What did you say?

I am right in the middle of an amazing online course for my business. One of my favorite modules from the course covered verbal and non-verbal communication. While it is important for me to be able to understand what my clients are telling me about their pets, it is also incredibly important for me to hear the things they aren't saying....and to listen to what their pets "tell" me as well.

I am a student of behavior and a keen observer. I have counted the number of times captive ungulates scratched or licked; I have spent countless hours observing the social interactions of captive primates; I collected data for my own research on cheetahs and snow leopards; and for more than 25 years, I've watched domestic animals who live with people. It's not to say that I am some kind of weird voyeur, watching people or animals in an overly clinical or stalker sort of way!  Rather, I believe we have much to learn from observing animals....and we have much to learn from watching each other as well. My mother used to tell me that I was an excellent listener, able to truly hear what others were saying without planning out what I was going to say in response. While I feel that this was a lovely thing to say, it got me to thinking about the "why." Why do I like to listen and observe? And, more importantly, how can that help my clients and their pets? Which really just gets us back to verbal and non-verbal communication.

Animals do speak, their language is just different than ours. And isn't it amazing that those same animals will make an effort to learn our language in order to interact with us?  Fascinating. I know a dog who understands five languages!  He came from Korea, lived with a family who spoke French, ended up living in a home with a family who spoke Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Not only was this dog a world traveler, he was multi-lingual. But what he was best at was observing human behavior and responding accordingly. There are many facets to human body language that are universal and this dog recognized that for sure. When I met this dog, I was there to help ease his transition into his new (and hopefully last!) home environment. Through mutual observation, this dog and I discovered that we had something in common; I liked to walk around looking at the ground, and so did he. We both also liked bacon. So, as I began walking around, looking at the ground, and periodically dropping bacon, we had a "dialogue" and a relationship to build on. My job was to take that foundation and help his new owners build on it, using their body language and watching his. Those non-verbal cues are so important, and sometimes we just need help reading and understanding them in order to find common ground.

If you would like to learn more about canine body language and non-verbal communication in animals, please let me know. New seminars are in the works and I love customizing them to the topics that interest you the most.