Do you ever have a dog that just stares at you? Do you ever wonder what they’re trying to communicate? Well, this TikTok user, who is also a certified dog trainer, breaks down the subtle communication this dog is trying to convey.

“Does your dog ever come up, stare at you, and vocalize a little bit, and you just can’t for the life of you figure out what in the world they’re trying to tell you?”

“Daphne’s mom here is having one of those moments, so let’s talk through the subtle hints that Daphne’s giving about what she might be communicating.”

“The good thing to know here is that Daphne has had all of her needs met. From the start of the video, we can see she’s very intently staring at her mom. Mom goes in to pet her and she pins her ears back and pulls her head away.”

“She tolerates the chin scratching for a second and then pulls her head away once again. Her tail starts going and she resumes staring at her mom. Something else she is doing though is pointing with that left ear, which is something she actually does repeatedly throughout the video, and dogs will 100% indicate things with their ears.”

“So you can see she’s backed away; she stops wagging her tail and then goes back to just staring intensely. And here we have the ear point again. We then get a second ear point right here and notice when that ear points the second time, the head also tilts slightly to the left.”

“So to me this looks like Daphne is communicating something about the gate or something going on behind the gate. You can see she whimpers, does the slight tail wags, then points her ear again at the gate, and then just looking off slightly in that direction.”

“If I were to guess she wants to go out that gate. It doesn’t look like she’s super concerned about whatever’s going on behind the gate because I’m not seeing any stress signals, just repeated glances over in that direction which she’s doing again right here.”

“When petting is offered to her, she does accept being petted. But because from the very beginning, she was saying no, that wasn’t it, I wasn’t asking to be petted, and then when the petting pauses there she immediately goes back into the backing up, tail wagging, staring tells me that she’s taking the petting as a secondary option, but it’s not what she’s asking for.”

“You can see there that we get a couple lip licks, she’s not throwing any stress signals here, so it doesn’t look like stress about being petted. More so that this was just not what she was actually asking for. So maybe a little bit of frustration. And you can see she’s pretty much looking out that gate pretty consistently throughout being petted. The petting pauses and she doesn’t immediately re-engage. And when she does come up, she perches way up and again we have that ear going back towards the gate.”

“And goes in to pet her and she turns her head away and then we get more vocalizations and a stress yawn. We then get pinned back ears there and then some mouth movements. None of this looks like stress about the interaction, just stress that she can’t get across what she needs. So I would try offering her going out the gate and see what she says.”

@fivebyfivek9 What is Daphne trying to say here? #dogbehavior #dogbodylanguage #doglanguage #pettingyourdog #caninecommunication ♬ original sound – Five By Five Canine

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