Greeting Behaviors
These are ritualized postures that dogs use to greet one another. In an earlier module you learned how dogs and humans should meet. With this greeting behavior we’re talking now about how dogs greet one another.
Appeasement Gestures
Another type of social behavior is appeasement (or pacifying) gestures. With these type of behaviors it’s really one dog deferring to another animal to say, “Hey, I’m not a threat to you, you can be in charge.” They’ll show behaviors such as lifting their paw or rolling over as an appeasement gesture to another animal.
Confidence Behaviors
Confidence behaviors are another social behavior. Confidence behaviors are a way that a dog will establish some type of rank order at least for a moment in time. And it is important to realize that dogs are never “always” confident or “always” submissive. Their status can change in terms of the relationship from one dog to another dog or to another human and it can also change in terms of the environment that they’re in. Many of these behaviors are designed to avoid conflict. In dog language they will choose to use a lower level of force or display rather than going into an all-out fight. If they can send a message by just standing over a dog, there’s no reason to fight.
Displacement Behaviors
Displacement behaviors are often stress signals. So you’ve learned about some of these already. These are behaviors a dog will do because they’re nervous and they’re just trying to diffuse the situation. Things in the pictures you see here, like scratching and stretching, are obviously normal dog behaviors that a dog might do because they have an itch or because they just are tired and trying to stretch. However, these same behaviors, when they’re done out of context, are displacement behaviors.
Watch the video below and try to think of the various things you’ve learned over the last few lessons. You’ll watch each dog and you’ll see different body postures, different yawns, shake offs, some lip licking, notice how often sniffing occurs, and start to try to put together all of the different body postures and body language that you’ve learned and you’ll see how many things you can read in the dogs.
Correcting Behaviors
Correcting behaviors are another social behavior type. Correcting behaviors are used to teach and change the behavior of one animal to another. These are most often seen given to puppies by older dogs, particularly by the mother of a litter.
Warning Behaviors
Warning behaviors that we’ve talked about in earlier lessons are another type of social behavior. Aggressive displays that we talked about in earlier lessons most often relate to space. Also, resource guarding that we’ve talked about a lot throughout the lessons falls into this category. You’ll be watching a video that gives you some examples of correcting and warning behaviors.