Mat Ward - What Dogs Want: An illustrated guide for HAPPY dog care and training

To Trace, Finn, Lochie and the furry members of our family Pepper, Suki, Hemi and Limpet

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Everyone seems to have an opinion on dog behaviour and training. The amount of material in books and on the internet seems endless, and is often contradictory and confusing. How do you begin to separate the wheat from the chaff when digesting all this doggy information?

Its taken me 25 years of academic study and hands-on experience, with thousands of dogs and their guardians, to distil whats most important when caring for and training a dog. The information in this book represents the latest scientific understanding of our companion Canis familiaris, coupled with my real-world experience as a Clinical Animal Behaviourist. Whether youre thinking of adopting your first pup, or have a lifetime of experience with our four-legged friends, this book will help you understand your dog, train them effectively, and build a strong relationship with them. It will allow you to focus on whats actually important as a dog guardian.

After reading this book, and applying its advice, Im confident your dog will be happier, and so will you!

Mat Ward BSc MVS CCAB

petbehavioursorted.com

CONTENTS

Its hard for us to imagine, but a dogs reality is more influenced by the way the world smells than the way it looks. To understand a dog, you need to understand their nose.

SUPER-SCENTERS

Did you know that dogs can identify smells as dilute as one part per trillion? Thats one drop in twenty Olympic-sized swimming pools! In practical terms, your dog can tell which direction you walked off in by sniffing five of your footprints, and assessing how old the smell of each step is.

This amazing ability is a result of a number of special physical features. Dogs have a recess in their nose that traps 12% of inhaled air and is jam-packed with olfactory receptors. These receptors line a labyrinth of bony structures that maximise the available smelling surface area. Dogs also have the mental processing power to make the most of this information the area of their brain dealing with scents is at least three times larger than ours.

A window into the past

Smells help dogs to understand the world around them, not only in the present but also from the past. Think of it as smell CCTV!

Stereo smell

Each nostril samples air independently, which helps your dog to work out which direction a scent is coming from in much the same way that we humans use our ears to tell where a sound is coming from.

Dogs with jobs

Dogs brilliant noses and trainability make these four-legged friends the perfect candidates for jobs like search and rescue, truffle sniffing, explosives detection, and biodetection.

Dogs see the world differently from us. They do well in the dark and have good peripheral vision, but dont see as sharply as we do, and cant differentiate some colours.

ARE DOGS COLOUR BLIND?

Dogs can see colour, but not as well as us. We have three types of colour receptor in our eyes (red, green and blue), but dogs have only two (yellow and blue). This means that while we see a full rainbow of colour, dogs see the range red, orange, yellow and green as one colour. Identifying a bright red ball in grass is a lot harder for a dog than it is for a human!

Night vision

Dogs see well at night. This is because of special features of their inner eye.

Do I need glasses?

Dog vision is blurrier than ours. If dogs were able to take an eye test, they would achieve only 20/75. This means an object that appears clear to us at a distance of 75 feet, is clear to a dog only when they see it from a distance of 20 feet or closer.

A third eyelid

Dogs have a third eyelid called the nictitating membrane, which helps clean and lubricate the eyes, produce antibodies to fight infection, and protect the eyes from damage.

Theres nothing better than stroking the velvety ear of a dog while they snuggle into you, but those ears arent just there for fun. They are serious pieces of equipment.

GOING ULTRASONIC

A dogs hearing is top notch, beating humans hands down in most respects. It is estimated to be four times as sensitive as ours if you can hear the noise of a pin dropping on a wooden floor, your dog can hear it on a carpet Dogs are also able to hear sounds at much higher frequencies than we can they can hear frequencies of 45kHz compared to our 20kHz max. Going ultrasonic is no problem at all for your average dog!

Furry satellite dishes

Dogs excel at identifying exactly where noises are coming from. Their independently moving outer-ears (pinnae) are able to rotate like a radar to locate the source of a sound.

Designer ears

Over the centuries, as humans bred dogs for different purposes, the erect ear that is typical of the dogs ancestors evolved into many new shapes and sizes.