A musing on ‘canine comedy’

I have recently picked up my first canine related job – finding pictures, videos and articles to post on a canine business related Facebook page. There are some amazingly funny and informative pages around and I have been learning a lot in my searches. However, I keep seeing pictures and videos posted all over the place claiming to be showing ‘hilarious’ images or clips of dogs. There is one single thing that links all of these posts, and it is not any kind of hilarity.

‘Look at this dog acting all ashamed haha!’ Do you want to know what I see? I see a dog that is utterly stressed and giving off all of the ‘please don’t hurt me’ signals that it is capable of. The lip licking, the looking away – all of these are stress signals. This dog is not trying to make you laugh, he’s trying to make sure you don’t hurt him or yell at him.

‘This dog is so cute playing dead so he doesn’t get told off!’ This dog is shut down or displaying huge appeasement behaviour because he knows that something he doesn’t like is coming.

And let’s not even get started on the people that claim their dogs show that they feel guilty and they ‘know’ they have done something wrong. No, they don’t. Dogs do not think like that. What your dog knows is that you come home and yell at them about something, so they try to appease you as soon as you come in.

One particular example that has been doing the rounds lately is a pair of bulldogs that are just completely frozen on their backs while their human keeps repeatedly asking them who has done whatever it is that they don’t like. She even then asks them if they want a snack and as soon as they actually unfreeze starts with the ‘who did this’ spiel again, throwing them straight back into the stress behaviours.

Please, please – educate yourselves at least a little in canine body language and canine psychology. There are so many resources out there, based on scientifically proven, positive, force free methods (as always I’m going to recommend Canine Principles as an excellent place to start). Also, please don’t share these so called funnies so that they go viral. It just spreads the misinformation that dogs exist for our amusement and that this kind of treatment of them is acceptable.