I never could decide if she was simply amazed or just disappointed. I wasn't bitten because I watched the dog for even the smallest sign that he was beginning to feel threatened. With this dog, subtle changes in his breathing pattern, a compression of the lips and a constriction of the pupils gave me the only clues I needed. At that point, with no further clues and without pushing until I saw more dramatic signs, it was a simple matter to shift our activity to something less threatening and allow the dog to calm down. Ignoring these clear but subtle signs would have undoubtedly caused the behavior to escalate until perhaps we had a full blown aggressive episode ending in a bite.
Dogs live and act in a world of exquisitely subtle signals in their interactions with each other.
Our observations and communications in our interactions with them must seem unbelievably coarse at times to these sophisticates of non-verbal communication. Turned around the other way, we would perceive such inattentiveness to our subtle signals as rude, uncaring or perhaps simply stupid. Fortunately for us, dogs bring to the human-dog relationship their wonderful powers of observation, allowing them to be highly aware of our posture, breathing, muscular tensions, and facial expressions, often reacting to changes of which we are not aware. Training or behavior problems often result from the dog's response to signals we unknowingly have sent. Unfortunately, the dog is often blamed rather than the handler.