Why Dogs Sniff Each Other (And What They Learn)
The rear-end greeting is an information exchange, and the anal glands are the reason. Here is what dogs are actually reading, and why forced greetings go wrong.
24 articles
The rear-end greeting is an information exchange, and the anal glands are the reason. Here is what dogs are actually reading, and why forced greetings go wrong.
Dogs hear roughly twice as high as we do, locate sounds more precisely, and pick up things in your house that you have never noticed.
Burying a bone in a flowerbed, or a sofa cushion, is food caching — a survival behaviour from a time when meals were unpredictable.
The violent head-shake with a squeaky toy is the tail end of a hunting sequence. Knowing which part of that sequence your dog enjoys explains most of their play.
They are not decorative facial hair. Whiskers are precision sensory equipment wired directly into the brain, and trimming them takes something away.
Sirens, music, loneliness, and the wolf inside. What howling is for, which breeds do it most, and when it means something is wrong.
The dog who shoves between you and another dog is doing something. Whether it deserves the word jealousy is a genuinely interesting question.
The oldest domesticated animal, and still an argued-about one. What the genetics and the archaeology currently suggest about how wolves became dogs.
Fox faeces, dead fish, badger droppings. The behaviour is universal, the theories are competing, and none of them is 'to get clean'.
Your dog waits by the door before you get home and knows when dinner is due. That is not clock-reading — the mechanisms behind it are more interesting than that.