How Dogs Tell Us What We Need to Know | Barbara Sherman | TEDxSandhillsCommunityCollege

good afternoon, how many of you have lived with the dog, ah, the vast majority of you

know

the joy of that experience and the remarkable interactions we have with the

dogs

we live with and how we communicate both verbally and non-verbally and how they communicate. they. Excuse us in a similar way, so

what

I'm going to talk to you about today is some of those ways that we can overcome some of the difficulties that

dogs

have, so if you live with dogs, you

know

something about that communication, the fact That when you put on your running shoes, you are asking your dog if he wants to go and

what

your dog is doing.

Jump for joy. It follows you throughout the house. Ready. Ready to go. If you put on the program to go to work, choose what your dog could do. sulking, going to your bed, looking sweet and sad, so you and your dog are communicating that way when you meet us that day, you may find that your dog appears and puts his head on your lap seemingly so empathetic with your feelings which is quite remarkable. Isn't this social in

tell

igence of dogs that we have lived as humans with dogs for thousands of years and dogs have really perfected this type of in

tell

igence where they notice things visually and also sounds and we communicate in many ways in my role as a veterinary behaviorist from North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine clients come to see us with their dogs and their dogs tell me stories about the intelligence of their dogs, the fact that they know so much, they do tricks and can show me many even skills complexities that their dog has, but they come to us because there is something that the dog can't learn and it baffles them like if he learned all these other things, why can he learn this particular behavior or, more commonly, not perform a certain behavior and we?

I'll talk about some of them and what we often find is that the learning impediment may have something to do with anxiety and fear, so what I would like to do is share some examples from our clinic of some of the things that we see and then in ways that we could help the dogs as we move forward and express our compassionate care for them and our desire to live in harmony with them as well, so here our cute reference video for this clinic, the dog barks and jumps and this is the mode In case of a touching situation, another option is to use the keep away signal, the signal that says perhaps when approaching a friendly stranger where the dog says: I don't know, you'll come back, stay away from my owner, here's the threat that I'm giving them a growl and a growl and at that point I really didn't want him to at least break down good and this may be familiar to some of you dogs who are a dog who is never destructive when the owner is home and yet when they leave him just destroy the blinds choose the moldings around the door in an apparent attempt to escape from slavery and go to the owner then what we often call separation anxiety and I want to show you some examples of how dogs express themselves and these emotional states of anxiety and fear we are going to show two videos here two videos and this is my therapy dog ​​Kenya and I am there on the right and she on the left, a person she knows very well will approach her and on the right a stranger will approach her friendly that she doesn't know either, so if you start the video on the left and then stop at my sign and then stop there and then the video on the right, you can see a friendly stranger approaching. and watch his behavior, so the video on the right, please, he got a friendly greeting and stop there and compare these two videos, it's pretty subtle, this dog is not aggressive at all, but he is expressing something in a pretty subtle way, is very different in response to a direct approach from a person.

Many dogs feel a little threatened by a quick, direct approach from a person and she is doing a signal that we sometimes call looking away, where the dog lowers his head and looks away, we see that in other dogs and I want to just mention my little model here before we go any further and this dog is actually posed in the Look Away posture. I don't know if you guys can see that, but when I approach this dog, she looks away and that's a really significant behavior. It's a behavior of deference and he says, I mean, you're no harm, but could we do this differently?

Could we sit down to meet and get to know each other? Could we have a different way of interacting besides this? So let's look at some other videos. In our clinic, where we see a little more activity, we see dogs trying to escape, they pant excessively, they are looking for a way out, they sit on their owners feet trying to connect with the owner and often they also look at the owner almost as if they are saying save me from this situation in this video you will see another anxious dog you see this dog again looking around you have the feeling that he might try to escape he is sitting on the owner's foot and looking at the owner it is very common and he has also yawned and we see yawning as something commonly associated with anxiety behaviors and dogs like that are not ready for a nap and this dog again, when I got closer, he started wagging his tail, but as I got closer, he realized what a Sometimes we call is the worried face that alleviates that worried look that says oh brother, how can I get out of this? he is starting to look away and is exhibiting what we sometimes call whale eye, it is evidence of the sclera where it is exposed and then the dog's ears are back so he has a posture that suggests his anxiety in this particular pose.

I want you to really take a look at the characteristics of this dog, so this is a dog that and the closeup of a friendly stranger crawled under a chair and observed the characteristics of its behavior so we have the tail tucked in a wide base a crouched posture the raised pond the raised paw is often associated with what we could call conflict i.e. the dog maybe it is interesting to think about can I escape from this should I stay here with my owner who is out of the field What should I do? It's a real conflict behavior and looking at this dog's face, so again, wouldn't you recognize that as a worried dog, the glow in the eyes is evident in that way?

Li, the ears are back and what could this dog do next? He is communicating his fear and anxiety and he is also telling us that if he is moving towards what we might call the flight or fight zone, he may decide that he would like to escape if he has that opportunity if he is trapped as he can. see. here, in reality, he can resort to aggression as a way of keeping the fearful stimulus, which in this case is a person, away from him, so that by understanding what the dogs are communicating to us, he will be able to respond appropriately and help mitigate or diminish those fear responses.

If we look at this dog again, this dog is very different from the previous one and yet his behavior is also in that domain of fear and anxiety. He has made a different decision, although his decision is not to flee, his decision is to fight correctly, so he is willing. To present yourself openly, maybe use aggression first as a threat, a growl and a snarl and then maybe even present yourself in a threatening or dangerous way, so dogs have many ways to respond, but the more we know the more we can connect and recognize these signs. the best we can handle them, so how do we handle them?

This is our stock and we market our behavioral medicine service and I'll show you just a couple of examples but one, I'm sorry, is to create a safe bubble for the dog adjacent to your own and we generally use the behavior that the dog knows very well like sitting. and stay and here you will see that we can play this video. You see a dog, the owners talking to the dog, there are some treats on the side and she is going to invite the dog to sit and stay and she will be the protector of the dog, the defender of the dog, she will prevent strangers from approaching, help this dog to adapt to a situation that makes him a little anxious and then this gives us the opportunity to use behavioral methods to help this dog. learn new answers here we see a young dog that developed there and revealed fears of strangers so we are going to use what we call systematic desensitization protocol and I will show you some steps here and that the owners are sitting there with the dog , the dog feels very comfortable with the owners, we will see the veterinary student approach and invite the dog to come closer to receive a treat, so we are going to systematically desensitize this dog to the approach of strangers, so watch the dogs jump , make sure there is our veterinary student and our technician is leading him, he moves forward feeling comfortable and taking a step back, it is not an easy task to pet and then as we move forward and this can be done quite quickly, this dog starts to learn new responses and begins to feel safe in a new or novel situation, so the student now invites the dog to come and sit and rewards him for this relaxed posture and lack of barking and aggression, which is what he expressed before .

Okay, that's it, okay, that's it now. As a kind of test, I'll show you a video and once you actually see the dog in this video, there's a dog in a minute and a Jack Russell terrier and a three-year-old boy are the father. It's a home video the father is behind the camera and the boy says he bites me it's a little hard to understand and I want to assure you that no one was hurt during the making of this video okay play it right a little growl I want If you watch the dog's behavior, he freezes a little, looks at the child and you will see him look at the parent, he is trying to eat in peace.

I think it would be his preference and what you'll see this Paul pick up in just a minute, there it is, so it's a very common conflict, easier when dogs get stuck, they're anxious, they don't really know what to do. This is the part where I get nervous and the parent is giving the dog some admission warnings. Trembling is something that some dogs exhibit when they are afraid or anxious and now look what the dog does looking at the owner saying save me, can't you imagine? So what are we going to do in this situation? How many of you feel? sympathy for the dog, yes, and the story was really that this dog was clearly becoming more manifesting some signs of aggression, some signs of distress as this child got bigger and bigger and more clearly exceeded the size of the dog and So what did we do?

Well, the first thing we did was create for the dog just a simple door in this small area, his cage and his bed are in the back, there is food and water, so we put a door and in the door there was an opening the size of a Jack Russell Terrier, so the dog could choose to go eat, sleep, rest and escape from the three year old when he

need

ed to and what the effect of this was was actually quite remarkable. We saw what we sometimes call a behavior. release and what that means is that suddenly the dog started exhibiting more and more normal and happy behaviors and the owners even said that he now seems happier and in fact the dog could find a time to eat and rest without worry about The actual well-being of the child and the dogs improved.

The other thing we did was establish positive relationships between the dog and the child. This is the hop and watch the transformation of the dog's behavior, meeting the dog's behavioral

need

s by controlling the dog's fear. and anxiety, we have created a much safer situation for this child and a much better lifestyle for this dog as well. I just want to mention before I close that number one is that dogs tell us what we need to know, so I urge you to watch. His dogs are on the lookout for those subtle signs of fear and anxiety and secondly, if you're interested in this, my colleagues and I wrote a book about these methods called Decoding Your Dog, thank you very much.