Saturday 20 October 2007

dog body language

Penny tries to let us know what she's thinking or needing but we often misunderstand her because we don't speak 'dog'.

I do think humans are pretty good at reading dog body language, though. I read somewhere that if animated movies include canine characters, most humans will notice inconsistencies, so it's a challenge for the animators. I think it was the movie 'Babe' that was mentioned but I can't find any references to this on the Net.

However, in searching, I found lots of sites about dog body language.

'A dog's eyes are the windows to his soul'.
This quote by Turid Rugaas headed a page at Australian Canine Current Events where there is a huge list of sites dealing with dog body language.

I followed the link to Turid Rugaas' site and found an article called
Calming signals: the art of survival’ There are plenty of photos of dogs using different calming signals. They're in the link called 'Gallery'.

Paws Across America also had a good discussion of how to interpret dogs’ body language.

The UK ‘dog listener’ Stan Rawlinson, says that we need to realise that our dogs don't think as we do:
We are further hampered by the fact that we tend to think that our pets can understand complex thought patterns; we assume a dog's level of understanding is on a par with our own. This is known as “anthropomorphism”, the dictionary definition is “The attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behaviour to nonhuman organisms or inanimate objects”. It is a bit like saying that a vine climbed up the tree to getter a better view of the garden.

In all my searching about on the Net at least I was reassured about the treatment of the animals used in the filming of the movie 'Babe'.

I guess the site that I found the most fascinating was one where there are instruction on how to make an animated movie (at a simple level) of your dog talking. I think it would be great fun, but I bet it would be harder than it looks. Still, it might be fun to try...

4 comments:

Noah the Airedale said...

Hi, Noah here.
You were asking how much I weigh and how often we're given meals. Well I weigh in at about 29 kilos. My sisters are about 21-22 kilos. I look boofy at the moment cause my fur is long and I need an airecut which is happening soon.
We have one meal a day. It varies but its always raw. We're on the BARF diet which stands for bones and raw food.

Bye
Noah

Noah the Airedale said...

Sorry further to my last comment, we get 4 large drumsticks in one go. Our favourite meal is a combination of one barf pattie, tinned tomatoes, baked beans or tuna and an egg. Sometimes a dollop of yoghurt gets thrown on top.

Noah.

parlance said...

Noah, thanks for that info. I'm going to come over to your site and ask you more. I'm fascinated that you get baked beans and I need to ask you about the tomatoes. I've never fed Penny tomatoes, because I assumed that were not on the list of good foods for dogs because of the acidity.
I have read that one meal a day is better than two, but others said two a day was okay so I went with that.

Anonymous said...

Parlance and Penny, I think tomatoes are fine for dogs (only acid when cooked or juiced). My friend Levi steals tomatoes from the bushes when they are growing. He looks as if he has blood coming from his mouth. We are just catching up with your blog after our WONDERFUL holiday. What a lot of new stuff you have added.
Jabari