Talking Dog: The "Guilty Dog"
Dogs “talk” to us all the time, we usually don’t understand them or are not even listening. If we stop whispering to them, dominating them and commanding them but try and look at things from the dogs point of view we maybe better able to “hear” them.
Below I discuss the "guilty look", some things that we may not see or even misinterpret.
“Guilty Dog”
This is also the dog that people describe as “he knows he has done wrong”... The German Shepherd dog in the picture above is a great example of the image that goes along with this label and description.
To my knowledge we have no research to support this idea that dogs feel guilty. Also if we think about it in another way; If a dog felt “guilty” about something or “knew that he had done wrong,” why would he then keep doing that “wrong thing” over and over again, especially if he “feels bad” about it?
Why might a dog cower, look puppyish and “submissive”? What if he is just using his natural survival instincts? In the face of an unhappy owner who may be telling the dog off and maybe angry, the dog chooses to make himself smaller and less confrontational and “say:” “please calm down, I am not trying to start a fight!”
The dog may also slow down his movements, because again this is less likely to get him in trouble. In the face of a confrontational situation slow movements might be a “gesture” of no threat. Think about how we often interpret this; Eg. we shout or raise our voice at the dog and suddenly the dog does the behaviour even slower, does this sound familiar? (Yelling “down” or “come” and the dog lies down even slower or comes even more sheepishly.) We then interpret this as the dog is trying to be stubborn or defy us, when in fact it could be that the dog is just “saying calm down, I mean no harm”.
Some research published in 2009 actually suggests that “people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offence.”
