The stress signals owners read as personality

The stress signals owners read as personality

Ask an owner how they know their dog is stressed and they will say trembling, whining, panting. Those are the loud ones. The quiet ones happen dozens of times a day and mostly get filed under personality: "he's a licky dog", "she always yawns when the kids come in", "he just looks away when you talk to him".

Where the list of signals comes from

In the late 1990s a Dutch research group set out to measure what a stressed dog actually does. They exposed dogs to a range of unpleasant things, from a loud noise to a brief restraint, and recorded both behaviour and stress hormones. The strongly aversive events produced a very low body posture and a rise in cortisol. The milder, social kinds of stress produced something subtler: restlessness, licking the snout, yawning, an open mouth, a lowered posture, paw lifting and body shaking. That study is the origin of most "calming signals" lists you will see.

A decade later, an Italian team asked nearly 1,200 dog owners which behaviours they read as stress. Owners readily named the obvious ones. The subtle signals from the earlier study, yawning, lip licking, looking away, were recognised far less often. That gap is the whole reason this article exists.

The signals, and how to read them

None of these means much on its own. A dog yawns because it is tired; it licks its lips because it just ate. What you are looking for is the signal appearing out of context, or several appearing together.

  • Lip or nose licking with no food around, often quick and repeated.
  • Yawning when the dog is clearly not tired, especially during greetings, hugs or being leaned over.
  • Turning the head or body away from a person or another dog. Owners often read this as aloofness.
  • Whale eye, where the whites show because the head is turned but the eyes stay on the thing.
  • A lowered posture, weight back, tail down, ears back.
  • Paw lifting and shaking off as if wet, when the dog is dry.
  • Pacing and an inability to settle.

What to do with this

The point is not to diagnose anything. It is to notice. If your dog lip-licks and turns away every time your nephew hugs it, the dog has been telling you something for months. Give it somewhere to go: a bed in a quiet corner that is genuinely off limits to visitors is more useful than any product with "calming" on the label.

We do not sell anything that claims to treat anxiety, and we would be suspicious of anything that does. What helps is an environment that gives the dog choices: a retreat, a predictable routine, and something to do with its mouth and nose when it is unsettled.

What we stock for this

References

  1. Beerda B, Schilder MBH, van Hooff JARAM, de Vries HW, Mol JA (1998). Behavioural, saliva cortisol and heart rate responses to different types of stimuli in dogs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 58:365–381. sciencedirect.com
  2. Mariti C, Gazzano A, Moore JL, Baragli P, Chelli L, Sighieri C (2012). Perception of dogs' stress by their owners. Journal of Veterinary Behavior 7(4):213–219.
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