On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals
A book by Turid Rugaas
2006; Dogwise Publishing; 76 pages

Review by Marcia Barkley

This is a very small book – 75 pages plus a bibliography – that is having an enormous impact on how I deal with dogs in general and my own in particular.  I find myself wanting to grab my fellow dog owners by the sleeve and loudly proclaim “You have got to read this book!” 

Turid Rugaas is a Norwegian dog trainer and behaviorist.  She has not written a great many books, but this one, all by itself, will be a legacy of which she can be very proud.  It describes, in wonderfully simple language, the “body language” that dogs all over the world, of every breed, use to avoid and even resolve conflicts among themselves.  It also offers numerous examples, brief but vivid, of how that language can be applied by people who live and work with dogs.

What Ms. Rugaas calls calming signals are the physical movements and positions that dogs use to calm either themselves or other dogs.  She lists 30 such signals, including turning sideways, looking away, sniffing the ground (sometimes a sniff indicates more than an interesting scent!), lifting a paw, yawning, lying down, sitting (sideways to or with the back toward the other dog), walking slowly, and licking the nose.  (There are many photographs that very clearly illustrate the signal under discussion.)

We’ve all seen dogs do these things.  I suspect we’ve all seen our own dogs do these things at home or at the dog park.  Stop now and think about what Fido might have been trying to communicate when he sat and yawned upon arrival at the park.  He might have been saying “We’ve been here before and it’s boring” but it’s also very, very likely that he was communicating something like “This is very stressful for me.  There are too many other dogs here, and I don’t like the way they are running around and insisting that I play.  I don’t know these dogs and they make me nervous.” 

Another thought about canine body language as it relates to interacting with our dogs, either in training situations or just day-to-day interactions:    Eye contact is a core aspect of human communication, but among dogs it is a threat and a challenge.  Many dogs resist learning to “look” or “watch” and the more they resist, the more we insist.  Turid Rugaas might suggest that we find some other way to for our dog to demonstrate attention: perhaps it is equally valid that the dog simply looks in the direction of our face.  It also happens that when we are – we think – petting our dog lovingly: we look them in the eye, and they pull back a bit.  The dog is not comfortable: why should we insist on doing it our way?  There’s a signal called “soft eyes” that might make all the difference in the world.

In a training session – perhaps learning to sit, or come –  has Spot ever just stopped and looked away from you?  Freezing in place is a strong signal that the environment – in this case, the movement – is overwhelming.  I was struck by an example in the book :

“Shiba, a Border Collie agility dog, became slower and slower on the agility course.  The owner ran around, jumped up and down, waved her arms and yelled a lot to encourage the dog.  In the end, Shiba hardly moved around the agility field because she was trying so hard to calm her owner.”
 
The solution, by the way, was that the owner learned to calm down, learned how to get her dog’s attention in a way that was much quieter.  With the cause of the stress removed, the dog could focus on the job at hand.

I expected that this skinny little book wouldn’t take very long to read.  What I didn’t count on was the time I would spend thinking as I read, remembering times when my Starr would stop dead in her tracks and look away from me during a training session, or yawn and shake her head, or lie down, or stand sideways to me when I wanted her to face me.  Little signs … little signals … all now open to new interpretation.  We care about our dogs, we love them and want them to have good lives, to be “good citizens” and well-behaved members of our society.  We try to feed them well, and keep them safe, and we take them to the vet when something seems physically wrong.  This book gives us a tool to take it a step further, for what better way can there be to demonstrate our affection and respect for these animals  than to see what our dogs are trying to tell us?

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