You’re going to learn how to look at a dog and recognize some of the stress signals. We’re going to show some of the stress signals in the images below. What typically happens once you start learning about stress signals is you start to see them everywhere and it can be a little alarming.
What you’re going to focus on is how many stress signals do you see. You want to work to identify and alleviate any stress. But obviously the more stress signals you see, the more stressed the dog is. If you see just one stress signal, it many not be a time to change anything. But if that dog doesn’t relax on it’s own and stress starts to come up in more than one area on the dog’s body, then you probably need to do something to change the dog’s environment or change what you’re doing with the dog.
Let’s once again review the list of top 10 stress signals that you will typically see in a pet care facility.
- Closed mouth
- Change in breathing
- Diarrhea
- Dilated pupils
- Excessive shedding and / or dandruff
- Half-moon eyes
- Lip licking
- Look away
- Vocalizations
- Restlessness
These signals are all relatively easy to identify if you are able to recognize what you are looking at. This goes back to that supervision myth that we talked about in an earlier topic. Let’s review that myth again here.
Myth
Supervision is the key to keeping dogs and humans safe.
Truth
Supervision only works if the person supervising knows what the dog is saying.
That is partially true. The problem is that supervision will only work if the person supervision knows what the dog is saying. An example we ofter use is if I went to the hospital and a friend of mine happened to be hooked up to all kinds of IV’s, tubes, and monitors and the nurse came in and said, Okay, Mary…you just watch these monitors and I’ll be back.” Well, I can watch the monitors all I want, but I’m not a nurse and I don’t know what any of them mean.
In that situation, my supervision is not going to count for anything because I don’t know what I’m looking at. The same thing is true with dogs. If you don’t know what you’re watching, then supervision isn’t that important. We want you to learn what you’re looking at and then supervision becomes critical. That’s the whole point of learning about dog body language and that is the whole point of the remaining lessons in this course.
In reviewing the list of stress signals above you can probably think of dogs that you’ve seen showing some of these signals, but maybe you didn’t realize at that time that the dog was stressed.
In the images below, we will see what some of these stress signal look like.
We learned earlier that not all dogs like to be hugged. Here’s an example of a little girl holding and hugging her dog. The closed mouth that we’ve discussed in earlier lessons and topics is quite often a sign of nervousness or stress.
What we’re looking for here is panting of the dog out of context with what he’s actually doing. You’re looking for panting with a wide-open mouth but the tongue is still tightly held within his mouth. This is opposed to a dog who has just exercised and his tongue will be flopping out the side of his mouth. So the change in breathing pattern can be a little tricky to identify the one related to stress, but you’ll also se other clues usually in the dog’s body that will help you discern that.
As you learned in a previous lesson, dilated pupils and half-moon eyes are both yellow light behaviors. The dilated pupils shown in the image on the left are noticeable from a distance because you can see the light reflecting off the dog’s eyes. The image on the right shows the half-moon eye and you see the white on the outer edge of the eye.
In lip licking a dog will flick his tongue out his mouth with nervous anxiety. People often assume the dog is just hungry. But normally the faster and tinier the tongue flick or the lip lick is, the more anxious the dog.
A look away is very easy to miss. Dogs will glance away from you as you approach or interact with them. They are trying to avoid the contact or the interaction with you. You can see this in the Beagle. He’s pushed away from the woman’s body and he is actually looking away from her.
The shake off is something dogs generally do after they have a bath, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a dog that does this exact same behavior in the absence of water. It’s kind of like a neurological reset. You’re done the same behavior before. Think about a time when you were in conflict or in an argument with a friend. You finished that argument and walked away and probably did a little shake of your head as if to say, “Woo! I’m glad that’s over.” Dogs do the same thing. When they’ve interacted or met somebody or something that makes them a little uncomfortable, they might move away and do a shake off. That’s a stress signal.
Yawning is another signal that’s very easy to recognize but people often ignore it. When you see a dog that yawns, you might think “Well, the dog is just tired.” But look carefully at the situation. Often, the dog is a little bit uncomfortable and he / she is yawning as a way to release some tension.