On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals – Import Author: Visit Amazon's Turid Rugaas Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0954803213 | Format: PDF
On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals – Import Description
- Hardcover: 82 pages
- Publisher: Qanuk Ltd; New Ed edition (November 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0954803213
- ISBN-13: 978-0954803216
- Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
This is a simple little book. It's cheap and doesn't look like much, but the content can revolutionize your communication with your dog. It's about dog language, but not about the "big" wolf postures of dominance or submission that many of us already know about. This book is about the wide range of subtle signals (about 28, I think) that dogs use to communicate "please calm down" towards other dogs - or their owners. Because owners stress their dogs a lot, unintentionally. Like when we practice obedience exercises. In the middle of training, the dog starts looking away, yawning or sniffing the grass! Bored? Stubborn? Dominant? No, it's probably sending you signals to ask you to calm down!
I attended a weekend seminar with Turid Rugaas last year which opened my eyes and I know that this works. Since then, and also since looking at video recordings from dog meetings, I now understand that dogs "talk" all the time. When meeting us or another dog, every single move or glance can carry a meaning. The other dog understands, if he has been allowed to "practice" dog language in lots of meetings with other dogs, but we, the humans, the supposed alphas, don't understand. Instead we try to teach the dog OUR verbal language. How frustrating for the dog! Shouldn't we first learn the dog's language?
This is a book that makes you understand that dog language is so much more than where the tail or the ears are. It's about signals that our own pets send to us daily. With this book we can start looking at our own dog and see much, much more than we saw before. We will actually start to understand what our dog tells us. And, even more thrilling, we can use the dog's language ourselves and be understood by the dog!
During my five, post-retirement years as a shelter volunteer, I've accumulated over six shelf-feet of dog books, most relating to behavior and training. Many were skimmed and forgotten; others required several readings to achieve maximum effect; some I kept only as examples of what I have come to consider bad practice.
In contrast, OTTWD produced an immediate "Ah ha!" reaction, and I reread it occasionally as much to renew the sense of inspiration as to glean more information from its scant pages. (As other reviewers have pointed out, there are other, far more exhaustive treatments of the vocabulary of dogs -- such as those by Roger Abrantes and Stanley Coren.)
I had barely finished reading the author's first, rather sketchy, case-study (which describes the role of her dog, Vesla, in communicating with the client's dog -- a recurring theme throughout) when I started to think about a pair of Border Collie mixes, Amelia and Cinder, at our shelter.
They are as close to feral as any dogs I've ever been around. We suspect they grew up from puppies as junkyard dogs. Among the dozens of our all-volunteer staff who have tried to befriend them, only three of the most empathetic, female volunteers have progressed to the point where they can leash them for a walk. Amelia and Cinder always responded to me by barking and retreating, even though I already knew to avoid assertive body posture, eye contact, use of my deep, male voice, etc. I eventually quit trying to connect with them.
The possibility that Ms. Rugaas opened for me was to use another dog as an intermediary. I decided to enlist the services of Mercedes, a young, high-strung, female Pit Bull that I was already teaching basic obedience.
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