Last Updated on January 30, 2022
How would you like to learn to speak canine? A class being offered in Kentucky promises to get you up to speed on dog language.
Our four-legged friends definitely have their own way of communicating, but if you’re like me, you’d love to be better versed in dog language so you could have a better idea of exactly what’s going through their minds.
And having that knowledge would certainly be easier (and cheaper) than calling up the Dog Whisperer for a personal consultation.
A class being offered next month in Kentucky is designed to teach dog owners ways to tell if their dog is stressed or if a dog does or does not like something the owner is doing, among other subjects.
I imagine it will use some of the same dog body language cues written about in countless books. This website, for example, shows specific cues dogs give to show whether they’re relaxed, on alert, frightened and stressed out or potentially aggressive. Illustrations there show simple markers like the position of the tail or the ears can very clearly communicate what a dog is thinking about what’s in front of him.
But that’s based on body language from the dog itself. In terms of pulling a “Dr. Doolittle” and actually being able to have a real conversation with a dog, we aren’t there, yet.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could?
A recent Facebook meme asked people what they would say to their dog if they had 10 seconds — and only 10 seconds — to say anything they wanted to their dog and that the dog would completely understand the message.
Some of the messages, as I’m sure you can imagine, were quite touching and even prompted a mysterious watering of the eyes.
As a lifelong dog lover, I’d love to have those 10 seconds to talk to my Collie and know he’d understand everything I was saying; but if you have a dog you love a lot, what can you possibly say if you only have those 10 seconds? How do we put our love for our dogs into words adequate enough in such a small amount of time?
I don’t know that the English language has words that carry enough meaning to begin translating to a canine equivalent.
