Inside a Dog's Mind: Part 4

Dozer is leading the team on the 2025 expedition.

However, before we delve any further into our dog’s mind and open the desirable neural pathways—which we are doing but will discuss in more detail later—we must quickly and easily recognize our dog’s state of well-being. How do we do this?

Simply, reading their facial expressions. In all my training videos, I emphasize the importance of reading our dog’s facial expressions.  Yet, I haven’t ever given you a clear reason why. 

For me, their facial expressions are easily read since I’ve been training dogs for over half a century. It’s like second nature to me, so I easily forget to explain clearly what I mean.

The bottom line is that I stop the dogs and camp when their facial expressions show any signs of fatigue whatsoever.  Ideally, I stop well before these signs appear, meaning far in advance. 

I don’t like the faintest signs of fatigue at all!  However, I know instinctively, by having many decades of experience in dog sledding.

 And I’d like to note that, as strange as it sounds, air humidity is the determining factor in how far we can travel. I’ll talk more about this soon, but for now, I’ll give you a quick rundown.

Lower humidity causes more friction on sled runners, requiring more effort from the dogs to pull the sleds. And vice versa, higher humidity is easier. But detecting these humidity levels is another chapter, which will be coming soon. However, it’s highly important to know humidity levels.

Let’s get back inside our dogs’ minds: Dogs have similar expressions to people, particularly in their brows and mouths. And we all know the basic expressions of sadness, happiness, stress, or fatigue.

But in people, there are more facial expressions flashing before us in just 1/25 of a second to half a second. These involuntary emotional leakages, or micro-expressions that flicker uncontrollably on the face, reveal true emotions and can easily be missed, especially if we’re not paying close attention. I believe these micro-expressions are also present in dogs.

Here are a few facts I’ve dug up: Dogs underwent significant changes during the process of domestication, both in their behavior and physical features. 

Domestication has altered the facial muscle anatomy of dogs, specifically for facial communication with humans. The muscle that raises the inner eyebrow is uniformly present in dogs but not in wolves. Basically, dogs’ expressive eyebrows are the result of selection based on human preferences.

And for this reason, I prefer to travel ahead of the team by skiing or snowshoeing, so that I can look behind me and read the faces and expressions of my 22 dogs.  

So, if we’re sitting on the sled, sipping coffee, and smoking a cigar while running a dog team, we’re likely to miss what our dogs are “telling” us.

However, before I discovered these scientific findings that allow us to read about our dogs' health and mental well-being through their facial expressions, I had taken this concept to heart when I was a kid training hunting dogs. Yet, I couldn’t explain it like a scientist!

Now, we have it written in scientific terms, rather than my favorite saying, which I always replied to when asked how I could tell if my dogs were stressed, injured, or fatigued: “It’s all in their faces.”

However, what would happen if I sat on the sled, watching my dogs’ butts, and counted the miles traveled without paying attention to the dogs’ true levels of stress and fatigue? The answer is simply that the team wouldn’t have ever accomplished the remarkable feats they have.