Teaching Canine Body Language To Your Team

The best way to have peace of mind that your team truly understands the heart and soul of your business (the dogs!!) is to make sure you are teaching canine body language to your team. Learning to read dogs helps your team better communicate with the animals in your facility’s care (and each other!). Plus, your team will gain the skills they need to avoid unnecessary injuries, stop chaotic behavior, and provide a fun and playful environment for dogs. In this short article we’ll discuss our lessons learned in effectively teaching canine body language skills to your team.

In our over 25 years working with pet care businesses including our own we’ve learned that it is not hard to teach canine body language and everyone can learn it. That’s great news so the key is having a plan and curriculum to teach your team. 

Our first project working together was co-authoring the book, Off-Leash Dog Play: A Complete Guide to Safety & Fun. You may not realize we wrote the book to not only share with the industry, but to create a tool to train our own team on canine body language. In hindsight, using the traffic management signal to teach dog postures and behaviors as green, yellow or red was key to making body language easy to teach and learn.

As you plan to teach body language another tip is to look at it as teaching a new language. This means you start with individual words/dog body parts. Build the words into the total picture/sentences & paragraphs to teach your staff to understand what the dog is saying.  We’ve also learned the importance of starting with pictures as the brain needs to learn to understand what they are seeing. Progress to video (slow-motion and then real-time) and last observing live dogs.

You don’t want to miss watching our video where we share the common stress signals your team should recognize and the reason you’ll want to spend most of your time teaching the yellow postures, signals and behaviors. We also provide tips on prompting discussions on what specific item in the dog’s body language indicates the color and how a dog’s breed also impacts reading their body language

Don’t forget to plan on frequent refresher training as you don’t see the red behaviors frequently in your pet care center. You still need to train staff on the canine body language and behaviors you never want to see in your pet care business. Moving into February and our annual Daycare Games competition is a great time to plan refresher training. Effective dog leadership requires knowing canine body language and intervening early to keep your playgroups safe and fun.