Wow that’s an unwieldy title. I should workshop that a bit. I probably won’t. And if you read the title and thought, “Wow, that’s an unwieldy title,” then you know that I for sure didn’t. I’m sorry. My jokes are not only bad, but reading them actively inconveniences people. If the bad jokes are not why you’re here, then maybe you’re here because you wanted to read something about corgis. And so…maybe I should skip to that bit.
Now, I’m not here to talk about tail docking. I won’t do it, and you can’t make me. You can’t. I don’t want to die. Not on that hill.
I’m here to address the fact that I have seen and heard people make the claim that the lack of a tail makes it hard to tell how a dog is feeling. And THAT, that is a hill ‘twould be an honour to die on.
DOGS are Expressive
First of all, we need to take a moment to recognise and appreciate just how expressive dogs are as a species. And for a moment I want to focus on their faces. Because the amount of expression in their faces is actually pretty remarkable, by which I mean that it is unusual, even amongst other domestic animals. Patricia McConnell talks about this in her seminar “The Art and Science of Canine Behavior.” She points out that dog faces are far more expressive than those of horses, or cats, or chimpanzees. And you know this, we all know this.
Can you tell me, which dog is happy and which dog is sad?
Which dog is happy and which dog is scared?
Which dog is feeling friendly and which dog should you back the heck away from?
One more. Which one is happy, which one is uncertain?
It probably wasn’t difficult to identify the dog on the left of your screen (or the top picture, if you’re on mobile) as the one exhibiting the happy or friendly expression. Humans are very good at correctly identifying positive emotions in dogs. (Negative ones, not always so much, interestingly.) So I’m not saying you’re a psychopath if you had trouble with that, but…no, I’m kidding. And I’m sorry. Another bad joke.
In Patricia McConnell’s For the Love of a Dog—(which you should read, have you read it? Go read it. Bring tissues)—there’s a really interesting series of pictures comparing the faces of dogs with the faces of people experiencing the same emotions, and the direct parallels are striking.
And in the pictures I showed you, did you notice that not one of those pictures relied on the tail to convey that emotion? Nope, it’s all in the face.
The Tail Wag Trap
Obviously tails are expressive. But relying solely on the tail and not reading it correctly has gotten some people into trouble. I have to invoke Patricia McConnell again because I feel like she had the best analogy: usually, a smile means the person is happy/friendly. But not always. We can all think of smiles that do not indicate good will.
In fact, in the wrong context, smiles can be downright terrifying. So too, not all tail wags are equal.
And just as some people are naturally very adept at reading other humans and identifying a disingenuous smile, and others have trained themselves through observation to get better at it, so, too, we can learn to read tail wags better and determine which ones are true signs of a happy dog and which ones just indicate high arousal of a not-necessarily-positive variety. Because there is a difference, and there has been some fascinating research actually analysing tail wags. Here’s an example.
But until our eyes are trained, the best thing you can do is remember to see the whole dog, and repeat as many times as necessary that wagging tail ≠ friendly dog every time.
And once you learn to take in the whole picture, you’ll find that dogs without tails are actually quite expressive, too.
Reading dog body language is a vast subject that is far beyond the purview of anything I can possibly do with this blog. If you really want to dive into this topic, there are so many good resources out there. The most easily accessible (and just a beautiful book too) is Lili Chin’s Doggie Language. I love the illustrations so much, and I love how this is something that you can even share with your children. If you want a deeper dive, I absolutely love Brenda Aloff’s Canine Body Language: A Photographic Guide: Interpreting the Native Language of Domestic Dogs. It’s almost textbook sized, but there are tons of photographs, so don’t be scared. It’s an incredible resource.
Once you know what you’re looking at, the best thing you can do is observe dogs. Something that I’ve learned from watching presentations given by Sue Sternberg is to take videos (or find videos online) and then watch them frame by frame. There are so many blink-and-you-miss-it signals that dogs give, especially to other dogs, who are (not surprisingly) better at quickly perceiving and interpreting dog body language than we are. I feel like most dogs really dumb it down for us humans, and even then we often don’t get it.
So, as I said, I can’t do a deep-dive here. Besides the fact that I would never call myself an expert, there’s just too much for one blog post. What I can do is show you a (tailless!) corgi displaying emotions quite clearly.
Relaxed Corgi
This is Delia at her baseline. Relaxed, neutral. Very low-arousal. Also completely comfortable in her surroundings.
If she had a tail, it would be as relaxed as the rest of her.
Happy Corgi
I showed you some happy Delia pictures at the beginning, but here are a few more.
Notice how her mouth in those pictures is relaxed, not pulled back tight at the corners. Think of the difference on a human face between a grimace of yikes or pain, vs. a relaxed smile of happiness. You can also see that her eyes are bright and soft. In the top left one she has slightly higher arousal because she is waiting for me to push her herding ball, and you can see that in her eyes. But they’re still happy eyes, there’s just more excitement there.
Another sign of a happy dog is when their whole body is wagging and wiggling, and they don’t need a tail for that. There’s also what I refer to as “happy tip-tap feet,” which I think describes itself and you can probably picture. When you think happy, think movement and curves. Depending on individual personality, there might be a LOT of movement (I meet a lot of labs and pitbulls like this: big, wiggly, bouncy, just a knock-you-down blur of happy motion) or not a ton (Trigger, who approaches you wiggly and with smiling face and eyes, then leans against your leg to let you pet him, closed eyes opening occasionally to gaze adoringly up at you.) But a happy dog is not stiff. Their muscles are loose and fluid.
And the curve, even if slight, is important. Standing in a full, stick-straight head-to-tail alignment toward a person or other dog is not a sociable gesture. It is not received well by other dogs, and can be associated with aggression. This is another thing I’ve started paying attention to since watching presentations from Sue Sternberg. I think a lot of us intuitively know that a dog facing us down head-on without moving is probably not friendly (even if the tail is wagging). But do start paying attention to the reverse and noticing what sociable dogs are doing with their bodies so as not to be in that unsociable full alignment position. It’s pretty interesting.
Another thing, which I don’t have many pictures of because she’s always moving so much when she’s in this state, are ears back. (Not pinned tightly back against the skull.) Look for this in combination with other signs of happiness.
Sad Corgi
I realised it’s really hard for me to find pictures where Delia is experiencing the less positive emotions, because it’s usually the moments when she’s relaxed or happy that I’m more likely to pull out the camera. But you know the sad dog face. It looks a lot like a sad human face, and that’s I think why it pulls at our heart strings so much. Eyes become large and soft, the inner corners of the eyebrows raise, and sometimes the head is tilted or the nose pointed downwards. The dog may drop their head, and the posture is deflated and loose, not tense.
All of this is clearly visible without a tail.
Apprehensive Corgi
Apprehension is something that I think is so important for dog owners to get better at seeing, ESPECIALLY when socialising our puppies! It turns out that I have tons to say about this, and I just had to edit out a whole bunch of stuff that I think belongs in its own separate post.
I really recommend diving deeply into this topic. I’m just going to point out a couple of things that are visible in the picture above, because again, I would need to do a whole post on this, and even better than hearing me talking about it would be consulting the resources I mentioned earlier.
In the picture above, Delia and I are getting in the car on our way to her spay appointment, and she is looking toward the car, but she is not facing it, and you’ll notice that even her feet are angled away from it; she doesn’t want to go toward it. She loves car rides and until this point had also shown no apprehension around going to the vet. So my explanation is that she had picked up on my own anxiety.
You can see that the inner corners of her eyebrows are pushed up and inward. Her mouth is closed, and she is holding perfectly still (a freeze.) The whites of her eyes are showing because she is looking at the car but her head is not turned toward it all the way. This is often called “whale eye.”
She is not completely terrified here. She was able to enter the vehicle of her own accord, without any coaxing or forcing. But she knew something was up, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.
Again, there are so many more signs of apprehension that aren’t in this picture but are important to talk about. But I’m trying not to get side-tracked. The point of this post is not to dive deep into body language. The point is that corgis can be read without tails. (I’m saying this for myself, because I keep forgetting!)
And on that note, I think you get the point.
All the Feels!
So we looked at neutral, happy, sad, and apprehensive/conflicted. There are, of course, way more emotions to talk about, and way more subtleties of the ones that we looked at than what I mentioned here. But you got the point, right? Not having a tail does not make corgis hard to read. Not by a long shot.
Let me also present you with this excellent poster from Lili Chin, from her Doggie Drawings website, which I share under the terms she outlines there.
What I love about this, aside from the fact that it is awesome in every way, is that she uses Boogie, her Boston terrier, who also does not have much of a tail. What you get from these illustrations is the dog’s entire body. And in her book, she also reminds you how important it is to consider the context.
One last thing I wanted to touch on.
What About Other Dogs?
Okay, so humans can read corgis even though they don’t have tails. But I’ve heard people say that dogs have trouble reading docked dogs.
With all due respect, I think that’s bologna.
The truth is that an unfortunate number of dogs have trouble reading social signals from other dogs, full stop. This is due to a variety of factors. Insufficient time spent with their mother and other adult dogs in the first few weeks of life; being the only dog in the household; being in a household or attending a daycare where the only dogs they have to learn from are also completely socially inappropriate; being in a household where the older dog is corrected by the humans for appropriately correcting them. I also have a guess that it might be prevalent in dogs that have been heavily selected for extreme sociability towards humans, which may be why I have observed it a lot in doodles—and I’m not throwing shade.
Another unfortunate truth is that a lot of corgis have poor social skills. It makes me sad when people tell me that they love how friendly Delia is because most corgis they meet aren’t very friendly. I don’t run into other corgis at the dog park very often, but I’ve met quite a few who simply weren’t interested in interacting with other dogs, were fearful, or were antagonising other dogs. None of that has anything to do with their tails.
The reason I think that the idea that docked tails interfere with a dog’s ability to communicate is bologna is because anything signalled with the tail is also being communicated in other ways. I’ve told you how important it is to look at the whole dog. Can you for one moment imagine that dogs need to be told that? We have to study dog body language, but for them, it’s their native language. So a socially and neurologically typical dog will not be hampered by the lack of a tail on another dog. They will be picking up on all the other signals, including both the big flashing neon ones and ones so subtle and fleeting that we need to watch frame by frame to catch them and even then may not know how to interpret them. Dogs do catch these micro signals, and we can tell this by the ways they respond. And that is another topic that is too big for this post.
So if you see a conflict between another dog and a corgi (or some other breed with a short dock) before you assume that it’s the lack of the tail, look at other factors.
Now on this topic, one thing I will say is that I do think there is validity to the idea that certain phenotypes can be interpreted as aggressive/high arousal/unsociable/predatory by other dogs. For example, I see a lot of dogs react defensively when approached by Siberian huskies at the park, even when the huskies are demonstrating sociability. Many of them have a naturally high, arched tail carriage, pricked ears, an intense gaze, etc., all of which present a visual package that can make another dog uncomfortable. The stiff gait, the mane which can resemble raised hackles, prick ears, and high tail carriage of a Chow cause many dogs to react even from very far away. But the difference here is that these effects are not based on the absence of something. A tail carried high or curved over the back is sending a signal, even if the dog isn’t intending to and that’s just their natural tail carriage. The absence of a tail simply doesn’t provide any information, nor does it look like something else.
And even in these cases, not all dogs seem to be sensitive to these phenotypes. For other dogs, they may have an initial reaction and then realise that they have misjudged the situation—again, by looking at the rest of the dog’s behaviour. Delia reacted fearfully when she met her first husky as a pup, but she quickly realised that this dog was sociable and in fact was trying to solicit play. She loves playing with huskies now.
So even if a dog were phased momentarily by the lack of a tail—and I have yet to see a dog react that way to Delia, who is a beautiful communicator—I think we can expect that they would quickly adjust.
End of My Ramblings
I don’t know if this post was all that coherent or interesting, but there you go! I’m trying to post regularly, but time keeps slipping away from me, and also, I’m lazy. Lately I’ve been taking courses and reading books like crazy. I am pursuing additional certification and would eventually like to be a dog trainer—on the side, I like my day job—with a focus on helping people find solutions to meet the needs of both the dogs and the humans in their household. At least…that’s a thought. Right now I’m just enjoying the learning. There is just so much there. For instance, I watched a fantastic webinar from Sue Sternberg which is available to APDT members which was an entire hour just about some behaviours surrounding the mouth, especially the tongue/licking behaviours. The more I dive into this stuff, the more aware I am of all there is to learn. I will never be an expert, and I love that!! I would happily study dogs for a few thousand years.
That about wraps it up. I will happily take suggestions for future posts if you have any—I do have a list, but I’m not really feeling any of my ideas there and I’m not sure what others are interested in reading. So feel free to submit any suggestions here. If you enjoy my blog, thank you; I will literally never get over that or wrap my mind around it. You can feel free to subscribe at the bottom of the page, or follow us on Facebook (link is also at the bottom of the page.)
Have a lovely day!
