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Understanding Natural Dog Behavior

The World According to Dogs

As a pet owner to have some knowledge of natural dog behavior can put you ahead of the game.  If you have this information you will know that he isn’t barking at everything that moves just to aggravate you.

Most important is you can use your knowledge of natural dog behavior during training.  He can be trained to understand human expectations for behavior and what we consider polite behavior and what we consider unacceptable.

 

        Smell:

In most people’s experience the most important natural dog behavior involves food and your dog being ruled by his stomach.  Actually it's not so much his stomach as his nose and his sense of smell.  He actually lives in a world of wonderful, delicious smells which has a big effect on natural dog behavior.  

His nose can detect hundreds of odors humans miss, smells that are on clothing, in the air, on objects and on the ground.  Your dog can tell one scent from hundreds of others, even if the scent is days old.  Knowing this about natural dog behavior explains why your canine best friend seems to stick his nose into everything, including some of the grossest stuff.

This also explains another natural dog behavior, using his nose, to recognize people. He isn’t trying to embarrass you when he put his nose on everyone, sometimes not very politely.  He is using a natural dog behavior to identify them.
 

    Sound:

Dogs have exceptionally keen hearing and can pick up sounds too faint for human ears. So, a very natural dog behavior is to respond (I refer to this as “alert”) to things they hear, things that we can't hear or don't pay attention to because our attention is else where.  

They can also detect sounds of a higher pitch (The silent dog whistle). It is a very natural dog behavior for your dog to be responsive to the human voice.  By changing your tone or inflection, you can achieve a different reaction from him.

Your voice and how you use it is going to be a very important factor in successfully communicating with your dog. In fact, using sound and its effect on natural dog behavior is a very important tool in training.

        Sight:

Your dog doesn’t see the world only in black and white. They can differentiate between colors in a very limited way, they have dichromatic color vision - similar to that of a human with red-green color-blindness, if you are not color-blind you have a trichromatic system; that allows you to see a range of colors that are a mix of red, blue, and green pigments. 

Another difference is that his  field of vision is from 200 to 270 degrees depending on the size of their snout and the shape of their skull, compared to humans' approximately 160 degrees. This allows him to almost see movement behind him, he seems to have “eyes behind his head.” 

These physical characteristics have effect on natural dog behavior, causing your dog to respond to many things you aren’t aware of.  Finally, he has excellent night vision (he has a special membrane that allows him to receive light). Here again, I am sure you have experienced another example of natural behavior using his extraordinary sight, your dog getting up in a window watching something inexplicable in a dark backyard.
   

       Taste:

 A dog's sense of taste is connected closely to his nose.  He doesn't really differentiate much between tastes.  His natural dog behavior is ruled more as I said before in smell.  A natural dog behavior is to eat all kinds of weird and gross things but how things taste isn’t really a factor.  In his regular food consumption, smell and texture are more important than taste.