I was asked this question by an owner recently. Her dog was a young collie cross and she’d noticed that the dog always either crouched low to the ground, or lay down when she saw other dogs approaching.
As you can probably guess by now if you’ve been following these Wednesday Why blogs, there is more than one possible reason for this behaviour.
Crouching may be due to fear – all mammals tend to make themselves smaller when they feel threatened, including us. Young puppies will fling themselves to the ground and usually roll over if faced by something or someone scary or bigger – and many things, dogs and people are all bigger and scary to a puppy. That’s why socialising your puppy properly is so important – to build her confidence in everything she might smell, hear, see and encounter in life. (Download our free socialisation help sheet from the Freebies section on the website for more information.)
Crouching low to the ground is also a behaviour bred into herding dogs – just picture a sheepdog herding sheep. It’s called the eye-stalk and it’s part of the predatory sequence – a sequence of genetically based behaviours common to all predators.
The sequence is: Search (orient, or eye); Stalk; Chase; Bite (grab-bite, kill-bite); Dissect; Consume. Wolves and other wild predators show the full sequence, but our domestic pet dogs usually don’t.
Different breeds have been bred to exhibit specific parts of that sequence. Herding dogs such as collies have a strong eye-stalk behaviour, search behaviours important in detection dogs such as bloodhounds and beagles, gundogs will flush out and retrieve birds, terriers will find, chase and kill vermin.
In this particular dog, the crouching was a manifestation of her innate herding behaviour. After the crouch she usually ran wide around to the back of the other dog – another innate herding manoeuvre.
The predatory sequence is useful to you as a pet dog owner as you can encourage toy play games such as fetch and tug, which in turn can help you with training your dog.
We play lots of other games in our Perfect Pet courses.
Keep training
Carol