Dog Behavior Explained 
A dog standing in a backyard may notice another dog hundreds of feet away long before either animal comes into view.
Researchers who study canine olfaction describe a nose built for exactly this kind of separation.…
Is your dog tasting a scent you can’t detect? Waiting for food? Feeling nauseated? Reacting to an uncomfortable social moment? Or did her tongue simply continue into empty space after a lick?…
When your dog plants its nose an inch from yours, it’s almost always curiosity doing the work, not affection.
Your dog isn’t checking whether it loves you. It’s reading you, the way you might glance at a friend’s expression to see how their day went.…
A dog thrashing a stuffed animal from side to side is running a movement sequence built to rapidly incapacitate small prey.
That whip-fast head shake did not start as play.…
Before a dog does almost anything else on a walk, it breathes in.
That first inhale at the curb, the fence post, the mailbox, is doing more work than most owners realize.…
At a dinner party, deliberately turning your back on someone would be questionable manners. Dogs have apparently declined to adopt this rule.
Your dog walks over, settles directly beside your legs, and then rotates until his face points toward the room and his back points toward you.…
Three commercials go by without so much as an ear twitch from the dog sprawled across the couch. Then the fourth one starts, and he’s on his feet before the jingle even finishes, barking at a screen he’d ignored for the last twenty minutes.…
A hairbrush is an odd thing for a dog to deliver. It doesn’t squeak, bounce, dispense food, or look much like anything you would normally throw across the room.…
Your dog may have a perfectly good bed, a patch of sunlight, and an entire couch available to him. None of that matters once you stand up. You walk from the office to the kitchen.…