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Dog Intelligence & Communication
In their natural environment, our domestic dogs would get into organized packs. Each dog would have a determined social status, with concrete rights and duties and the pack in general would rarely interact with any unknown canine. In fact, if they would find a dog that belongs to another pack they wouldn't trust it and if the group may feel threatened by this foreign dog , they would scare it away with threatening gestures and big hostility signs.
CANINE COMMUNICATION
Despite this fact, we expect our dog to interact in a different way with other dogs. It is normal for the dogs belonging to different packs/families, no matter the gender age and size, to find each other and interact everyday on the streets or at the park, without any kind of conflict or confrontation.
This is possible only for two reasons. The first one is that the domestic dogs, during their evolution from the wolf, probably suffer a natural selection that left them on neotonic state, meaning, stuck on a youthful behavior for the rest of their lives. Dogs never behave like adult wolves. In fact, they show great flexibility in their social interaction with the other dogs along their whole lives, that is, if they don't keep on showing themselves even as playful as puppies.
The second factor that makes possible for our dogs to interact among each other with such naturalness and with no violence is precisely the early socialization we submit them to. We teach them since they are little puppies that the other dogs, even when they don't have the same smell or the same aspect as their pack partners, are equally friendly and reliable.
In any case, we can still find in our dogs some traces of the wolf social conduct on their behaviour when we take them to the park. It is true that they freely interact with other dogs, but taking always into consideration some rituals, a series of rules of conduct aimed to make possible for the dog to be in front of an unkown dog and stablish a friendly relation with it, even when it may be a very fletting one.
Besides that, in order to let other dogs know about their existance and intentions, dogs don't need to mandatorily agree with each other, it is also possible to stand in front of the others in different ways such as marking their territories with urine or carefully choosing the best place to defecate.
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FIRST LESSON
Learning how to communicate with your dog will require time and effort, but it will also give you both freedom. As any new language, it will seem kind of strange at the beginning: you and your dog, both carefully looking at each other, trying to interpret each others the facial and body gestures in order to understand what they mean. However, with some practice, the communication between you and your dog will soon be fluent. The canine training lessons can help you understand your dog better, but before registering on them, think it carefully. Are you ready to abandon your favorite armchair when it is dark outside and a cold wind is blowing on the street, just to get the lessons?
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