Did you know?

Did you know that there is a very simple three step solution to your dog's barking?

Did you know that your dog is very good at playing "King on the throne" and "Simon says"?

Did you know that there is a very simple way to get your dog to stop pulling, which will give results within minutes and it it totally without any pulling or jerking on your part?

Did you know that Dog Listening gives results within minutes when you start implementing it, no matter what dog you are dealing with? It is absolutely fantastic.

If you want to know more, please contact me.

How is your dog asking questions?

 I am interested in hearing from you all how your dog is asking questions.

Is your dog:

• Barking down the house?
• Dragging you down the street?
• Jumping the fence and escapes?
• Peeing in the house?
• Destroying things around the house?
• Refusing to eat?
• Jumping up on you?
• Biting you?

What is your story? Please tell me in the comments below.

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How do dogs ask questions?

You might be wondering how and why dogs ask questions. That is a very good question. I will give you some answers here.

When I first started with Dog Listening, I started by just ignoring my dog. He knew that I did not like him to take my socks from the laundry hamper. He sat down in front of me with a sock, staring at me. He sat there and stared for an hour. Suddenly I saw from the corner of my eye, that he started to blink slowly, he had trouble keeping his eyelids open. After that he started to nod, falling a sleep, dropping his head and wake up because he had dropped his head. When he had done this for a little while, he left me with the sock and went into the bedroom, hopped up in bed and lied down with a very loud sigh of relief. He had asked the first question that I answered appropriately. As a result he was calm and relaxed for the first time since we got him. He realised that he did not have the responsibility for my safety anymore.

Other ways that dogs are asking questions, or testing could be for example:

• Barking, looking at the owner
• Not eating
• Peeing in inappropriate places, whilst looking at the owner
• Jumping up at the owner or other people
• Stealing items and destroying them in front of the owner
• Pulling on the lead when out walking
• Refusing to walk

Please, tell me in the comment section how your dog is asking questions, how are they testing you. What are the challenging behaviours that you experience together with your dog?

On the next page, you can tell me about your journey with your dog.

Dog's questions

This is Tora when she grew up.

When ever a new dog comes into the pack, or a new human for that matter, or even if someone move, our dogs will ask questions about where do I fit in into the pack? Am I the leader or at the bottom, or somewhere between the two?

When our dogs ask these questions it is important that we give them the right answer. However, first we need to understand what the dogs are doing. A question by a dog can in many people's eyes look like poor behaviour. However, this poor behaviour is very important to the dog. This is the way they are asking questions about where they fit in and who is the leader in the pack.

If we answer in a way that the dog can comprehend and understand, we will have a harmonious relationship with our dog. The answer is going to be different, depending on what the question is. In most cases, if not in all, our response should be that we are ignoring the dog. As soon as we react to something they do, we have told them that they are our leaders and that they have all the responsibility for the safety and welfare of the pack.

If we look around us, we see that not much around us where most of us live is not natural and very hard for our dogs to comprehend. They cannot pay rent and go shopping for food. It is absolutely impossible for them. This why we, the two legged ones have to take the full responsibility of the pack. We do that when we give our dogs the right answer and they as a result elect us leaders.

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Tora, my little rescue

I was looking for a playmate to Tov. I found a little Bull Arab cross, who I named Tora. When she came to me she was 10 weeks old and she had been an orphan for 5 weeks already, due to the council here. They killed her mother because of a human error. I was not impressed with them at all.

Tora was very sick when she came to me. She had ticks, lies, fleece and a belly full of worms. I took her to the vet the day after I got her and they gave her medication to get rid of all the parasites she had. As she had never been indoors, but spent her first 10 weeks in a small cage outside, with human contact only during feeding times 3 times a day, she was very dirty when she came.

Due to that Tora only had had her mother for 5 weeks, she had not received the education she would normally have gotten from her mother. This resulted in her not having any manners at all. I was lucky that I had been studying so much about puppies already then, so I knew how to be a surrogate mother and how to teach her using her own language which she was born with.

In the beginning, at 10 weeks, she would Gesture Eat for me. This resulted in her not eating hardly anything the first day. I had to do the Gesture Eating process 4 times with about an hour in between, before she ate her whole meal. After that I have not had any problems with her not wanting to eat. The tricky part was to give her the right amount, so she could keep it all and grow healthy. Now, I have succeeded, she does not look like a ribcage on legs anymore, she looks like a well fed, healthy dog. Her fur is shiny now. It was very matte when she came and she stank. Now, she smells like roses, which is her natural smell, coming from her.

This is Tora the first evening she was with me. She was very scared of everything. She is still scared of certain objects like paper and the broom. She is scared of the wind, but not of the thunder. She can walk out in the middle of a severe thunderstorm, making me very worried about her safety. Now, i close the door during thunderstorms, so my dogs do not wonder out. I do not want them to be electrocuted.

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Moving with a dog

After some time it was time for Tov and myself to move. The travel took us 2 days in a car. When we reached our destination, I had to put Tov in a room away from everybody, so he would not be in the way and not run away in all the tumult with everything going from the truck and car into the house. I basically treated him like one of the items going into the house. That way Tov did not have to worry about all these new people and everything that happened, he could just relax in the room until we were all done. The only other thing that was in the room with him was a bowl of water, in case he got thirsty.

After everything had settled, Tov could be let out from the room and start exploring his new surrounding inside the house. He went from room to room, sniffing wagging his tail in excitement. Did you know that a wagging tail only means that the adrenaline levels in the dog is elevated. Have you ever seen a dog attacking and biting aggressively with a wagging tail? It is a myth that a wagging tail only means happiness. The adrenaline levels could be elevated because of happiness. A dog who is aggressive and is wagging its tail is not giving mixed messages.

I had a very low fence in the backyard, so Tov had to be on a long leash when ever we were outside in the backyard. When we went for walks, he was on his normal leash of course.

It takes a dog about 48 hours to get used to its new surroundings. If there are additional people or dogs coming into the pack, or perhaps some individuals are leaving, it will take the dog about two weeks to figure out where it fits in, what place it has in the pack. This was the reason Tov asked me a lot of questions the first two weeks after we had moved, as I then had moved away from a family I temporarily lived with. Dogs have to ask to make sure that the right individual is still the leader in the pack, or if they have to take over the leadership in order to keep the pack safe. Our job as humans is then to give the dogs the right information the whole time. Remember that a dog will keep asking questions throughout its life. The reason is that in the dog's mind it is a matter of life and death that the strongest, fittest, most intelligent and most experienced individual has the leadership.

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Getting an additional dog

When you are getting an additional dog into the pack, the whole pack dynamic has changed. The same happens if a person moves in with you or someone moves away from you. Anytime any kind of change happens in your family (pack), your dog is going to ask questions. The question the dog is asking is whether you are still the leader or if the dog has to take over the responsibility. It is always the most experienced, most intelligent, strongest, the fittest individual that has to be the leader. If you give the dog the answer that you are still in control and that the dog can still trust you with its life, everything is going to go back to normal It is important that we are then giving the dog the right answer. 

When someone is moving away from us, we could have emotions regarding the change, however, the answer we give our dogs should be the same: Do not worry, I have got this, you can still trust me with your life. Remember that the leader is the one with the most responsibilities, they have to be able to keep the pack safe, well fed, happy, and they are also the only ones that are allowed to breed, even though they can allow other pack members to breed too, but then it is all on their terms. This is how you can be a breeder, and still do Dog Listening.

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