For those of you with a dog at home or those of you who love dogs, you know thatsome of their habitsaren’t very polite. In fact, some doggy behaviors are downright confounding and a little nasty. Yes, I’m talking about consuming poop. Not all dogs do it, but if you have one who does like feces, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Why do dogs eat poop?
It can be quiet worrisome if you have a pup who exhibits this behavior. Are they at risk? Is there something “wrong” with them? You’ll be surprised to find out this is common behavior and there are ways to train your dog not to consume fecal matter. Before we get to training, let’s talk about the matter at hand.
What’s Appealing about Poop?
If your dog likes to eat poo, don’t be hard on yourself. Astudyreleased by researchers at the University of California at Davis found that 16% of people with dogs say their pup eats other dog’s feces. There’s comfort in numbers, right?
TheAmerican Kennel Clubhas more reassurance. For some species, like rabbits, eating feces is a normal way to consume nutrients. And it is even typical behavior for puppies and their moms. Dog moms will lick at their baby to encourage elimination and puppies may consume feces as they learn about the world around them.
For non-puppy dogs, the reasons behind consuming feces may date back to the dog’s ancestry. Benjamin Hart, a veterinarian who conducted the research study at UC Davis, surveyed 3,000 people with dogs. The study didn’t find evidence linking coprophagy (poop consumption) to age, dietary differences or compulsive behaviors. They also didn’t find that dogs who consumed feces frequently had trouble with house training.
Then what was the common ground? The study showed more than 80% of the stool-consuming dogs preferred feces no more than two days old. Hart toldThe Washington Postthat he attributes the dog’s preference for fresh poo to a dog’s wolf ancestry. Hart told the post, “Wolves typically defecate away from their dens, in part because feces contain intestinal parasite eggs. But if, say, a sick or lame wolf did its business at home, the waste wouldn’t necessarily be dangerous immediately. Parasite eggs usually don’t hatch into infectious larvae for a few days.” So the dogs would eat the feces more quickly as to not get infected.
PetMDhas some other ideas about why your pup may eat their feces. Your dog may be bored, want your attention, or be stressed. These can be treated, and we’ll talk more about that later.
Okay, there are some reasons behind the appeal. But there’s the outstanding question of potential danger.
Is Poo Harmful to Eat?
It depends. The American Kennel Club andWagsay that ingesting fecal matter from another animal (think: cows, horses, sheep) is potentially harmful to your pup. Even other dogs’ feces should be avoided. When your dog consumes feces from another animal, they are ingesting whatever that other animal ate.
If your dog consumes his own feces, there is less to worry about since he has already ingested that food.
Your dog may also consume cat feces. It’s enticing to dogs because the stool smells like cat food. Dr. Jennifer Coats, a vet, told PedMD that, like other forms of poop, it could possibly harm your pup. Feces contains a lot of bacteria and it could make your dog ill, but not definitely.
If you are concerned and notice some differences in your dog’s behavior or mannerisms, call the vet. Some symptoms to look out for are vomiting, nausea, lethargy, no interest in food, or diarrhea.
What Can You Do About It?
If your dog is part of the 16% that consume feces, you’re probably wondering how you can change the behavior. There are a few different tactics you can take.
Some vets think dogs consume feces because of a Vitamin-B or enzyme deficiency. They may prescribe these supplements to your dog’s diet. Other vets suggest modifying your dog’s diet with more fiber or adding yogurt or papaya to your dog’s food because it may make their stool less edible. Before you change your dog’s food, call your vet and make sure they approve.
There are other ways to teach your dog to break the habit of eating poop. Most of these are simple and you can start making some changes right away.
Clean up your dog’s living space. If there is no poop in their vicinity (think: your backyard), they won’t be able to eat it.
Teach your dog toleave itand use the command when your pup prepares to eat the poop.
Offer your dog toys to keep him engaged when you aren’t around. Get your dog theBetterBall. It’s a toy and a game and it offers a reward when your dog manages to retrieve the treat.
Supervise your dog during their walks. If you typically let your pup roam free in the backyard to do her business, keep a watchful eye to monitor her behavior.
You Aren’t Alone…
…if your dog consumes feces. Try not to be embarrassed by the behavior. There are ways you can help your dog learn not to eat their poop or other animals’ poop. Talk to your vet and make some simple changes to their living area and walk schedule.
It seems to most of us that our dogs constantly have their mouths open, panting. We notice that it seems to be louder or more obvious after running or playing, but other than that we may not give it much thought.
However, knowing why your dog pants is an important key to reading your dog in order to identify health and emotional states. Every dog owner should be paying attention to their dog’s “panting habits.” It could save their life.
Temperature Regulation
Dogs use panting to regulate their temperature. This is why when they have been running or playing hard, they pant harder. Owners can use this cue to let them know when their dog needs a break to prevent “over doing it.” This is important, as many dogs will continue to “work” with their owner even if they are over-exerted. It’s our job to give them a break when they need it.
Heatstroke
Along with temperature regulation, if you notice your dog panting excessively in warmer weather, it can be a sign of deadly heatstroke. Get your dog out of the heat and to a vet as quickly as possible.
Overweight
“Overweight dogs tend to pant more,” says Amanda Cornell, CPDT-KA, owner of Accomplished Canines, “because their bodies have a harder time regulating heat.”
The best thing you can do for an overweight dog is diet and exercise. They will not only be more comfortable, but they will live longer.
Breathing
Cornell also notes that “brachycephalic dogs pant more because they don’t get the same amount of air through their smushed noses.” As we know, these dogs are also more susceptible to the aforementioned heatstroke and being overweight is even more hazardous for these breeds.
Illness/Poisoning
According to Petmd.com, a lot of illnesses and poisons can cause your dog to pant. If you notice your dog is panting heavier or more than usual, you should take them to the vet for a check-up.
Therefore, it is good to notice what your dog’s normal panting is like, so you can be aware of changes. It is such an everyday occurrence that it is easy to not think about it. BUT it is important for your dog’s health that you pay attention. If you suspect abnormal panting, consult your veterinarian immediately.
Stress/Fear
Probably the least known, dogs will also pant more when they are stressed or fearful. Petmd.com says you can actually tell when an electric storm is coming by your dog’s panting.
“This is a normal fear response — dogs are easily startled by loud noises and bright flashes of light (such as with thunder and lightning).” (Petmd.com)
If you have a dog that is fearful or anxious, start paying attention to their panting. It can actually tell you a lot about your dog’s mood. Are you sitting in a nice, air conditioned obedience class and your dog is lying next to, seemingly calm, but panting heavily? Your dog is stressed and you need to change something in the environment to help ease her nerves.
Knowing more about your dog’s body and how it functions will make your dog happier and you a better owner.
Does your dog seem to always have his face in people’s crotches? Embarrassing, isn’t it? Well, don’t be too embarrassed. Dogs see the world with a different sense than we do. In addition to sight and sound, they depend on their sense of smell dramatically more than humans. When they approach you in this way, they are not just being a “space invader”. They are trying to gain information about the person through a scent inspection. To a dog, the private areas are like a name tag or even a business card with more information about an individual. If you watch dogs interact with each other, they often start by sniffing each other’s rears.
Dogs have glands on either side of their rectum. These glands produce a strong smelling discharge that seems to serve no other purpose aside from serving as a name tag for your dog. They identify him to other dogs and tag his feces as belonging to him. He can carry and leave his mark with these secretions and sees no reason that you would not do the same, only you stand upright and so your scents are in a slightly different location for him to access.
As a non-verbal species, sniffing you in such a way is akin to shaking your hand and asking your name and where you live. We, humans, are not scent markers, but we do write our names on our own stuff with permanent markers to label it as ours. We define our properties with maps and surveyors and we know what it means to stake a claim. You would not allow a stranger into your home without getting some basic information from him or her. Your dog is doing the same thing. It’s just that his method of background check does not agree with our human cultural norms.
If your dog’s curiosity is embarrassing you, you can try to redirect his behavior. When new people come into the room or environment, plan ahead and ask your dog to sit. Then reward his sitting until the new person has been able to sit down or settle into the room. Stash treats in your pockets or a pouch on your hip, so his nose is drawn elsewhere. Give some of the treats to any new person that comes into the environment, so they can offer them too and keep the dog focused on their hands instead.
Dogs are dogs, even though they have adapted tremendously to live and thrive with us. Some things are just “dog things” and we have to realize that we are the ones that need to adapt!
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Do you have a dog who doesn’t seem to be learning how to behave as quickly as you’d like, and you’re concerned that if you don’t figure out how get through to him his behavior is going to keep getting worse?
If so, don’t feel bad! Getting stubborn dogs to learn how to be calm, obedient, relaxed dogs is really hard to do if you don’t understand how to read dog body language.
Not learning how to read dog body language is like trying to communicate with someone who ignores things like your facial expressions, eye rolling, or arm crossing when you don’t want to talk. Ignoring the subtle, nonverbal parts of communication ends up creating situations like this:
It’s a funny cartoon, but it’s not that funny when you watch YouTube videos like this, where the dog is OBVIOUSLY giving off signs that he doesn’t want the toddler to be crawling on him, and it ends badly. Remember, a dog’s mouth is a very dangerous weapon if pushed too far, as this poor family found out the hard way:
Obviously, this is an example of a dog showing body language that leads to aggressive behavior. But, dogs show many other types of body language signs too… like fear, happiness & stress. By learning how to read this canine body language and reading your dog’s entire body, life with your dog stops being a one-way conversation and creates a shared communication between pets and their owners.
Knowing that this Secret Dog Body Language Exists, What Should You do About It?
Well… have you ever been in a situation where you had to try and communicate with someone who didn’t speak the same language as you?
Like maybe you tried to learn where the bathroom was in a foreign country and the person you asked didn’t speak English?
What did you end up doing to try to communicate?
Maybe you did some pointing? Maybe you crossed your legs to act out that you ‘had to go’ to get the point across?
In most cases, whenever we humans know we’re not being understood, we try to find some sort of a common language. We know there’s a language barrier, so we turn to other types of communication.
So this begs the question…
What “language” do canines understand?
While it is true that dogs can learn to understand verbal cues and vocalizations…
(because after all they need to know that growling from another pack member means, ‘back the ‘F’ off’)
… vocalizations are NOT the primary way dogs communicate and learn from each other.
The primary way that dogs communicate with each other is actually more through NON-verbal communication.
What we tell our clients here at TheDogTrainingSecret.com is that if you have a dog who is ignoring you, it’s usually because dogs don’t listen with their ears very well… they actually “listen” more with their eyes. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that dogs can’t learn to listen (I’ll actually show you how to get them to listen later on)… I’m just saying that it’s not the DEFAULT way dogs communicate.
To show you what I mean here’s a simple ‘Turning Head’ test you can perform on your dog to see if your dog has this same type of listening problem. By turning your head away from your dog so he can’t see your mouth or your facial expressions, you can find out if your dog was actually listening to the words you were saying, or just reading facial expressions.
Try This Quick ‘Dog Listening Test’
Pretty crazy huh? My dog wasn’t listening at all! He was reading my facial cues! So the second I hid them from him, he was essentially DEAF to my commands. And many, many dogs are like this.
This happens because dogs are experts at nonverbal communication. They are constantly using their eyes, mouth, tails and body posture to try to tell us how they’re feeling. If we want our dogs to learn behaviors as quickly as possible, we first need to get better at understanding the nonverbal communication signals they’re sending us ALL day long.
So let’s first start with…
How to Read Your Canine’s Mind Through Their Eyes
When learning to read your dog’s eyes, you need to be able to identify the three different types of eye cues dogs give you, which are Neutral, Aroused/Anxious, or “Whale Eyes”. Here’s a great video on reading dog eye cues. See if you can look at the image below and match the pictures of dog eyes to the appropriate eye cue type.
Step #1: Match the Dog Eye Images to the Three Types of Dog Eye Cues
Also… watch for dogs who look at you from the corner of their eyes, or avert eye contact. This is a common look for dogs who are feeling fearful. It’s also common for these types of dogs to keep their mouths closed tightly, and hold their breath. If you see a dog doing these things, he’s telling you he’s scared!
Watch For ‘Averting’ Eye-Contact
Remember, if you see a dog exhibiting signs of fear or stress, they will typically respond in one of three ways: fight, flee, or cower.
Humans are pretty bad at actually noticing these signs in dogs. So bad, in fact, that a recent study of dog experts who analyzed dog body language signs in social media pictures where dog owners were hugging their dogs, noted that 80+ percent of dogs were showing signs of stress while being hugged. And the owners had no idea! Learning how to spot these signs is going to make your pooch’s life so much less stressful!
Step #2: Learn How to Read a Dog’s Mind Through Their Tail
The way your dog wags his tail is a fascinating study.
Tail wagging to a dog is like facial expressions to us humans. So just like how we know a smiling person is approachable, and an angry person should be avoided… dogs get that same information from a tail wag.
Here’s a few tips on how to read this nonverbal communication:
Reading Tail Height
How high a dog’s tail is can be a pretty good way to gauge the intensity of your dog’s emotions.
If your dog’s tail is middle height he’s in a pretty relaxed state. If the tail goes straight up, the dog is getting too excited or upset; and the lower it gets the dog is getting more upset or anxious.
But height isn’t the only thing to pay attention to.
The direction your dog’s tail wags, and the speed at which he wags his tail mean different things too.
For example. a tail wagging to the left, like in the images below, is a negative tail wag. A dog wagging his tail in this way is in a negative state of mind. A tail wagging to the right says the dog is in a positive state of mind, and a tail tucked between his legs means he’s feeling submissive.
I recommend taking this chart and starting to pay attention to other dogs while out on walks. See if you can gain some more insights into their emotions. The first time I did this, it was like those videos of people who have their ears cured and hear for the first time; because you realize there is this whole level of communication that your dog has been trying to tell you that you never new about. It’s really pretty cool.
Step #3: Reading Your Dog’s Posture
There are a few reasons you want to make sure you learn how to interpret a dog’s posture.
The first is if you are interested in socializing your dog to other dogs. Socialization is a two-way street with dogs. You need to be able to look at your own dog and read his comfort level around other dogs so you don’t push him too fast and CREATE an anxiety issue. But, even more important, you need to be able to read BAD dog behavior from afar, so you can avoid them.
You don’t want to blindly let your dog walk up to a dominant dog only to end up having to break up a dog fight.
The Pass/No Pass Philosophy
Here at TheDogTrainingSecret.com we teach a pass/no-pass philosophy to people who are training their dogs how to properly interact with others out in the world. What pass/no-pass means is that we want to stay VERY far away from dogs with certain types of posture, as we can tell that they are likely to lunge, bark or attack our dog if we get too close. When people make this mistake and allow their dog to have run-ins with dogs like these, it builds their dog’s anxiety “Head Trash” when they see other dogs (this is especially important when working with a new puppy). So, instead of praying that a dog-to-dog interaction will go well, just walk far around these types of dogs, or step off the side of the path and stay far enough away to prevent an accident.
Here’s an example of dogs you should steer clear of and ones that are ok to walk by:
Also… if you notice YOUR dog doing any of the behaviors in the RED zone on the above graphic, please do other dog owners a favor and steer clear of other dogs, as your dog is not yet ready to interact appropriately. You won’t be doing either dog a favor if you try to approach a submissive dog who’s hiding behind his owners legs, or who seems overly excited to play.
Usually, if you follow those large posture cues you’ll be doing pretty well. But there are some other, more subtle, body language cues that you’ll want to learn how to spot.
Identifying the More Subtle Nonverbal Signs in Dogs
A dog’s posture is the next thing you need to pay attention to, specifically, if you are trying to read a dog who has fear, anxiety or aggression. As with all cues, some can be subtle, and some are more obvious.
And to help you know what each of these looks like, here’s a video that shows you examples of each.
How To Spot Fearful Body Posture In Dogs
Are you starting to see why learning to read your dog’s body language is so key in helping him learn how to behave? Who would have thought that whether or not your dog licks his lips too much was a warning sign, right?
Once we better understand how to tell what your dog is thinking through body posture, types of eye contact, and tail position and movement, the question should be…
What Should You Do When You See Signs of Stress in Your Dog’s Body Language?
When your dog’s body language suggests he’s stressed, we believe in using a handful of different strategies for helping them overcome their fears and anxieties, by working ‘Below their Emotional Threshold’ with low level stimulus. We even built a whole course around this called Impulse Control that you can check out here.
For example…
Let’s say you have a dog who is fearful or anxious around other dogs. In that situation, take your dog to an area where you know dogs will be, like a park or trail. Experiment with how close you can get to other dogs before your dog starts to show body language cues that he’s feeling stressed. Let’s say in this example that is 30 feet away, and you notice your dog start to lick his lips all of a sudden when he’s that close to another dog.
If 30 feet is the distance where your dog starts to feel stressed, then that’s the place we need to start!
If we try to push it and force our dog to work through his fears while he’s 10 feet from the other dog, that’s too much emotional intensity for your dog to make progress.
Be Wary of Forcing Your Dog to Push Through His Fears
There is a very popular dog trainer on TV that has made a name for himself by using video editing to make it look like he can fix fearful dogs by dominating them and forcing them to submit to his ALPHA will.
I cannot even begin to express how dangerous, and harmful, these approaches are to your dog’s ability to have emotional resilience.
When you take the approach of forcing your dog to confront his fears full on, and at their full intensity, you get one of three responses. Your dog will try to flee, fight or cower. Just like you wouldn’t take someone with a fear of spiders and lock them in box full of Tarantulas (in the hopes that’d they’d just ‘get over it’), we don’t want to flood our dog’s emotional system with overwhelming fear and anxiety. Doing so actually makes it MORE likely that your dog will become MORE fearful, anxious and submissive.
Like these poor dogs who’ve been trained to cower submissively by a dog trainer who uses electric shock as a consequence the second their dogs get out of line. Is this what you want your dog to look like?
Don’t Take That Approach, Do This Instead…
Instead of using methods like the trainer above, we want to use training methods that teach our dogs to be calm and relaxed when in the presence of things that get them overly emotional.
We want dog’s that look like this while out on a walk: happy, calm and well adjusted, and NOT like the video above.
By taking the time to learn how to read the different types of anxious, excited, fearful and aggressive body language that dog’s are displaying, we take a HUGE leap forward in our ability to be better communicators with our dogs. Better communication leads to a deeper bond, and more obedient behavior.
Taylor the German Shepherd and Godzilla the 70-pound tortoise got themselves into quite a pickle. When firefighters arrived at the scene, both animals were trapped in a tunnel a couple of meters from the entrance. How they came to be underground together was not known until a bit after the rescue. Thankfully, that only took about 10 minutes.
Firefighters responded to a call about a man and a dog who had both fallen into a hole. By the time rescuers arrived on the scene, the man had been able to extricate himself from the cavity, which was actually a tunnel, but the dog was still trapped in it. A tortoise was also in the tunnel, and the behavior of the two animals had combined to create an unusual situation.
What “language” do canines understand?
