On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals

I grew up with hunting dogs that killed with happy abandon, and I never wanted to own one. At 56, with great reluctance, I got an adult rescue Great Pyrenees to guard my stock. He was not a good fit so 8 months ago I got a pup. The pup has been a challenge as I don't speak dog at all. This book was recommended by a highly respected trainer and breeder. I read through it in about 30 minutes, almost every page being an aha moment. My pup has been yelling to me in many ways that I simply did not comprehend. Behaviors are described and illustrated with clear pictures. The reasons are spelled out, as are ways to respond and make your dog more comfortable and therefore more successful. There are case histories, with the challenge, response, and result clearly detailed. This book goes into the pasture with me until I can learn to implement it from memory. It's an amazing resource that you can understand and use from the first few pages. If you have or work with dogs, you need to read and be able to use the concepts here. I will highly recommend it to anyone in my groups struggling to understand their canine friends.

I am an American who lives in Germany. My husband and I are training our Labrador to be a search and rescue dog with a German organization. This book comes highly recommended by our group. I am in the middle of reading it and applying its teachings to the training of our dog; I can't believe the difference in my relationship with him. It takes time and consistency to make it effective...patience too, but it is oh so worth it! A couple of things that I have learned are: 1) If you think that your dog has messed up, look at yourself...99% of the time it's the trainer who has messed up. 2) It is usually the trainer who has hindered the dog in speaking and understanding "dogese", that is "calming signals", and therefore it is the trainer who has to learn and "re-teach" this language to the dog. Calming Signals is just the book to teach this.During our search and rescue training, my dog used to get so wound up just before he searched a pile of rubble for a "victim" that he didn't work well. Calming Signals has helped me to effectively calm my dog down by using HIS language, and not mine. When I was stern with him, he would only get more wound up. Now, we sit down on the ground, I don't look him directly in the eyes, and yes, I even yawn at him. It works!Dog training is an investment of time (and lots of it). Dogese IS a foreign language for humans, and if our dogs are important to us, it is our responsibility to learn their language! Don't expect to give your dog a few signals here and there and have everything magically fall into place. You and your dog are learning to "communicate" with each other and Calming Signals is the "phrase book" to this language.I very much appreciate the insights from Gunilla Melkersson's review of Calming Signals and especially the cultural difference in American and European dog training. It is absolutely true!

This an exceptional book that should be mandatory reading for all dog owners. If you have a problem dog, or just want to understand why dogs do what they do, this book is for you. This book will make for more happy owners and dogs. It is a great book for those of you who dont like to or simply dont have the time to read a lot. It is a to-the-point, no-nonsense and easy to read introduction to canine communication that explains dog behavior and interpreting dog communication signals in an easy to understand way. This a a short but very enlightening volume, filled with a ton of great information. A bit off-beat and quirky at times, it is a wonderful resource no dog owners library should be without. And the affordable price makes it even more worth while! I will continue to buy it as a gift for my dog-training friends and students.

For the first time, I am now able to understand my best friends, my dogs. Not only my dogs, but all dogs. This book should be read by all people not just by persons who love dogs. This book should be required reading in elementary or junior high schools. I am absolutely convinced that the number of dog bites in children and adults would be much lessened were we all to know what is within Turid Rugaas' Calming Signals.An example of my new wisdom: I walk my two dogs every day and every once in a while my one dog will stop and sniff at nothing. Now I don't mean she stops for a few seconds and sniffs at a bush or rock; she stops and refuses to move forward at all while she continues to sniff at an empty spot on the ground, all the while looking up at me. I would tug and pull on her leash, becoming more and more upset. Not realizing that when we had started the walk I was already tense and stressed, that I was hurrying and not paying attention to anything around me because I was concentrating on something disturbing. All this time she was telling me to calm down. Once I learned what she was saying, I forced myself to stop for a moment and take a few deep breaths and relax. Good for me, good for her and a much more enjoyable walk.Thank you Turid.

This is a simple little book. It's cheap and doesn't look like much, but the content can revolutionize your communication with your dog. It's about dog language, but not about the "big" wolf postures of dominance or submission that many of us already know about. This book is about the wide range of subtle signals (about 28, I think) that dogs use to communicate "please calm down" towards other dogs - or their owners. Because owners stress their dogs a lot, unintentionally. Like when we practice obedience exercises. In the middle of training, the dog starts looking away, yawning or sniffing the grass! Bored? Stubborn? Dominant? No, it's probably sending you signals to ask you to calm down!I attended a weekend seminar with Turid Rugaas last year which opened my eyes and I know that this works. Since then, and also since looking at video recordings from dog meetings, I now understand that dogs "talk" all the time. When meeting us or another dog, every single move or glance can carry a meaning. The other dog understands, if he has been allowed to "practice" dog language in lots of meetings with other dogs, but we, the humans, the supposed alphas, don't understand. Instead we try to teach the dog OUR verbal language. How frustrating for the dog! Shouldn't we first learn the dog's language? This is a book that makes you understand that dog language is so much more than where the tail or the ears are. It's about signals that our own pets send to us daily. With this book we can start looking at our own dog and see much, much more than we saw before. We will actually start to understand what our dog tells us. And, even more thrilling, we can use the dog's language ourselves and be understood by the dog! We can use the same calming signals to help the dog for example in a stressful situation.There is a cultural diffence between the European look on dog training and the American look. In America there is much focus on teaching a dog through reinforcing behaviors, like operant conditioning. Clicker training is very good, and I'm all for it. But when "Culture Clash" by Jean Donaldson came, it was considered to be a revolution, because some Americans had actually forgotten that dogs are dogs, with dogs' needs and drives and motivations! In Europe, we've always been interested in dog behavior. Konrad Lorenz is a good example. Swedish "dog psychologist" Anders Hallgren wrote about a dog's calming signals more than ten years ago, inspired by Ms Rugaas. Unfortunately his books are not spred in the US. Turid is Norwegian and also represents the European way: to look at the dog as a dog and try to understand how it thinks and feels and acts in a pack. So therefore I think that this is a very good book for every single dog owner, but especially (no offense) for American clicker-trainers. This book will make them even better trainers, because it will probably give them an important missing piece in the training puzzle.I think I can make a promise: If you read this boo