Getting To Know Your Best Friend

Learning your Dog's Body Language
DOGS also talk. Yes they do, although not in words. Just watch a dog wagging his tail and climbing and jumping all over you and you'll know that he is happy. That is called body language and is used by all living beings in the world. When a cat curves its body, a dog straightens its ears or a monkey screams, they are expressing something with each gesture. You just need to know what they are trying to say.

The dog's predecessor, the wolf, can make fourteen different facial expressions. From the different wrinkling of the nose or the forehead, the upturning of the lips or the widening of the eyes; a wolf's face skin reinforces all these expressions as if it were a theater mask.

Modern day dogs have lost some of these mimic expressions and even more those breeds that are the result of artificial breeding. For example, how can you recognize the facial expression of a Bobtail, which has the face all covered with a hair curtain.

It's interesting to know that dogs with droopy ears are able to use their ears to express themselves as well as the ones that have straight ears. The rigid musculature of a Bull Terrier's head makes it look as if he has a "poker face".

So how can we decipher their body language? In this case, we will be limited to the sounds which are also expressions. There is a very wide repertory of sounds, from groans to screams, from growls to howls. They can be, at the same time, of a higher or lower intensity.

There are also noisy and silent dogs and this can be characteristic of every breed. We always have to be very aware of what a dog is trying to express through sound and body language, especially in the case of unknown dogs.

A dog's bark forms the spinal cord of the sound expressions of a domestic dog that learns to use it for purposes which are, in most cases, separated from the original ones produced in a wild state. The more urban the dog breed is and the more adapted he is to his lifestyle the less he will use the different means of alerting which his vocal cords allow.