A good way to tell whether a potential guard dog has good protective instincts is to look for dog body language that exudes ...

Poppy, a large Weimaraner cross, was a high-energy dog with reactivity issues. Managing her excitability was challenging. Before I trained as a dog behaviorist, I believed that giving Poppy a lot of ...

The reason dogs beg, sit, stay, and shake for peanut butter could be both evolutionarily wired and learned behavior.

Dogs have perfected a vocal triage system consisting of a soft warning bark that may escalate to a growl, and in extreme ...

Dogs have the innate ability to channel Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Who Stole Christmas and make our hearts grow three ...

If your dog locks eyes with you and refuses to blink, it’s not just weird — it’s communication. Discover the key reasons ...

Does your dog always try to sit on your lap, and refuse to leave your side, even when there are a million more interesting things they could be doing? We all love it when our pets show us their love, ...

"It means nothing about how 'smart' a dog is or how much it loves/cares about its people/feels like part of the family." People generally smile and cheer while the dogs look happy albeit confused — ...

In a classic series of studies, psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated that in humans and animals, a trained brain thinks differently than an untrained brain. Specifically, he was able to show that ...

The phenomenon of dog behavior getting worse rather than better is something that dog parents often find perplexing. It seems to defy logic, considering that most people think along the lines of, “If ...

Just like many of our readers, Scientific American editors love our dogs, cats and other pets (just try to stop us from sharing cute photographs). We also enjoy learning about why they do the funny ...

There is ever-growing global interest in human-dog relationships. Not only can they help us along, but we can also help them enrich their own lives. The best human-dog relationships are those in which ...