Green Signals
Now we can take our social gestures and categorize them according to our traffic management signal. As before, green means go, and when you see these behaviors you are safe to approach and handle the dogs.
Yellow Signals
As you’ve learned by now, yellow means caution. These are some of the social gestures that are in the yellow category. When you start to see these, you’ll want to change your approach (i.e. perhaps turn sideways) or change the environment in order to change the dog’s behavior and get them back into the green category.
You’ll notice that some behaviors appear on both of these charts. For instance, lip licking, look away, and pawing are on the green chart as well. As you see these behaviors, you need to take the entire context of the situation and the rest of the dog’s body language into consideration in order to determine if you are in a yellow or a green state.
Red Signals
Red obviously means stop. With red social behaviors you want to stop your approach and see if the dog can improve or change into a yellow or a green state. If the dog does not change and remains in red, you want to get assistance from your supervisor.
Here are some photo examples of some of the social gestures we have talked about.
Here we see the paw lift and the side turn. A side turn is a very polite greeting gesture in dog language.
The social gesture of yawning we’ve talked before. And mentioned the fact that it doesn’t mean the dog is bored. We also have the back roll which is usually a fun, relaxed gesture or the dog fooling around.
Here is an example of guarding and lip licking. They fall into the yellow and red category.
Here you see the social gesture called piloerection. This is just a fancy term for saying the hackles are up or the hair is standing up on the dog’s back. The other picture shows staring. One dog staring at another just like one dog doing a hard stare at us is a social gesture and the dogs will often break eye contact.
In these pictures you see pawing behavior and the look-away. We talked about the look-away before. With the pawing behavior, that can be a dog pawing another dog for attention or to be playful. This can also be a dog pawing another dog in a rude manner that is considered impolite in dog behavior.
Here you see the social gesture of mounting. There are a lot of reasons that dogs mount one another. It’s not just a sign of dominance or confidence. The muzzle grab is where one dog simply mouths another dog’s muzzle. It’s seen especially with mother dogs to their puppies.
Social gestures are a very important part of dog language. We definitely want to pay attention to the yellow signals. As we discussed earlier in this program, yellow is caution and we need to take action to try to get our dogs back to the green balanced state. We also want to make sure we do not correct dogs when they give warning signals. They will stop giving them and go straight to conflict, which is not good for any of us. When you’re seeing warning signals, it’s important to consider the appropriateness of the warning to the context of the offense that the dog is giving the warning for and that overall the situation that the dog and people are in.