My Biggest Regret

Apr 4

I’ve been a dog guardian for 22 years. I had two incredibly sweet Schnauzers before my current pup. I miss them terribly, and will always love them.

The recent death of the last of their doggie friends brought back a lot of memories. Good memories that make me smile, but also many regrets.

And I have to say, my biggest regret isn't about the time I didn't spend with them. I spent a lot of time with them. But my regret is about the things I didn't see because I didn’t know to look for them.

For the longest time, I fell into the same trap most of us do: I thought loving them was the same thing as understanding them. I assumed that because our bond was strong, I automatically knew what they needed. I bought the best food, worked from home so they wouldn’t be alone much, gave them plenty of exercise and play.

Alas… I was missing a crucial piece. Understanding their individual and species-specific needs, and the way they communicate them to us. Learning Doglish.

And I’m not just talking about the audible parts of it. The moment I learned about "calming signals" and the subtle body language of dogs, everything started shifting in my mind. There were a lot of heavy realizations. I started looking back and seeing all the times my pups were expressing their needs, “speaking” loud and clear, but I was essentially deaf to it. I didn’t know what to look for.

We often mislabel what’s right in front of us, because we look at it from a human perspective.

The "Smile": We see pulled-back lips and think they're happy, but often, that "smile" is a grimace of pure discomfort. The dog might be saying “Please don’t stand so close to me and hold that phone in my face, I love you but you’re making me feel uncomfortable.”
The "Crazy" Look: We see wide, so-called "whale eyes" and a long, lolling tongue and think they're just having a blast. In reality, that’s often a dog in a state of intense physiological stress. A dog whose brain is flooded with dopamine and cortisol, and who has quite literally “lost their mind” for the moment. It takes up to 24 hours for cortisol to leave the body, and while present, it affects the dog’s immune system. If they get this excited every day, they are likely to suffer from chronic stress, which invites all kinds of trouble, physically and mentally.
The Leash Puller: We call it "bad manners," but what if it’s actually a physical manifestation of anxiety, stress, or overwhelm? What if we were actually the ones teaching them to pull, inadvertently? And what if that pulling affected their posture, leading to discomfort or pain? Especially when a dog is lead by the collar, the list of potential injuries is jarring, and many will not be obvious right away. Dogs will try to get away from things that cause them discomfort or pain. If pulling is leading to discomfort, they will paradoxically pull more, in an attempt to escape the tension.
The Barker: We see a "difficult" dog, but what if they’re just desperately shouting that they feel unsafe? Or maybe just telling you that there’s someone coming down the driveway and they’d like you to acknowledge that? For a minimum of 15,000 years we’ve relied on dogs barking to alert us of danger. Arguably, we wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t coevolved with us, and protected us along the way. This isn’t something we can now just turn off. But we can acknowledge it as communication, and show them that we hear them, let them know we got the message by looking at what they are barking at, together, and assure them that we will take care of the situation.
The Selective Listener: We call it "disobedience," when in reality, they simply could be completely overwhelmed by their environment, and frozen, shut down. They may also be deeply immersed in analyzing a scent. Dogs have roughly 220 million to 2 billion olfactory receptor cells, compared to only about 5 to 10 million in humans. Scent will always take priority over sound (like a shouting human), in a dog’s brain. They can’t help it.

The Missing Piece in Training

Here is the hard truth that most traditional training ignores: You cannot "train away" a feeling, a need, that simply has to be conveyed via communication, in Doglish.

Sure, you can suppress, or redirect a behavior. You can use corrections or redirections to stop the barking or the jumping for a moment. But if that behavior was your dog’s way of communicating a deeper need or fear, that message is still there. If you don't address the root cause, it’s just going to bubble up somewhere else, and often in a way that’s even harder to manage. And here’s the kicker: You may have no idea where it originated, and how it connects to a need you overlooked, ignored, or suppressed.

If you feel like you’ve been training in circles and nothing is sticking, it’s likely not because you’re bad at training. Maybe you’re simply trying to fix a symptom instead of listening to what your dog is actually trying to tell you.