Mysterious miscommunications

John Steinbeck, an author and noted dog lover once said, “... I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.” In an opinion widely held by students of canine behavior, Steinbeck wasn’t far from the truth. Personally, I think our dogs regard us on the whole as nice enough, if a bit dull upstairs. I’ve witnessed several intelligent dogs rolling their eyes while their well-meaning owners attempted to coerce, bribe, and otherwise beg them into some behavior. Once, I’m positive I saw the canine equivalent of the wide-eyed, disbelieving head shake that is the universal sign for “You must be insane.” On the other hand, I’ve met more than one owner of a pleasantly bright and accommodating dog who insisted that his or her dog was slow, disobedient, difficult, or just plain stupid.

How does this happen? How can two reasonably intelligent beings interact every day with each coming away with doubts of the others’ cognitive capacity? The answer lies in the vast gulf between our hardwired social behaviors and those of our dogs.

For example, how often do you find yourself hugging your pooch buddy? We all do it, whether we’ll admit it or not. As primates, we consider wrapping our arms around someone else an expression of affection. This behavior is so ingrained in us that we need to experience it regularly in childhood for our minds to develop properly. Our sanity is quite literally dependant on this sort of social contact.

Behaviors like hugging are necessary for the development of relationships in primates’ social groups, and so necessary for their survival. In all social species, close relationships between members of a group keep everyone safe. If they wanna live, they gotta love. Displays of affection or aversion are what make and break these relationships. So it’s very natural for us to want to hug our dogs. After all, they’re members of our families; they share our homes and our lives.

Most well-adjusted dogs will resign themselves to our compulsion to hug, waiting patiently for the hug to end and the fetch to begin. But these are dogs that have adjusted well to human behavior, and are willing to accept us for the goofy primates we are. To a dog with any doubts in his mind of our intentions, a hug can be an intensely frightening threat. If you look at it from the dog’s perspective, you’ll understand. They don’t have arms to wrap around one another, so they’ve developed other methods of displaying affection. Along comes this human with appendages the dog doesn’t even possess, and he proceeds to toss these appendages around the dog’s neck or body, surrounding him, holding him, and preventing any escape. It can be a very scary experience for a dog who is not entirely comfortable with human behavior, and he may pull away or growl to demonstrate his displeasure to his well-intentioned aggressor.

By hugging this dog, we’ve made a grievous communication error. We were trying to show affection, the dog perceived a threat. The dog reacted to the threat with displeasure, which we may then take to mean that he doesn’t like us or is just generally aggressive.

To be fair, we aren’t the only ones making the errors. I know a dog who actively seeks out hugs. He loves nothing better. He even goes out of his way to find strangers and ask for a big bear-hug. The problem develops when the stranger - doubtlessly feeling a tremble in the ground under her feet - turns to find a one-hundred-six pound, three-foot-tall Great Dane with feet like dinner plates bounding toward her in all his massive glory, usually accompanied by an earth-shaking bark and a wildly wagging tail. Rocky only wants to show his new best friend how well he understands and accepts primate social behavior, but I’d bet the farm that most of his unwitting targets lose a few years off their lifespan in that first meeting. And these are the dog lovers; I’d hate to think what would happen if someone with a fear of big dogs caught Rocky’s eye.

Miscommunication goes both ways. And this is just one example of one behavior.

I believe that most - if not all - undesirable canine behavior is a result of the formidable language barrier between our species. We don’t know how to tell our dogs what we do and do not want them to do, and they don’t know how to tell us what they want and need. The only way to live with dogs and keep from pulling out your hair is to learn to understand some small amount of Dog-ese. Most dog owners have an elementary grasp of their dogs’ language, just enough to get by in relative peace. Similarly, most dogs have a reasonable grasp of human language. But humans prefer to communicate with vocalization, while dogs communicate almost exclusively through physical signals and body language. So we’re not just communicating with different dialects, we’re speaking two completely foreign tongues. And to make things even more difficult, the body language that we grow up with and of which we have an innate understanding does not translate well into Dog-ese. Some things that seem very natural to us can seem completely bizarre to our dogs, and they’re frequently left trying frantically to discern our meaning.

As the more mentally flexible species, it’s the humans’ responsibility to learn to communicate with the dogs, not vice-versa. To a dog who’s become used to being linguistically ignored, discovering someone who can and will listen to them is a huge relief. There is nothing supernatural or even unusual about being able to talk to your dog in a way he understands. Likewise, there’s nothing magical to those folks who seem to keep their dogs under control in any situation; they’ve simply developed a two-way, open dialogue with their best friend. They listen to their dogs, and their dogs listen to them. Your dog will listen too, if you teach yourself how to speak to him. And you’ll be amazed at what you can learn about your species and yourself when you learn to listen to him in return.