How to Talk to Your Dog

Book excerpt: As any dog owner learns, dogs can talk. But not in English nor any other human language. They talk to each other using body language, barks, snuffles, growls, and whines. They also talk to us this way too. But we are very bad at understanding dog language. We consistently misinterpret their growls as aggression, when they want to play. We consistently misinterpret their slow tail wagging as friendliness, when they mean, “I am about to bite you” instead. We consistently misinterpret a whole host of signals that dogs send to us, thinking all the while that we understand what our dog is trying to tell us. Most of the time, we don’t. We desperately want to have a great relationship with our dogs, but much of the time we don’t know how to make that happen. Many of us don’t know how to read the signals that dogs send us, and we don’t know how to respond so that dogs will understand what we are trying to tell them. How to Talk to Your Dog teaches what dog signals mean, and how we can communicate with our dogs so that we do, indeed, have great relationships with them.