Collins Good Dog Behaviour: An Owner’s Guide. Gwen Bailey
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Название: Collins Good Dog Behaviour: An Owner’s Guide
Автор: Gwen Bailey
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Домашние Животные
isbn: 9780007586837
isbn:
THEIR PHYSICAL WORLD
It may seem too obvious to say that dogs experience things at a different level to us. But imagine what it must be like to live in a world where you cannot see the faces of the animals you live with when they walk around and where most of the interesting things they do, such as eating, take place way above your head. What must it be like to live in a house where you cannot see out of the windows without making a special effort and where most of the focus of your world is at knee height? Getting down to their level and looking at things from their perspective gives a surprisingly different view of the world we both inhabit.
Dogs need to adapt their behaviour when living in a world designed for humans.
A DOG’S SENSES
PAWS AND JAWS
Again, it may seem obvious, but dogs have no opposable thumb. This means that they cannot pick up objects easily with their paws and, instead, will often use their mouths in situations where we would use our hands. Dogs do not hit people when upset but bite instead. They can learn to be very accurate with their mouths and, once experienced, will only rarely make unintentional contact with their teeth on human skin. In other words, if a dog snaps, but misses, he probably meant to! Dogs will also explore using their mouths in the same way as we will touch unusual objects. Since their mouths are full of teeth that can cause damage, this exploratory behaviour often gets them into trouble, particularly when they are puppies.
The need to explore new objects with their mouths can often get dogs into trouble.
Another striking difference between our species is that, as primates, we like to touch, hold, hug and cuddle to express affection. However, dogs rarely do this to each other unless they are fighting or mating. This accounts for why some dogs will bite when hugged or stroked, especially by children. In order for dogs to accept our loving behaviour, they need to become accustomed to it gradually, preferably during puppyhood.
A SMELLY FACT
A weak solution of salt is odourless to humans but dogs are able to detect as little as one teaspoonful in thirteen gallons of water.
SUPER SCENTING
One of the first things a dog will do in a new environment is to put his nose to the floor and sniff. A human in the same situation would look around. A dog when meeting another dog or a person will, characteristically, sniff them, sometimes in the most embarrassing, but smelliest, places. A human (fortunately!) will just look. Both are gathering information about their world, but the way in which they do it illustrates one of the most important differences between them. We live in a very visual world, whereas dogs live in a very smelly one.
Their sense of smell is incredible by our standards. Not only do they have many more cells in their nose for detecting different smells (the area used for smell detection is fourteen times the size of ours), but these cells are of better quality and the part of their brain that receives the information is considerably more developed. This allows dogs to detect and identify a much wider variety of scents at much lower concentrations.
Dogs gather a lot of information by sniffing at places in a territory which have been marked by other dogs.
Smells on the ground need careful investigation.
Using this ability enables them to acquire much more information in one sniff than we can ever imagine. Going for a walk and sniffing the scents left behind by other dogs must be like watching a video of all those who have passed by in the past few days. Information such as sex, health and social standing may be passed on through urine and faeces. This allows most male dogs, and some females, to advertise their presence and status by marking every available lamppost and clump of grass.
Although we cannot even begin to understand what it is like to be able to detect odours in the same way as our dogs do, knowing that they live in a different sensory world can help us to understand them better. It helps to explain some of their peculiar habits, such as sniffing everything they come into contact with, kicking up earth with their back hind legs after going to the toilet (they have scent glands in between their pads), and rolling in substances that we would rather they did not.
SCENT CAMOUFLAGE
Rolling in substances with a very strong scent has never been fully explained. It is likely that it is a remnant of the days when dogs’ ancestors needed to camouflage their own scent to be more like that of their environment in order to be more successful when out hunting.
EMPLOYING A DOG’S SUPERIOR SENSES
Man has utilized the dog’s incredible sense of smell in a variety of ways. To detect drugs, explosives, to find lost people, to track criminals, to find buried survivors after earthquakes or avalanches, to track animals to be hunted, or, more recently, to sniff out dry rot and termites in buildings, to find human bodies lost in water or to detect skin cancers and other diseases. In such exercises, dogs are better than any machine, having a better publicity value, being more accurate, more reliable, cheaper, and more fun!
SEEING THINGS DIFFERENTLY
Dogs have a greater field of vision than humans. This enables them to see things to the rear and sides. The amount of overlap (shaded area) will determine how well the animal can judge distances.
A human has a field of vision of about 100 degrees.
A whippet’s field of vision is about 200 degrees.
Dogs that have been bred to look more like us, such as the King Charles Spaniel, with forward-facing eyes, have a reduced field of vision.
Long-coated breeds with hair that hangs over their eyes will have their field of vision greatly reduced. It is best to clip it or tie it back so that they can see properly.
SENSITIVE SIGHT
Dogs СКАЧАТЬ