Body Posture Overview
Think of dog body postures as being on a continuum. Think about it kind of like a scale, when the dog is balanced and in the neutral position the scale is balanced and neutral is the center. When you recognize the neutral and relaxed body position, the dog is balanced on all four legs, there is not any tension and their movement is relaxed, loose, and curvy.
You recognize a confident dog in their posture being very tall, weight learning forward and their legs and body being very stiff. A confident dog is more likely to assert themselves through aggressive behaviors.
On the other extreme, we have the fearful or subordinate body posture. Dogs that are in this state are the opposite of the confident dog. They are very low, crouched down, and the body is shifted back. Everything seems to be going backward and the body movement is tense and slow. We’re in the red light traffic signal color. These are dogs that are very fearful.
Your goal in looking at body postures is to identify when the dog leaves neutral and the scale starts to shift in either direction. Our goal will always be to get the dog back to that balanced posture in the middle.
Segmenting Body Posture
Now we are going to begin the learning process of breaking down each individual part of the body. We consider this a bit like learning English. When you learn English, you learn individual words and the meaning of those individual words. Then as you get better, you begin to put those words together into a sentence and eventually the sentences become a paragraph. That’s how we are going to look at segmenting dog body language.
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