How to Talk to Your Dog

As any dog owner learns, dogs can talk. But not in English nor any other human language. They talk to each other using body language, barks, snuffles, growls, and whines. They also talk to us this way too. But we are very bad at understanding dog language. We consistently misinterpret their growls as aggression, when they want to play. We consistently misinterpret their slow tail wagging as friendliness, when they mean, ＂I am about to bite you＂ instead. We consistently misinterpret a whole host of signals that dogs send to us, thinking all the while that we understand what our dog is trying to tell us. Most of the time, we don’t. We desperately want to have a great relationship with our dogs, but much of the time we don’t know how to make that happen. Many of us don’t know how to read the signals that dogs send us, and we don’t know how to respond so that dogs will understand what we are trying to tell them. How to Talk to Your Dog teaches what dog signals mean, and how we can communicate with our dogs so that we do, indeed, have great relationships with them.

Con Slobodchikoff is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, and President and CEO of Animal Communications Ltd. He received both his B. S. and Ph. D. degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a Visiting Professor at Kenyatta University, Kenya, where he studied the behavior of hyraxes, and he was a Fulbright Fellow. He has spent twenty-five years studying the behavior of prairie dogs, concentrating on decoding their language-like communication system and describing their social system.

He is the Director of the Animal Language Institute which disseminates information about animal language studies around the world. He has written or edited five books and has authored more than 100 articles in scientific journals. His most recent book, Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals was published in 2012 by St. Martin’s Press.