The appeasement signals, you know? These are all the mimics that our dogs adopt to send us or their peers specific messages.
These calming signals are essential because they allow us to read and understand the emotional state of our dogs. To learn to communicate with your dog is to respect it and above all to prevent and anticipate possible behaviors that may be aggressive.
And yes, the good reading of the appeasement signals of our canine friends helps to prevent our dog from entering such a catastrophic emotional state that its only option is aggression.
Let me give you a specific example to demonstrate this:
A child approaches a dog in his basket, the basket being in a corner of the living room. Everything as the child approaches, the dog looks away, then the head, licks the truffle, and finally, if the previous signals have not been taken into account, the dog growls. No adult is present, the child does not have the abilities to read all of these signals and continues his approach. The dog, unable to escape, attack!
This is a slightly caricatured example, but unfortunately many assaults (especially on children) are due to a misunderstanding and / or a misinterpretation of the appeasement signals sent by dogs.
There is a very long list of signs of appeasement but I suggest you to list here the main signals that the dogs adopt to communicate with us or between them:
Head spin
You may notice it, when you want to take a dog in picture, it often turns the head. Well it's not to pose, it's just to let you know of his immediate discomfort.
A dog can also adopt this signal of appeasement when another dog is approaching a bit too brutally from him or a human bends over him very intrusively (to caress him for example).
To give you a concrete example, I recently taught my dog to bark on command, gold, my dog does not like to bark too much. Naturally, it does so very rarely. In fact, when I ask him to bark, it may happen that he turns his head, I then feel like he snubs me completely! Now, it just means that the attitude I ask him to adopt does not put him in a situation and a pleasant emotional state.
As a human being, you can use this signal, in particular to communicate to a dog, who may feel threatened by your presence, that you are not seeking conflict and that you have a pacifist attitude towards it.
Lick the truffle
This signal may be difficult to observe but its interpretation is essential. You can observe this signal (sometimes very fast) especially when your dog feels threatened (be it by a congener or a human). This calming signal is very important because, when it is done very quickly and repeatedly, it translates a certain discomfort and often the next step will be the bite to eliminate the cause of the discomfort of the dog.
To give you a specific example: following a castration of one of my dogs, I had to care for him, namely the application of an ointment. In the first few days after the surgery, the area where I had to apply the ointment was very sensitive to my dog (and you can imagine why). On the first day of care, I saw very clearly my dog lick the truffle very quickly and repeated as I applied the ointment, so I stopped what I was doing in order to To avoid a bite. If I had not observed this signal of appeasement and / or I had not taken it into account, my dog would surely have bitten me to eliminate the cause of his discomfort. Not wanting to interact with my dog, I decided to "listen to him" and respect him instead of forcing him into a conflictual relationship with him.
Yawn
You see your dog yawning? You think he's tired? Well no ! He's just "fed up." Indeed, yawning expresses more discomfort, lassitude rather than a state of fatigue as for us, humans.
You may observe yawning in your dog when you are doing an education session and are starting to get tired or bored, for example. I notice this very much in my dog when I ask him several times to sit down, an order he knows by heart. In order to remedy this, I stimulate him more by teaching him more complicated exercises, that he does not know or that he is not used to performing.
Yawning can also mean that it's time to stop what you're doing with your dog, take a break, offer him something else, play with him, and so on.
In addition, you can also use yawning to communicate with your dog. It is also proved that even in an inter-specific relationship (between a human and a dog), yawning could be contagious.
Fold your eyes
Rolling eyes is somehow a sign of politeness. This indicates total passivity on the part of the one who adopts this signal of appeasement. Moreover, the term "signal of appeasement" has never as well bears its name as for this signal. Indeed, the dog will come to appease a situation such as when meeting an other dog, by squinting (which will often be accompanied by a movement of the head to look away).
It is often said that you should not look at a dog in your eyes because it would be taken as a threat, and when you feel that a dog regards you as a threat, do not hesitate to take this signal, To calm the situation.
I hope that this article has been useful to you and that it proposes to you better to understand your relation and generally the communication that you maintain with your animal.