Two dogs meet in the yard after spending the day apart. They know each other well, and the greeting is relaxed. One dog sniffs the other’s shoulder, moves toward his head, and spends a few seconds investigating the area around his ear.…
Imagine your friend has spent the afternoon with her own dog. She steps through your doorway, says hello, and your dog comes over for a closer look. He sniffs her shoes, moves toward her trouser leg, and pauses at her hand.…
A walk that takes you fifteen minutes might take your dog twice as long. You know the route, there’s nothing unusual ahead, and you’ve already passed this particular patch of grass a hundred times.…
One dog drifts along a quiet trail with a loose body, nose moving from a tuft of grass to the edge of a tree root. Nothing has interrupted him.…
When a dog shifts his weight forward, the simplest thing you can say is that part of his body has moved closer to whatever has his attention. His feet don’t even have to leave the floor.…
A squirrel moves along the top of the fence. Your dog is already walking toward the yard when she stops halfway through a step. One front paw stays suspended a few inches above the ground.…
A faint scrape comes from beyond the fence, and your dog’s ears move before the rest of him does. One second he’s stretched out on the patio. The next, both ears have swung toward the sound.…
Your dog cruises happily around the block every morning, tail up, nose working overtime. Then you take her to a new trail and she plants her feet at the trailhead like the ground itself is suspicious.…
Walk in the door and find the couch cushion torn open, stuffing scattered across the floor and one corner ripped wide open. Or fresh gouges raked into the doorframe, right where a paw would reach for the handle.…
An umbrella can be completely ordinary to you and genuinely strange to your dog. Closed, it’s a narrow object leaning quietly by the door. Open it indoors and it suddenly becomes wide, dark, overhead, noisy, and much closer to the dog’s body than it was a second earlier.…