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.…
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.…
Wolves, the closest living relative of the domestic dog, barely bark at all. Researchers who study wolves generally describe barking as a relatively uncommon part of adult wolf communication.…
Dogs experience the world in ways that are very different from people. Their senses are sharper, their curiosity is constant, and many everyday behaviors reflect how they investigate sounds, scents, objects, movement, and the people around them.…
The room is dark except for the blue-white glow of your phone. You’re halfway through reading something when a cold, damp nose presses into the back of your hand.…
Some dogs seem to save their best head tilts for a remarkably short list of words.
You can talk through an entire story and get nothing. Then you say ‘ball,’ ‘walk,’ or the name of a favorite toy, and your dog’s head tips sideways almost on cue.…