Reading a Dogs Body Language The Bite Emotion

Posted on February 18, 2009 by thespiritdog

You gotta love YouTube, here’s another video I saw sometime ago and recently found again, that’s important for you to see. Reading a dogs body language is nice if you can do it, but reading a dogs emotions is the key to stopping all unwanted behaviors.

The dogs emotion precedes the easily observable body language. When you watch this video what I want you to pay close attention to is the dogs eyes, this is where you can read the dogs emotions before you see the body language.

This video is 2:58 long, I would like you to watch the video in it’s entirely first. Then watch it again, and pause it at 32 seconds into the video and take a close look at the dogs eyes. This animal is clearly not comfortable with this reporter that close to him. If you look at the K-9 officer at that the same time, the officer is looking at his dog yet this trained animal professional couldn’t tell that his dog was uncomfortable and it was just a matter of time before he bit the reporter.

This is clear by listening to the officer describe the events leading up to the bite. He said “Pedro (the K-9 dog) was doing great, everything was fine and as it should of been”. This is not a criticism of the officer, this is meant to educate you in how to read a dogs emotions. If this trained animal professional missed it, you can be sure that most likely your going to miss it also. This is where the saying “the dog bite came out of nowhere” comes from. We didn’t read the dogs emotions of  “please get away from me or please stop it your making me nervous”. While some dogs still will not bite you after having this look in their eyes, many other dogs will.

Back to the video for a second, pretty much the entire time that the reporter is next to the dog the dog doesn’t want him to be there. And when the reporter leaned over to kiss the dog, the dog finally freaked out and bit him. The dog bit him not because the reporter leaned over him in what is commonly described (erroneously I might add) as a dominant position. The dog bit him because he held it together for as long as he could before losing it and saying “get the f♦ck away from me”.

Please pay attention to the dogs eyes, this is the same exact look most dogs give before biting either a person or another animal.

The Spirit Dog

Copyright © 2009 A.S.Papszycki

Filed under: dog video, The Mind Of a Dog Tagged: | dog aggression, dog bites, dog emotions, dogs behavior, dogs body language, fear aggression, K9 police dog, reading dogs