Your dog knows what's in your heart before you do

There are situations I see so often that I hardly notice them any more.

An agitated dog, at the end of a lead, with its owner beside it. I take the lead from the person's hand. And within a few seconds, the dog settles differently into itself. I don't say anything to it. I don't correct it. I don't pull on anything. It simply calms down.

Then I hand the lead back.

And, just as quickly, the dog becomes alert again. Head up, ears forward, body ready for something that's about to happen. The same dog, the same street, the same lead, thirty seconds apart.

What changed is who's holding it.

I want to be very clear from the start, because it's easy to turn this into a nice, false story: I don't know exactly what the dog read there. The moment the lead passes from one hand to another, a great many things change at once. The tension in the lead changes. The posture of the person above it changes. The rhythm of breathing changes. The way that hand is held changes, whether it's tense or not, whether it's expecting a jerk or not. The smell changes too.

So this scene isn't the answer. It's the question.

And the question is: how much of what your dog senses about you reaches it through the nose?

I looked for the answer where someone had gone to the trouble of holding everything else still and letting only the smell vary. Such a thing exists. And what came out of it is stranger than I expected.

The experiment in which the only thing that changed was the air

In an earlier article, “Your dog sees into the past”, I described what a dog's nose can do when it's pointed at the world. Now I'm turning it towards you.

A team from the University of Naples did something simple. They took sweat from some men in two different states: once frightened, once happy. Ordinary men, who had no connection with the experiment.

Then they brought dogs into a room where they could walk around freely. Labradors and Golden Retrievers, family dogs, not working dogs. In the room there were three things: the dog's owner, a stranger, and a device that released the collected smell into the air.

The dog didn't see anyone frightened. It didn't hear anyone scream. It only got the air.

When the fear smell was released, the dogs showed more stress behaviours. And, something that can't be faked and can't be interpreted by guesswork, their heart rate went up.

When the happiness smell was released, something else happened, and I'd ask you to read this twice. The dogs needed their owner less: they went to them less often and stayed next to them less. And they approached the stranger in the room more.

Stop here for a second.

The smell of the happiness of a person the dog had never met, released from a device, made that dog braver with a stranger.

Nobody told it anything. It wasn't rewarded. It wasn't trained for this. It breathed air in which something was written, and its way of behaving towards the world shifted by a few centimetres.

A state doesn't smell in one place. It scents the whole body

Here comes the part that changed the way I understand things, and it comes from a place you wouldn't expect: some dairy farms in the '70s and '80s.

The farmers had a practical problem. They needed to know exactly when a cow came into heat, because the whole economy of a dairy farm depends on it. So someone had an idea: since we have dogs anyway, let's see whether they can sense it.

They trained a few dogs, a cattle dog and three German Shepherds, to recognise the smell of a cow in heat. It worked. That in itself is small news.

The big news came when the same researchers asked themselves where exactly in the cow's body this smell sits.

They took several different fluids from the same cows and gave them to the dogs to tell apart. Vulval swab: ninety-seven per cent correct answers. Urine: ninety-six. Milk: ninety-nine.

And the last one: blood plasma. Ninety-four per cent.

The authors' conclusion, word for word: the smell associated with that state is spread through all the fluid in the cow's body.

Not in one place. Not in one gland. Everywhere. In milk and in blood alike.

And there's something else, also from them: the smell doesn't appear suddenly. It rises slowly over the three days before, peaks on the day itself, and disappears within a single day after. Dogs trained on milk collected a day or two earlier recognised it correctly in sixty-four per cent of cases. In other words, they sensed something that hadn't yet fully happened.

I have to say one thing clearly, so you don't draw the wrong conclusion: heat in a cow isn't the same thing as a woman's cycle. It's a different physiology and I don't have any study that makes that link in humans. I don't make it either.

What carries over from the cow to you is something else, and it's bigger: a hormonal state doesn't sit where you think it sits. It changes the chemistry of the whole body. And a dog can learn that change.

That's why you can't hide it. Not because the animal is magical, but because you're a whole body, not a face.

The dogs that sense when blood sugar drops, and the ones that don't

The best-documented example in humans comes from diabetes, and I want to give it to you in full, including the part we don't like.

There are people living with diabetes whose dog behaves strangely just before their blood sugar drops dangerously. It comes over, insists, gets agitated, won't leave them alone. These people talked about this long before anyone took them seriously.

When they were taken seriously, the following came out. In dogs that had never been trained for this, owners reported changes in behaviour in thirty-eight to one hundred per cent of the episodes they went through. In specifically trained dogs, in a study with seventeen people, eight out of ten dogs alerted significantly more often when their owner's blood sugar was outside the safe range, and seven out of nine people ended up with more readings on target after they got the dog.

Now the uncomfortable part, and it stays in the text because otherwise what you've read above would be advertising, not information.

When other researchers fitted people with a device that measures blood sugar continuously, without the owners seeing the figures, and compared the dogs' alerts with reality, most of the dogs didn't do well. Average sensitivity was thirty-six per cent during the day. Only three dogs out of fourteen did better than chance. At night, even less. And a detail that says a lot: those dogs seemed to react to how low the blood sugar was, not to how fast it was dropping.

So what's the truth? The ability exists and it's real. It isn't uniform, and you have no way of knowing in advance whether yours has it.

Just like with people, in fact. Some sense when something is wrong with someone they love, from the next room. Others don't.

And the thing that only shows after months

So far we've talked about moments. Now about years.

Cortisol is a hormone that rises when the body is under pressure. In the blood it changes from hour to hour, so it doesn't tell you much about someone's life. But cortisol is also deposited in the hair, as the hair grows. And a hair is an archive. You cut a lock and read the past months.

Some Swedish researchers took fifty-eight human-dog pairs and read their archive. Twice: once for summer, once for winter.

The dog's stress level followed the owner's stress level. In both seasons.

And now the things that didn't matter, because they're exactly the ones you'd think of first: it didn't matter how much that dog moved. It didn't matter how many times a week it trained. What mattered was who the person at the other end of the lead was.

The authors' conclusion: dogs largely mirror the stress levels of their owners.

Many people would stop here, because it sounds good. I don't stop, because the same people also did the second part, and the second part is more interesting.

They repeated the study on other breeds: ancient breeds, genetically close to the wolf, and breeds that were made to hunt independently of humans, making their own decisions.

In them, the mirroring didn't appear at all. No link between the owner's stress and the dog's stress.

It seems that this synchronisation isn't a law of nature. It's a trait of the dogs that were made to work shoulder to shoulder with humans. They're the ones that set their inner thermostat by ours, because that was their job for thousands of years.

And one last detail, which to me seems the most important in the whole study: what best predicted the dog's stress level wasn't the person's personality. It was the relationship between them.

I have to be fair with you here too: this study shows a link, not a mechanism. It doesn't prove that the animal smells your stress for months on end. What has been demonstrated through smell is the sweat experiment, from the beginning of this text. What has been demonstrated through the hair is that your levels move together. They're two different things and I have no intention of gluing them into one just to make it sound better.

What you do with this, and above all what not to do

The first and most important: your dog isn't a measuring device and it isn't a medical test.

If it suddenly starts behaving differently with you, insists, sniffs you in a new way, won't leave you alone, that's a reason to pay attention. It isn't a diagnosis, and it isn't a reason to panic. If you yourself feel that something is wrong, go to someone with a medical degree, not to the dog. And if you don't feel anything and the dog insists, remember just this: it's worth not ignoring. No more, no less.

The second: don't set yourself the task of "being calm" as if it were an acting exercise.

What you've read above means precisely that acting doesn't work. You can control your voice. You can control your hand on the lead. Your body keeps on transmitting. You can avoid raising your voice and, at the same time, your whole body can be saying "something bad is happening now", and the dog receives the second version, because it comes on a channel you don't have a switch for.

The third, and it's the only one that really changes anything: calm isn't a character trait you either have or don't have. It's a state you can build, and it's trained more slowly than a command, but it can be trained. Only it isn't trained by deciding to look calm. It's trained earlier than you think, and I'll show you exactly how.

What I do, and why it isn't a trick

I told you above that you can't fake being calm. That doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. It means that what needs doing is done earlier.

I'll tell you exactly what I do.

I walk around the neighbourhood without the dog.

It isn't a joke and it isn't wasted time. I walk alone along the routes I'll take with the dog later, and I look. Which window a dog barks from. Which gate a dog comes running to from the yard, every time, without exception. Where scraps of food are thrown on the ground. Where the cats hang out.

When I get to that street with the dog on the lead, I have nothing left to discover. I already know about that particular gate. I already know that something will kick off at the first-floor window.

And here's the whole secret, if you absolutely want to call it a secret: I'm not holding myself back from flinching. I have no reason to flinch.

And when I'm with the dog on the lead, it's like being behind the wheel.

A good driver doesn't drive tense. He drives by looking. What the other cars are doing. What the traffic light says. Who's indicating. Where the side streets are that someone might pull out of in front of you. Which of the pedestrians looks like they're going to step into the road without looking.

It isn't fear. It's attention. The difference between them is huge, and your dog feels all of it.

The beginner driver is the one who sits tense, hands clenched on the wheel, and brakes suddenly. Not because he's worthless, but because everything takes him by surprise. Surprise produces the jump. In his body, and from there into the air in the car.

A dog at the end of the lead spends the whole walk in that air.

The four things, in the order in which they matter

With us they have a name, because we use them every day and we needed to be able to say them in short: PICC.

Prediction. You see the other dog at a hundred metres, not at ten. Not so you can prepare a correction, but so you have nothing to jump at.

Initiative. You switch sides of the pavement, you change pace, you ask for something simple, before the situation decides for you. A body that has a plan doesn't transmit alarm.

Control. It starts with you, not with the dog. The hand on the lead stays as it was thirty seconds ago. This is the honest part of everything you've read here: you can't control what you transmit, but you can control what produces the transmission.

Consistency. Every time, not when you feel like it. The cortisol in the hair wasn't built up in one walk. It was built up over months.

PICC isn't a technique for the dog. It's a protocol for you.

And if you remember only one thing from this whole article, remember the reconnaissance walk. Twenty minutes, alone, on your usual route. It costs nothing, you don't need anything, and it asks absolutely nothing of the dog. It's the only exercise in everything I've written here that's done without the dog, and it's the one that changes most what the dog feels about your walks.

Back to the lead

Now I can go back to the scene at the beginning and tell you what I think, plainly.

When I take the lead from your hand and the dog calms down, it isn't because I have some gift. It's because at the end of the lead there is now a body that isn't waiting for something bad to happen. My hand isn't expecting the jerk, because I'm not afraid of what's coming. My breathing hasn't got shorter. My shoulders haven't risen. And, very probably, my chemistry hasn't changed the way yours changes when you think "now he'll bark again, now he'll embarrass me".

The dog doesn't get a technique from me. It gets a piece of information: nothing bad is happening here.

And when I hand the lead back to you and it goes back on alert, it isn't judging you or rejecting you. It's reading what it's given. And what it's given at that moment is a person who is afraid of the next thirty seconds.

The bad news is that you can't lie to this channel.

The good news is much bigger: it means that everything you do to feel better yourself reaches the dog. Your sleep. How cornered you feel at work. Whether or not you've learned not to panic when a dog comes towards you on the pavement.

It isn't empty talk. It goes straight into its behaviour, and it shows in its hair.

That's why, with us, we work with the person, not just with the dog. Not because it sounds nice. Because half of what your dog is holding at the end of the lead is you, and that part can't be solved with any command.

---

If you want to understand why everything you've read here works, the first step is KNESsence, the free material in which I've put the essence of the system we work by at KNES. Create an account on knes.ro, you'll get a six-digit code by email and go straight to it.

With care for your dog,

Petre ROMAN

This material is for educational purposes and does not replace a consultation with a veterinarian or with your own doctor. If you have a concern about your health or your dog's health, see a specialist.