I’ve fostered a lot of dogs, but the most challenging one so far was Marvin (on the right). Marvin had a lot of issues that we had to work on. I wanted to take some happy pictures of him, so if he ever became adoptable people might see him in a different light. At first, I thought this picture was very cute and have kept it in an album as one of my favorites. I see it all the time when looking through photos. But every time I look at it, the dog trainer in me wants to evaluate everything.
The picture was taken at around 1/200sec, which made me wonder. Marvin would go from acting completely chill to being in the red zone in less than the blink of an eye. So while this is a picture of two “happy” looking dogs playing, what I see now is that Marvin is very unsure about Gonzo (our dog on the left). You can see how laser-focused his eyes are, intense. Gonzo definitely sees this too. While he isn’t very worried about it, he does not want to take his eyes off Marvin either.
By the way, we had Marvin for 9 months, and he was adopted by a great couple who have given him a truly wonderful new life.
Do you study pictures of your dogs? Along with learning some great dog body language, it could help you see just how fast they can think.
