Motivation for a dog is different to a human’s so something quite simple to us means something very different to our dog. In this section, we look to outline the primary senses of the dog, how a dog interprets gestures and how to utilise this information to get a good relationship

Senses.

It’s important to understand a dogs senses as they are one of the key elements to a dogs behaviour.

The dogs senses are

	Smell;
	Sound;
	Sight;
	Taste
	Touch.

This is one of the dog most powerful senses. The average dog has around 220 million scent receptors against our 5 million – quite a difference!

A dog will use the scent of a particular food to determine a preference over taste – this is an important factor to remember when we come to training and motivation.

Dogs gather all their information by smell as their eyesight is much less well developed. If you watch a dog in a new environment, he will use his nose to detect things – when out walking is a prime example! You will no doubt be subjected to stop start walking while your dog investigates corners, lamposts, anything that has a scent on it. Although this is indiscernible to you, it’s very acute to your dog.

Sound.

A dog’s ability to detect high range sounds is one his legacies from the wolf. Although their hearing is much more acute than ours, one of their big advantages is the mobility of their ears. They can scan the environment for sound and collect the waves – an experiment conducted at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology showed that dogs could locate the source of a sound in six hundredths of a second.

A dog’s sight is not wonderful. They have better lateral vision that us but possess much poorer binocular vision. You will probably see that a dog shows a preference for a particular colour of ball, this isn’t down to the colour as such, just because it stands out better to the dog against the background.

The angle of vision varies from breed to breed with the Border Collie being the most superior.

A dogs sense of taste is governed by its sense of smell. As a general rule, you will find dogs prefer foodstuffs with a distinct smell, hence why they like unbleached tripe (yuck!).

Body Language

What seems normal body language to us, is not to a dog. Someone looking directly and smiling to us seems a friendly gesture, to a dog it’s something completely different.

Direct eye contact to a dog is a challenge so we need to teach our dogs that eye contact with us is safe. Dogs will often use direct eye contact to threaten another dog – indeed an alpha dog will rarely resort to violence, just piercing eye contact.

Showing teeth within a smile may seem normal but a dog will bare its teeth to another to say "I’ve got teeth and I’ll use them if I have to!" As with eye contact, we need to signal to our dog that this isn’t threatening and he will pick this up by learning from us.

Your puppy is quite tiny now (enjoy it while it lasts) so it’s important to make him feel comfortable. Your height when you stand over him could make him feel quite threatened so it’s best to crouch down when interacting with him as this is a much more open and friendly gesture for him.

Ensure all your speech and commands to him are in a friendly voice, you will get much more from him.

You can learn a lot from a dogs eyes and posture. If he is unhappy about something (e.g. his first experience of a cat), he will not relax. His eyes will be wide, ears up and if he goes into a down, it will be with all his legs underneath him – this enables him to launch from the ground at speed.

If a dog is relaxed, his eyes will be soft, ears neither up nor completely flat, just relaxed and when in a down, he will put his legs to the side. If your dog goes into "sunbathing" pose (on his back with his legs in the air!), he is totally at home – there is no need to be in a sharp position.

Look for these signs in your puppy, you’ll soon learn to recognise his mood!