A wagging tail does NOT mean you have a happy dog. If you believe that—if you believe that a wagging tail means you have a happy dog—we have to part ways. There’s nothing wrong with parting ways. There’s nothing wrong with having differing opinions. It’s not a matter of one of us being right, and the other being wrong. It’s just that my approach has repeatedly proven to me that a wagging tail has nothing to do with a dog’s happiness—a wagging tail is the indicator of a dog with a higher energy level. That higher energy level is the indicator of the source of all the problems that that dog is having.
- If you choose to continue to believe that a wagging tail on a dog is the indicator of a happy dog,
- and if you believe that having a happy dog is the best thing,
- and that getting a dog’s tail to wag all the time is what you should be doing,
then continue to believe that. Go down your chosen path, have a conscious break in our belief systems, go do what you want to do while I go and do what I want to do.
I believe that while your dog is wagging its tail, I’ll be having fewer problems, since I’ll be treating the dog’s tail wag as—simultaneously
- a tail wag (the behavior is the behavior itself)
- a message (the dog’s telling us its energy level is increasing or has increased)
- the dog telling us about his relationship with us (he’s going away from being able to submit to its human leader)
It really divides the landscape into three or four different regions, and if you don’t take a time to look at what’s going on, things get ugly really quickly.
Having a relationship with your dog is the experience of relating to them—not the thinking through of how to experience the experience. In this culture, we’re unconsciously taught to think everything through, and that prevents having a relationship with your dog. Lacking the relationship with them, their needs never get met, their energy levels increase, the brains shut off, and problems show up and never go away.