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Understanding Dog Growling and Dog Language

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Growling eBook from Whole Dog Journal
By Pat Miller, CBCC-KA,CPDT-KA, CDBC

Growling is a valuable means of communication for a dog – something that dog owners should appreciate and respect rather than punish. Of course, we don’t want our dog to growl at us, but neither do we want him to fail to growl if something makes him uncomfortable; that’s very important information in a successful canine-human relationship.

It’s very common for dog owners to punish their dogs for growling. Unfortunately, this often suppresses the growl – eliminating his ability to warn us that he’s about to snap, literally and figuratively. On other occasions, punishing a growling, uncomfortable dog can induce him to escalate into full-on aggression.

So, if you’re not supposed to punish your dog for growling, what are you supposed to do?

The next time your dog growls at you, try this:

  1. Stop. Whatever you’re doing, stop. If your dog’s growl threshold is near his bite threshold – that is, if there’s not much time between his growl and his bite, get safe. If his growl doesn’t mean a bite is imminent, stop what you’re doing but stay where you are. Wait until he relaxes, then move away, so you’re rewarding the relaxed behavior rather than the growl.
  2. Analyze the situation. What elicited the growl? Were you touching or grooming him? Restraining him? Making direct eye contact? Taking something away from him? Making him do something?
  3. Figure out a different way to accomplish your goal without eliciting a growl. Lure him rather than physically pushing or pulling him. Have someone else feed him treats while you touch, groom, or restrain him. If you don’t have to do whatever it was that elicited the growl, don’t – until you can convince him that it’s a good thing rather than a bad thing.
  4. Evaluate the stressors in your dog’s world and reduce or eliminate as many of them as possible. For example, if your dog is unaccustomed to strangers, then having your sister and her husband and three kids as houseguests for the past week would undoubtedly stress your dog. Noise-phobic dogs might be under a strain if city crews have been digging up a nearby street with heavy equipment or there was a thunderstorm last night. The vacuum cleaner is a common stressor for dogs. A loud argument between you and your spouse could stress your dog as well as you, and your stress is stressful to your dog. Harsh verbal or physical punishment, an outburst of aroused barking at the mail carrier, fence fighting with another dog. The list could go on and on. Keep in mind that stress causes aggression, and stressors are cumulative; it’s not just the immediate stimulus that caused the growl, but a combination of all the stressors he’s experienced in the past few days. This explains why he may growl at you today when you do something, but he didn’t growl last week when you did the exact same thing. The more stressors you can remove overall, the less likely he is to growl the next time you do whatever it was that elicited the growl this time.
  5. Institute a behavior modification program to change his opinion about the thing that made him growl. One way to do this is to use counter-conditioning and desensitization to convince him the bad thing is a good thing.

Another way is through the careful use of negative reinforcement as in a Constructional Aggression Treatment (CAT) program to teach him a new behavioral strategy when presented with the discomfort-causing stimulus.

If you need help to create and implement a behavior modification protocol, contact a qualified behavior professional who is experienced and successful in modifying aggressive behavior with positive, dog-friendly techniques. Or, check out Whole Dog Journal’s ebook Growling -Understand Your Dog’s Language.

Basic Meet & Greets

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Fight! eBook from Whole Dog Journal
Excerpted from Fight!: A Practical Guide to the Treatment of Dog-Dog Aggression by Jean Donaldson

A good meet and greet consists of the two dogs smoothly making muzzle to muzzle contact followed by some mutual rear investigation. Then either play will break out or the dogs will go their separate ways. A male may urinate on the next available vertical surface.

Meet and greets may feature stiffness, posturing and snarky stuff. The latter sometimes indicates some lack of social skill or confidence, or simply routine friction in normal dog interactions.

It’s a good general policy with unknown quantity dogs to break meet and greets off after several seconds, if the dogs don’t do so themselves. I recommend allowing posturing, stiffness or standing over, provided there is rapid enough behavior change, i.e. the dogs don’t get stuck in some volatile looking stance such as a stiff and growly T-position (perpendicular to each other with one dog’s chin or chest over withers of other). If there is some snarking or if they get stuck in some stiff posture, break them off. Happy talk them while walking away if one or both dogs are too stiff.

If you want to try again after breaking it off, wait a couple of minutes before re-engaging to let them cool off. Keep the dogs moving during the break and keep up the happy talk even as you disengage. Put the problem dog(s) through some obedience paces at some distance. Then try again.

For more information on ways to separate aggressive dogs as well as ways to use behavior modification to retrain an aggressive dog, download Jean Donaldson’s Fight! A Practical Guide to Dog-Dog-Aggression.

Breaking Up Dog Fights

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Fight! eBook from Whole Dog Journal
Excerpted from Fight!: A Practical Guide to the Treatment of Dog-Dog Aggression by Jean Donaldson

There is no golden standard for breaking up a dogfight, but there are as many opinions as there are dog owners. My recommendation is to try a sudden aversive, such as a loud noise near the combatants as a first line of defense. Bang pots and pans or steel water dishes together while yelling. Cease the instant the dogs disengage.

If this doesn’t work (try for two or three seconds, then move on), the two most experienced people, wearing the animal control gloves, will each pull one dog off as follows:

  1. Grip the base of the tail where it joins the body
  2. Pull both dogs simultaneously quickly out and up, raising the rear quarters off the ground

Secure both dogs with leashes and assess for damage.

If this doesn’t work, use citronella and, if that doesn’t work, pepper spray. Other people present should be securing all dogs not involved in the fight.

The very last resort to consider is pulling dogs out by their collars or necks. This is because of the significant risk of an accidental or re-directed bite. This risk is even greater if you are without gloves, which offer some protection. Many of the worst bites are sustained putting hands into fights.

For more information on ways to separate aggressive dogs as well as ways to use behavior modification to retrain an aggressive dog, download Jean Donaldson’s Fight! A Practical Guide to Dog-Dog-Aggression.

Most Common Types of Dog-Dog Aggression

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Fight! eBook from Whole Dog Journal
Excerpted from Fight!: A Practical Guide to the Treatment of Dog-Dog Aggression by Jean Donaldson

When you hear hoof-beats coming over the hill in Wyoming, think horses, not zebras. While it could absolutely be that there are zebras – or albino miniature ponies with pink ribbons in their manes – coming, the first and most obvious thing to rule out is horses.

When it comes to dogs who don’t do well with other dogs there are some common rule-outs that account for the bulk of cases. These are:

  • Dogs that come on too strong. They appear hyper-motivated and have coarse social skills. Then this type presents along with an impoverished play history, I’m going to refer to them as “Tarzan”.
  • Dogs that are sensitive to the proximity of other dogs. They may present with frank fearlessness or more subtly, as asocial animals that get snappy if a dog gets too close or makes social overtures.
  • Dog-dog resource guarding
  • Harassment, i.e. bullying or “hazing” of other dogs.
  • Play skills deficits – dogs that play but lack some of the features of normal play, causing frequent tipovers of their play into fighting.
  • Strong genetic predisposition to compulsively fighting

For more details on how to identify the specific aggressive behavior your dog may be exhibiting and ways to use behavior modification to retrain a dog, download Jean Donaldson’s Fight!, A Practical Guide to Dog-Dog-Aggression.

An Ounce of Prevention

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Feisty Fido Book from Whole Dog Journal
Excerpted from Feisty Fido by Patricia McConnell, Ph.D and Karen London, Ph.D

In some ways, your dog’s reaction to other dogs is like a bad habit. Every time she barks and lunges, she’s like a would-be quitter having just one more cigarette. Keeping this in mind, anything you can do to prevent an incident is worth doing. Prevention is not giving up. It’s a way of protecting your dog from situations that may overwhelm or frighten her and act to reinforce those old, bad habits.

You’ve probably already spent a lot of time trying to prevent incidents while walking in the neighborhood, but it always helps to review what you’re doing now to stay out of trouble while you’re working on a treatment plan. Most people with feisty fidos try to walk their dogs at quiet times of day. (We’ve learned to assume any dog out walking at 5:30 AM might be trouble!) When you do encounter another dog, don’t hesitate to cross the street or turn and go the other way. To make this possible, try to walk on streets that have little traffic. Obviously, you are already avoiding streets with dogs running loose, but you also might want to look out for yards with high hedges that may conceal approaching dogs until they are too close. Most importantly, if any situation makes you feel concerned, avoid it. Many of our clients skipped their neighborhood walks during the early stages of training, and found other ways to exercise their dogs. (See Play Together, Stay Together for ideas.) Don’t think you are being a wimp for avoiding trouble. You’re being a wise and thoughtful dog owner with a carefully thought out rehabilitation plan.

For more tips and advice on dealing with a leash-reactive dog, purchase Feisty Fido from Whole Dog Journal.

Using a “U-Turn” To Leave Trouble Behind

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Feisty Fido Book from Whole Dog Journal
Excerpted from Feisty Fido by Patricia McConnell, Ph.D. and Karen London, Ph.D

A “U-Turn” is a great tool to have in your training repertoire. A U-Turn is exactly what it sounds like: You and your dog are walking forward, and on your cue, you both instantly turn 180 degrees and move in the opposite direction. Your dog turns because he knows your cue means: “Quick! We’re going to play the turn-around-really-fast-and-go-the-other-way game!” Your dog doesn’t turn because he hits the end of the leash. That would increase the tension and could elicit the very behavior you’re trying to avoid. He turns because he knows the game, hears the cue and almost without thinking, wheels away from trouble.

Like Watch, the action itself is simple, but it needs to be mastered to be truly useful. And like Watch, a U-Turn is another behavior that is incompatible with your dog barking, lunging or stiffening. A U-Turn differs from a Watch cue in that you use it when you know your dog will be too aroused to perform a Watch or has already barked or lunged at another dog. The goal of a U-Turn is to get you out of sticky situations, and if you and your dog master both the Watch and the U-Turn, you’ll be able to handle most of the situations that life can throw at you.

For more tips and advice on dealing with a leash-reactive dog, purchase Feisty Fido from Whole Dog Journal.

Why Is My Dog So Rude?

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Feisty Fido Book from Whole Dog Journal
Excerpted from Feisty Fido by Patricia McConnell, Ph.D and Karen London, Ph.D

Right now your dog barks, lunges, or reacts problematically when she sees other dogs, but what if she had a different response? What if, when she saw another dog, she immediately turned her head and looked at you, wagging her tail in happy anticipation? We call this exercise “Watch” and for a seemingly simple exercise, it has a long list of advantages. First of all, your dog can’t bark and lunge toward another dog when her attention is directed to your face. Teaching an incompatible behavior is a time-honored and elegant solution to a lot of behavioral problems, and it works wonderfully with fidos who are a bit too feisty on leash walks. Additionally, by teaching your dog to look at your face when she sees another dog, you’re teaching her what you want her to do, rather than hoping she’ll figure it out herself.

Start teaching Watch in a quiet place where you’re the only show in town, and there’s nothing else competing for your dog’s attention. Don’t underestimate how distracting one of your other dogs can be. Start training when you and your feisty fido are all by yourselves. Arm yourself with a generous pile of treats by your side or in a bait bag, and wait until your dog is looking away from you. Say “Watch” in a clear, animated voice and hope your dog turns his head and looks toward you. If he does, immediately “mark” that response by saying “good!” or clicking if you use clicker training. Instantly follow that up with a yummy treat OR a game of tug or fetch IF your dog adores playing with toys. Remember that every trainee gets to define what reinforcement is best, so we can’t say which is more effective for your dog – toys or food. Toys have the advantage of overwhelming nervousness with positive emotions that are associated with relaxation and comfort, but chicken is the way to many a dog’s heart.

For more tips and advice on dealing with a leash-reactive dog, purchase Feisty Fido from Whole Dog Journal.

How Do You Judge an Herb’s Quality?

Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care Book from Whole Dog Journal

In our age of modern medicine, when illnesses are treated in high-tech hospitals with laser surgery and powerful prescription drugs, it is easy to forget that until the 20th century, plants were the medicines that kept people and their companion animals well. In fact, most of the prescription drugs in use today were derived and synthesized from plants, and outside of Canada and the United States, plants remain the world’s primary healing agents.

How do you judge an herb’s quality?

The best dried herbs are fragrant, flavorful, colorful and pungent. They don’t look like shredded hay or smell like cardboard. These plants are dried at low temperature with lively air circulation and stored away from heat, light and humidity, the enemies of all dried herbs. The best herbs for medicinal use are grown organically or wildcrafted from pollution-free sources, then handled with care at every step of their drying and storage. By their look, smell and taste you can recognize these plants – the peppermint is obviously peppermint and the chamomile is obviously chamomile.

Here are simple rules to keep in mind as you evaluate dried herbs. The larger the piece, the longer it lasts. Powdered herbs begin to lose their flavor as soon as they are ground. The more a leaf is exposed to heat, light, the open air and humidity, the faster it loses its healing properties as well as its taste.

This information will help you answer a commonly asked question: “How long can a dried herb be kept before it loses ifs effectiveness?” The answer is, “It depends.” While most herbs should probably be replaced after a year, the most sensible rule is to look, smell, touch and taste. Roots and bark hold their fragrance, color and taste longer than delicate flowers, yet even blossoms and leaves can retain their herbal identity for much longer periods if properly stored.

From long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care, this 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

Do Dogs Require a “Balanced Diet”?

Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care Book from Whole Dog Journal

The notion that every meal an animal eats should be completely balanced is a recent invention resulting from the use of packaged foods. If you were restricted to the same food in the same amount every day for the rest of your life, each identical meal would have to be nutritionally balanced because you would have no other source of nutrients. But you don’t eat this way, you don’t feed your children that way and animals in the wild don’t eat that way. It’s completely unnatural. What matters is not whether tonight’s dinner contains 100 percent of every nutrient your body requires but whether all of the combined foods you eat today or this week provide them.

From long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care, this 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

The Advantage of Natural Remedies

Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care Book from Whole Dog Journal

In our age of modern medicine, when illnesses are treated in high-tech hospitals with laser surgery and powerful prescription drugs, it is easy to forget that until the 20th century, plants were the medicines that kept people and their companion animals well. In fact, most of the prescription drugs in use today were derived and synthesized from plants, and outside of Canada and the United States, plants remain the world’s primary healing agents.

The surgical techniques and pharmaceutical drugs that define Western medicine work well in acute or crisis conditions, but they are far less successful in the treatment of chronic illnesses. This is because Western medicine as practiced by physicians and veterinarians is allopathic, which means that its focus is the alleviation of physical symptoms, not finding and treating the cause. Chronic conditions like arthritis, skin and coat problems, gingivitis, ear infections, asthma and allergies may improve temporarily when symptoms are masked, but they usually recur and, over time, grow worse. For this reason, conventional or orthodox medicine considers these conditions irreversible and incurable. In addition, drugs and surgery carry hidden costs in adverse side effects that range from negligible to fatal.

The advantage of natural remedies is that they often work as well as or better than conventional treatments, have fewer side effects and address the cause of a condition, resulting in its improvement or cure. It is because of allopathic medicine’s limitations that so many Americans have begun to explore more natural approaches to health and healing. This is not to say that natural therapies are successful in treating every condition in every person or pet, but they offer a first line of defense in the prevention of problems and, when an illness is well-established, they can help speed healing.

By far, the world’s most widely used natural therapy is herbal medicine. Every culture on every continent has experimented with local plants and developed a tradition of diagnosis and use, a repertoire based on experience and observation.

Excerpted from long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care. This 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

Contaminated Drinking Water

Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care Book from Whole Dog Journal

The purity of your pet’s drinking water is a serious consideration. In his book Pet Allergies, Alfred Plechner lists contaminated drinking water as a common cause of health problems. The simple act of replacing tap water with distilled, bottled or filtered water can bring surprising, dramatic improvements.

Water is the only thing to which your pet should have unlimited access. Animals know when they’re thirsty and they should have free access to clean containers of pure, healthy water.

Municipal water contamination has become a national concern now that chemical pesticides, fertilizers, industrial solvents, road salt, bacteria, parasites and heavy metals have found their way into kitchen faucets. Whatever you can do to improve your drinking water is worth the effort. Your own health as well as your pet’s health will improve.

Excerpted from long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care. This 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

The Epidemics of Modern Animal Illnesses

Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care Book from Whole Dog Journal

Pet food manufacturers and the veterinarians courted by their sales representatives have convinced most Americans that because commercial pet foods are designed in laboratories by people with academic credentials and because their labels contain long lists of nutrients and claims of being “scientifically balanced” and “nutritionally complete,” they are superior to anything an animal might otherwise consumer. Table scraps, raw food, “people food” and any supplements that might disrupt the commercial food’s precisely controlled distribution of vitamins and minerals are particularly frowned upon.

There is no doubt that commercial pet foods sustain life. Dogs, cats and other animals live for years on foods that come out of bags, can and boxes. But do these foods promote health? If they did, our companion animals would enjoy long, happy lives free of arthritis, hip dysplasia, eye problems, ear problems, fleas and other parasites, gum disease, lick granulomas, thyroid imbalances, skin and coat problems, personality disorders, birth defects, breeding problems, diabetes, cancer and other major and minor illnesses.

Before World War II, most Americans fed their pets raw bones and table scraps. Today, everyone uses convenience foods, and pet food companies are industry giants. Diet isn’t the only thing that has changed. So has life expectancy, with the life span of many breeds now less that half what it was two or three decades ago. Skin and coat problems are so common that we accept them as unavoidable, and today’s veterinarians routinely treat conditions that used to be unusual or even rare.

Of course, more has changed in the last 50 years than our pet’s diets. Environmental pollution, toxic chemicals and stress take their toll on companion animals as much as they do people. But a growing number of experts attribute the epidemics of modern animal illnesses in large part to diet.

Excerpted from long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care. This 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

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