When I studied beauty therapy one of the subjects was about communication and the one thing that I remember clearly is that 98% of what we say is through body language, yet most of us do not seem to have a clear understanding of the way we communicate and mostly focus on what we say and not even on how we say it.

If we are able to focus more on this we would start to realise that dogs speak body language too and not English or any other language. The beautiful part is even though we should mostly base behaviour on training issues we could understand a lot more about dog behaviour if we observe their body language. This takes patience and understanding of the "language". Even though we cannot truly know exactly what dogs feel we can assess their behaviour. Positive behaviours would be squinting, licking of lips, no head on interactions, yawning, looking away, airplane ears, paw lift and many more. Negative or more aroused behaviour would be enlarged pupils, head on confrontation, growling etc

There are many more but these are things people miss when having dogs socialise and if missed could cause serious injury to both dogs and human. When you think about it if you let kids play in a park you are looking for signs that your child is not being bullied or being a bully well it's sort of the same with dogs. If you struggle to do this you can video tape your dog and see how your dog interacts every second as well as how your response is towards your dog. Remember every behaviour that your dog is showing is a reaction as a result of his environment which includes even you.

Behaviour should not be labeled but treated purely as the behaviour it is and could be modified through training by replacing it with a wanted behaviour. We can't know or change what dogs think, but we can manage the environment and shape the behaviour we want through positive reinforcement. This way the dog learns something knew and we get the behaviuor we want. To achieve this we need to understand basic behaviuor of dogs.

For more on Husky behaviour and training read the following book that I wrote about Huskies called Winter Dogs; Living with Huskies as pet Dogs.

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