Stop Touching Your Dog: Reading Your Dog and Interacting Properly

I love petting my dogs. I love petting other people’s dogs. And more often than not, those dogs love to be petted. It’s an innate desire not just in me, but in every other dog lover to touch dogs. And it’s not just touching dogs in general, it’s touching and rubbing their faces.

Let’s think about this for a moment. A stranger has come up to you and decided to rub your face. This area of your body is not only a source of communication, but it’s also the source of three of the five senses. It’s a sensitive area of any animals body, so why is it okay to touch dogs like that?

American dog lover culture will generally dictate that a good dog is totally okay with being handled each and every way. The best dogs love being roughed up a little bit. Dogs need to be loved physically. There are two things wrong with this pervasive line of thought. The first problem is that it is dangerous. Without reading a dog properly, rubbing a dog’s face could get you growled at in the best case, and bitten in the worst case. The second point is that it influences poor training protocol. It encourages a dog to be reactive and act what we perceive to be as foolish.

We all know the major signs of an unhappy dog. The most obvious are raised hackles (hair on the back) and bearing teeth. Dogs showing these behaviors should obviously not be approached.

Let’s pretend we’re at the dog park, for example, where every dog could be considered free game to pet. Every dog’s hackles are up and teeth are showing everywhere while they are playing with each other. “It’s a sign of play,” is the first thought. “It’s pack behavior,” is another explanation I’ve heard from other dog park patrons.

A strange dog approaches your dog (who is perfectly trained and wouldn’t harm a fly of course). My first criteria in determining whether it’s safe for me and my dog to interact is looseness in the body. This can most often be seen in a dog that wags its tail and the whole body moves with it. On the other hand, a less happy dog has stiff body language. The tail will be the only thing moving on that dog. Today at the park, a strange mutt approaches and stands like a tree next to your dog, only his tail is moving.

Well, alright, maybe the strange dog is trying to solicit play from my dog. Body language can always have different interpretations based on context. But this dog begins to illustrate the opposite of the criteria for a happy dog: an unbreakable fixation on the target, also known as keying.

You see the fight about to break out and unfortunately, so does the strange dog’s owner. He runs over and starts man-handling his mutt to move him away. Here he is, touching his dog. He’s putting energy into the system. And when he’s put too much energy into his already combustible dog, it explodes. The dog’s owner gets bit in the wrist with two puncture wounds and my dog gets a good bite in her hips.

Now this situation didn’t actually happen, but it raises a point nonetheless. Touching and physically handling a dog can worsen a situation. Now if the dog fight actually happened, how many dog park patrons would rush in to grab their dogs? Too many is the only answer I have. I’ve seen the smart ones throw tennis balls, handfuls of dirt, and even emptying water bottles on them. These are all much better solutions than risking your health.

Make sure to consider your own safety first. They teach in CPR training classes to make sure you are safe before taking care of someone else. They even teach that in airplanes you should attach your oxygen mask first. How can you take care of someone else if you don’t take care of yourself?

From a training perspective, I have this quick and unedited video of my Guide Dog puppy in training. It's a low quality video, but it drives the point home. In this video you’ll see a dog that receives only the input of my hand on her back and talking to her. That’s all I’ve done. I’m not even roughing her up.

She’s gone crazy here. First she spins in circles then she decided to initiate play with Shimmer. Just by touching her I’ve started this. Immediately following this video I had the dogs go lay on their mats to chew on bones to diffuse some of the tension.

Now here is a video of me doing the same thing to Shimmer. Let’s evaluate the differences here.

Shimmer, unlike my GDB puppy, is not nearly as reactive. She looks at me and wags her tail a tiny bit.

(For the sake of fairness, we had the GDB puppy right next to Shimmer, just like when it was the puppy's turn.)

The reactivity of a dog is an important factor to understand when developing training protocol. Shimmer on one hand needs tons of cheerleading as I like to call it. All I need to do is pet her and get her wound up before a good training session will happen. That is entirely unlike my GDB puppy. With her I can just look at her and her tail will start going. This difference in reactivity is the premise for discovering how to motivate and train a dog.

I like to talk about a spectrum of dog personalities that range from soft dogs to hard dogs. Dogs can be a mix of both, or one or the other.

Soft dogs, Shimmer being a shining example, cannot be reprimanded firmly (with a stern voice of course; nothing more), cannot be man-handled, and most certainly cannot be expected to have confidence in most situations. Here is a dog that works well with certain types of touch. If I tried to rough Shimmer up by rubbing her face, what would happen? She would shut down and training would be over. The most I can do is scratch her sides and butt to get her tail wagging.

What I’m doing is touching my dog for a reason. I have specific training goals and have determined that touching my dog is the only way to meet them.

Now, dogs that are more reactive or in the middle of the hard-soft spectrum (like my GDB puppy) require no touching at all. None of my training goals require me to touch my dog. I know touching her is a bad idea based on the previous video; she’s going to go nuts. And while I appreciate a dog who has energy and is willing to work, it’s impossible to get good training done with that sort of exuberance.

For the reactive puppy, the most she gets from me is verbal praise and treats. I can get her to do anything I need with verbal praise and treats. Seeing my dog’s reactivity to physical praise has me using a training protocol without that source of motivation.

I love my dogs just as much as the next dog lover loves their own. I understand that touching dogs is a hard habit to break. My struggle with it will continue forever. But for the sake of safety and training, please be conscious of how your touch affects your dog.