do dogs understand apologies?

[mopinko]

my boxer, like many guard dogs, likes to lay by my feet, or in the doorway. naturally she gets kicked/stepped on with a fair degree of regularity. (yes, i could learn, but i am the old dog here.) i always hug her and tell her i am sorry. she seems to understand, but then again she might just be appreciating the attention, like always.
the worst part is that she has very bad hips, and even tho she doesn't seem to notice the pain, she sure yelps when this happens. i would feel a lot better to think that when i tell her i am sorry that she understands.
what do you think?

[Coyote_Bandit]

1. I think it's very possible

I made two job related moves in a very short times just after I got my first dog. Disrupted both our lives. He developed some behavior problems and separation anxiety. After I got settled and established a reliable routine I had a long talk with the dog and appologized to him. It was a turning point in our relationship.

Dogs are very good at sensing our emotions. They likely don't understand our words of appology. But they crave our attention and sense our concern for their well being. An appology fills both those needs.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. Well stated. I think you described perfectly a lot of human-dog interaction.

We like to ascribe to them human traits, but they're not human.

[TorchTheWitch]

3. I'm convinced that they do

I'm also convinced they understand a whole lot more than we can even imagine. My dogs always understood when I was sad or upset or angry (not at them) or didn't feel well or whatever. I think they know a whole lot more about our emotions than we do ourselves and respond accordingly. I've always spent so much time watching my dogs that I learned so much about the most subtle of body signals that show they understand things and body signals that show they either don't give a crap, annoyed that we aren't getting over it already and various levels of sympathy. They may not know what it is that is causing us to feel as we do, but I'm certain they know we feel what we do and respond in various ways (sympathy, apology, grudging patience with our mood, sick to death of our mood, etc.).

I've always used my dogs as a barometer of judging mood or character of someone else, but with the last dog I started also using him as a barometer to figure out what I was feeling myself since sometimes you know you feel something not good but can't seem to put your finger on what it is (am I sad, depressed, ill, anxious, etc.?).

I also think some dogs are more obvious about their subtle signals than others. I think the last one was wheres the one before seemed a lot more stoic, but that could be that his signals were just so much more subtle I couldn't always tell what they meant or didn't recognize they were there.

I really think a lot of animals are vastly more intelligent than we give them credit for mostly because our methods of communication are so incredibly different. It's actually pretty unfortunate that humans have relied so long on spoken language that we don't even know how to recognize the subtle body language of our own species anymore and what they mean. I find I sometimes wonder if animals think humans are unbelievably stupid creatures because of this.

[badgerpup]

4. Can't speak for dogs...

...but cats do.

Wimsey and Raven are bad about getting underfoot- Raven because she's young and hasn't learned the nuances yet and Wimsey because this is how he gets attention.

Gotta watch me feet around Wimsicle or he'll get stepped on. Then I'm expected to pick him up, cuddle him and apologize to him for being such a klutz (even though I could swear his foot wasn't there when I started to put mine down).

Raven knows the drill too...she looks at me like she's waiting for her apology and when she gets it, everything's cool.

[yellerpup]

5. My cats appreciate an apology as well.

They know the meaning of the word "sorry" almost as well as they know the meaning of the question, "Hungry?" They get a "sorry" and a cuddle and it's all cool. :hi:

[TygrBright]

6. My old boy was a big player of the "who's wrong" game...

We used to joke that tripping over Fisbin without moving him was five points, tripping with a little moving was 10 points, stepping on him lightly was fifteen points and stepping hard (sometimes unavoidable as he was super excellent at finding the exact spot your foot would come down) was twenty points. The "apology" varied by the point system... anything over ten points almost always rated a treat, but EVERYTHING got him cuddles and attention.

We were probably training him to put himself in harm's way, alas... but he was not exactly amenable to any kind of behavior modification in any other circumstance, so who knows.

Still miss the old boy. He was one in a million.

nostalgically,
Bright