, stress, or frustration. This behaviour serves as a way for the dog to release tension or cope with the mixed feelings they are experiencing.
This is when the dog redirects their attention to something else so they don’t have to deal with the ‘scary thing’, or situation, and can be a form of self-soothing behaviour that can give the dog a moment of relief. These behaviours can be random ge***al checks, eating grass, randomly scratching, or excessively sniffing in the environment etc...
The dog may now move to more intense behaviours if he/ she has not shut down and gone into a learnt state of helplessness. Your dog may have a small ‘rumble’ and start barking. Their breathing has rapidly increased. The dog is trying to deter the threat. You may even notice the dog dips their head down, snarling with excessive lip licking. At this stage you may even see a nose lick (the tongue will be going right over the nose with every lick). The dog may be baring teeth and growling. In between these behaviours you may still notice more calming signals or displacement behaviours.
If the dog gets to the stage where their behaviour is highly reactive and they are lunging out, barking/growling, teeth bearing, snarling, and showing stiff and tense body postures while exhibiting these behaviours, then this is a dog who is completely over threshold and not coping!
💥This defensive behaviour is their last resort before they follow with a bite! Their body is in overdrive, and in fight mode as the other behaviours of freeze, fidget and flight did not work. This dog is in SURVIVAL mode and the next step is to bite to protect/ defend himself/ herself.
Behaviours can escalate quickly. Within a blink of an eye, your dog can go from being ok - to nervous - to flight or fight.
Identifying body language, facial expressions and communication signals is an incredibly important step to PREVENT and ensure your dog remains in a state where they can cope successfully.
