R+R Canine Consulting

Certified Family Dog Mediator and Professional Dog Trainer

Why Dogs Do What They Do: Natural Dog Behaviors Explained

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The Behavior Behind the Behavior: Why Your Dog Does What They Do

Your dog digs up the garden. Barks at the window. Humps the same stuffed toy every evening. It's easy to see these as problems to fix. But most of them are natural dog behaviors that simply have nowhere to go.

This series is about understanding those behaviors, one at a time, and making room for them in real homes.

Most "Problem" Behaviors Are Normal Dog Behaviors

Dogs were shaped over thousands of years to sniff, dig, chew, chase, scavenge, watch, and connect. Those drives didn't disappear when dogs moved onto our couches. What changed was the environment. City apartments, suburban yards, leashed walks, and long workdays leave very little space for a dog to be a dog.

When a need has no outlet, it tends to show up somewhere we don't want it.

What Is the Total Welfare Ethogram?

An ethogram is a catalogue of the behaviors a species naturally performs. The Total Welfare Ethogram, created by applied ethologist Kim Brophey and the Family Dog Mediation Education Center, maps 52 dog behaviors, from scent tracking and digging to social grooming and resting outdoors.

The idea behind it is called behavioral diversity: dogs do best when they can express a wide range of these behaviors, not just the few that fit our routines.

Understanding a Behavior Doesn't Mean Allowing It Everywhere

Take mounting, or humping. Most of us stop it on sight because it's awkward. But mounting is a normal dog behavior, and it often has less to do with sex than with releasing extra energy or coping with overstimulation.

My dog Rosco has a stuffed dog named Goldie that he's had since he was a puppy. For years we stopped him whenever he humped her. Once I started watching instead, I noticed a pattern: he went to Goldie when he had energy to burn off or when the day had been too much.

That doesn't mean anything goes. Mounting a person's leg, a child, or a dog who isn't into it is a problem, and it's worth interrupting kindly. The goal isn't to erase the behavior. It's to give it the right place, like redirecting to a designated toy, and to notice what's building up before it happens.

That's the balance this series is about: understanding the need, then shaping where and how it gets met.

Our Dogs Depend on Us for Almost Everything

Where they go, when they eat, who they meet, what they get to do all day. In welfare science, that level of dependence makes dogs captive animals. It's not a word most of us like. It sounds like cages.

But captive doesn't mean uncared for. The best keepers of any animal are the ones who study that animal's nature and build a life around it. That's what loving a dog well looks like, too.

Why Meeting Needs Comes Before Changing Behavior

Guidance and teaching still matter. Our world is confusing for dogs, and they need our help to navigate it. But a dog whose needs are met is far better equipped to learn, cope, and settle. Often, when we change the dog's world first, there's much less left to change in the dog.

What to Expect in This Series

Here on the blog, I'm exploring a selection of behaviors from the ethogram. Each post covers:

  • Where the behavior comes from
  • What need it serves
  • Practical ways to support it in an urban or suburban home

Quick Answers

Why does my dog hump? Mounting is a normal dog behavior that can help release energy or cope with overstimulation. If it's directed at people or other dogs, redirect it to an appropriate toy. A sudden increase is worth a vet check, since discomfort can play a role.

Is it bad to stop natural dog behaviors? Redirecting is fine, and sometimes necessary. Removing every outlet usually backfires.

Need help reading your dog?
If a behavior is causing stress in your home, Book a Behavioral and Wellness Assessment with me.

This series draws on the Total Welfare Ethogram from the Family Dog Mediation Education Center.

What Street Dogs Can Teach Us About “Problem” Behavior in Pet Dogs

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I grew up in Manila in the 80s and 90s, surrounded by street dogs. They're properly called aspins now, short for asong Pinoy, Filipino dog. The older term, askal, carries a class-discrimination sting most Filipinos grew up not questioning, and the Philippine Animal Welfare Society introduced aspin in 2007 specifically to move away from that. They had routes, favorite people, and loose social groups that shifted from day to day. Nobody managed them. They managed themselves.

I also have one specific memory of two of them chasing me as a kid, and for years I read that as proof street dogs were dangerous. It took becoming a Certified Family Dog Mediator to look back and realize the chase probably had nothing to do with aggression at all. Movement, especially a screaming, running kid, is one of the strongest chase triggers a dog has, whether the motivation behind it is fear, excitement, or plain instinct with nowhere else to go. That reframe changed how I think about a lot of "problem" dog behavior, not just my own memory.

Dogs didn't start out as pets

Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, whose decades of research reshaped how we understand dog origins, argued that dogs domesticated themselves. Rather than early humans capturing and training wolves, wolves that tolerated proximity to people gained access to a new food source at the edges of human settlements. Over generations, that tolerance became the dog. Whatever the exact mechanism (researchers still debate the details), the population the Coppingers studied most closely was the village dog: free-roaming, self-sustaining, and still, by their account, how most of the world's dogs live today.

Researchers studying free-ranging dogs in India, particularly Anindita Bhadra's work at IISER Kolkata, have documented something closer to loose, flexible family groups than a rigid pack hierarchy. Mothers raise pups with help from other dogs. Bonds form around specific people, places, and resources. Dogs move fluidly between solitary time and social time depending on the day. None of it is managed by a person. All of it is decided by the dog.

The piece most pet dogs are missing

This is where it gets relevant for the dog on your couch. A dog barking at the window, pulling toward every scent on a walk, or guarding a spot on the couch isn't malfunctioning. Genetics and environment shape each other, and a dog bred from generations of free-roaming ancestors, placed in a home where every outing is scheduled and every decision is made for them, is going to feel that mismatch somewhere. Sometimes it shows up as anxiety. Sometimes as reactivity. Sometimes just as a dog who seems restless in a life that looks, from the outside, comfortable.

Street dogs (lovingly sometimes called "Streeties") have almost none of what we consider "care" by modern standards. No vet visits, no scheduled meals, no soft bed. But they have something a lot of pet dogs are missing: choice. The freedom to move through their environment, choose their own company, and make small decisions all day long.

I see this even in my own home. My dog Rei was a street dog before he came to me. His reactivity isn't fear-based, it's frustration. He wants to greet every person and every dog he sees, and a leash and city rules don't allow it. I used to file that under "whatever happened before I knew him." Now I think about it differently. In the Four Pillars Framework I built for street and shelter dogs, Rei gained real Safety and Trust the day he came inside. Where I'm still working is Gradual Integration, the pillar that separates integration from assimilation: a dog becoming part of family life while keeping who they actually are, rather than a dog expected to suppress their real self to fit our terms. Rei wanting to greet the world isn't a flaw. It's who he is. The work is giving that trait a legitimate outlet instead of just more rules against it.

Why this changes how we approach "training"

Understanding a dog's behavior has to come before trying to change it. A dog who barks, chases, guards, or reacts isn't a dog that needs correcting so much as a dog whose instincts don't have anywhere appropriate to go. That's the gap a Behavioral and Wellness Assessment is built to find, not obedience gaps, but welfare gaps: where a dog's genetics, environment, and history are asking for something their current life isn't providing.

If your dog's behavior has you stuck between "this is just who they are" and "I need to fix this," that question is usually the wrong one. The better question is what instinct is showing up, and what would it take to give it somewhere to go.

At What Cost?

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We love a well trained dog. The one who sits at the door instead of bolting through it. The one who walks past another dog without losing their mind. The one who "just knows" what to do.

And to be clear: training matters. Obedience matters. A dog who can respond to you in a chaotic world is safer, freer, and honestly easier to love well. This isn't an article against training.

It's a question we don't ask nearly enough.

At what cost?

The Quiet Dog Isn't Always the Okay Dog

Somewhere along the way, "well behaved" became shorthand for "well off." A dog who doesn't react, doesn't bark, doesn't pull, doesn't hesitate, gets called good. But stillness isn't always regulation. Sometimes it's shutdown. Sometimes it's a dog who has learned that responding honestly doesn't get them anywhere, so they stop trying.

That's not obedience. That's resignation.

You can train a behavior into a dog without ever asking what the dog needed in that moment, what they were feeling, or whether they had any choice in how they got there. The behavior looks the same from the outside. What's happening underneath is not.

Two Dogs, Same Sit

Picture two dogs asked to sit and stay while a stranger approaches.

Dog one has been taught that staying put is safe, that their handler will step in if things get overwhelming, and that they have some say in how close is too close. They sit. Their body is loose. They glance at their person, not out of fear, but because they've learned that person is a reliable source of information.

Dog two has been taught that moving means consequences. They sit. Their body is stiff, their eyes wide, tucked and still. They're not choosing to stay. They're enduring it.

From across the room, these look identical. That's the problem. We've built an entire industry around evaluating the sit and ignoring the dog.

Compliance Isn't the Same as Change

A dog's genetics don't clock out just because you've got a solid training plan. A herding breed bred for generations to track motion and grip isn't being "stubborn" when they struggle to ignore a running child. A dog wired for vigilance isn't being "dominant" when they bark at every visitor. Push hard enough on the outside, though, and you can still get the behavior to stop.

That's the part worth sitting with. Suppression works, in the sense that it stops the behavior from showing up. But it doesn't change what the dog is built to do or how they're built to feel. It just teaches them the behavior isn't safe to show you anymore.

What Welfare-Centered Training Actually Asks

This isn't a call to abandon structure or stop teaching your dog to listen. It's a call to ask a different question before you ask for the behavior.

Not just "how do I get my dog to stop doing this?" but "why is my dog doing this, and what do they need that they're not getting?"

A dog who feels safe, trusts their person, and has some real say in how they engage doesn't need to be suppressed into compliance. Compliance shows up on its own, because it's no longer costing them anything to give it.

The Real Measure

A trained dog and a well dog aren't automatically the same thing. Sometimes they overlap beautifully. Sometimes they don't, and the gap between them is exactly where shutdown, shell-shocked stillness, and quiet suffering live, hidden behind a resume of good behavior.

So before you ask what your dog should be doing differently, it's worth asking what's actually driving the behavior in the first place, and what it might cost your dog to train it away without ever answering that question.

That's exactly what a Behavioral and Wellness Assessment is built to uncover. Not another obedience checklist, but a real look at the dog in front of you: their genetics, their environment, their history, their nervous system, before a single training plan gets written.

Because the goal was never just a dog who listens. It's a dog who's actually okay.

“It’s How You Raise Them”: Why This Common Dog Myth Falls Apart

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You've heard it a hundred times. Someone meets a reactive dog, a fearful dog, a dog who guards resources or barks at every passerby, and the verdict comes fast: "must not have been raised right."

It's a tidy explanation. It also lets everyone off the hook a little too easily, because if bad behavior always traces back to bad raising, then good behavior should always trace back to good raising. Anyone who's raised two puppies the exact same way and ended up with two completely different dogs already knows that math doesn't add up.

So what's actually going on? This is where the L.E.G.S. framework, developed by applied ethologist Kim Brophey, gives us a much more honest picture. L.E.G.S. stands for Learning, Environment, Genetics, and Self, four interacting forces that shape every dog's behavior. Raising a dog touches maybe two of those. The other two are working the whole time whether anyone raised the dog perfectly or not.

Genetics didn't stop existing because a dog lives in your house

Dogs weren't bred to be blank slates. They were bred, often quite deliberately, for jobs: guarding, herding, retrieving, pointing, hunting vermin, sounding an alarm. Those genetic instructions don't switch off because a dog now sleeps on a couch instead of working a flock.

A herding breed who nips at running kids isn't confused about the rules of the house. A terrier who can't leave the neighbor's cat alone isn't poorly socialized. A livestock guardian who barks at 2am isn't being defiant. These are breed-typical behaviors showing up exactly where you'd expect, in a context that never asked whether the dog had a job to do with all that instinct.

"It's how you raise them" quietly erases this entire piece of the picture. It treats every dog as an equally blank canvas, when in reality you're working with genetic material that has its own agenda before any raising even begins.

Learning is bigger than "training" and it never really stops

Learning is the piece people usually mean when they say "raising." But learning isn't just what happened in puppyhood, and it isn't just formal training either. It's every single experience a dog has ever had, good and bad, and how those experiences built associations over time.

A dog who was never formally "raised" badly can still learn that the vet clinic means pain, that strangers reaching toward their face means danger, or that guarding the food bowl is the only way to keep it. One bad experience, repeated a couple of times, can outweigh months of otherwise careful raising. Learning history is happening constantly, well past the point most people stop thinking of a dog as being "raised."

Environment shapes what a dog's genetics and learning actually run into

Even a dog with rock solid genetics and a thoughtful learning history is still responding to the world they're actually living in. Crowded sidewalks, off leash dogs rushing up, a household that changed shape, a move, a new baby, noise, unpredictability. None of that is a raising failure. It's an environment mismatch, and dogs, like every other animal, respond to their environment whether or not it fits them.

Self accounts for the individual sitting in front of you

Two puppies from the same litter, raised in the same home, by the same people, using the same methods, can still turn out completely differently. Temperament, sensitivity, resilience, medical history, age related changes. This is the Self piece of L.E.G.S., and it's the reason cookie cutter raising advice was always going to hit its limits. You're not raising a blank slate. You're raising an individual.

Why this myth matters beyond just being inaccurate

This isn't just an academic argument. "It's how you raise them" has real costs.

For guardians, it breeds shame. People blame themselves for behavior that was never fully in their control to prevent, and that shame makes it harder to ask for help.

For dogs, it means the actual drivers of behavior, genetics, learning history, environment, individual welfare, go unexamined while everyone focuses on parenting technique. You can't fix a genetic mismatch or an unmet welfare need with better raising, because that was never the whole problem to begin with.

And for the field of dog training as a whole, it keeps the conversation stuck on blame instead of moving toward what actually helps: understanding.

What actually helps is understanding the whole dog

This is exactly why assessment has to come before training. You can't meaningfully address behavior you don't understand, and you can't understand it by asking one question about how a dog was raised. You have to look at the whole picture: breed history and genetic predispositions, the dog's full learning history, the environment they're currently living in, and who they are as an individual.

That's the starting point for real change, and it's exactly what a Behavioral Wellness Assessment is built to uncover. Instead of guessing at what went wrong in the raising, we look at what's actually driving the behavior right now, so the plan that follows actually fits the dog in front of us.

Is Your Dog’s Behavior Actually a Problem, or Just Instinct With Nowhere to Go?

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Your dog barks at the mail carrier. Herds your kids around the yard like they're loose sheep. Digs a crater in the middle of your freshly planted flower bed. Pulls toward every squirrel like nothing else in the world exists. Guards the couch. Can't settle when the doorbell rings.

At some point we started calling all of this a "behavior problem." Something wrong with the dog. Something to train out of them.

But what if it isn't wrong at all? What if it's just... normal?

Worth asking before you reach for the label

Every dog alive today is carrying around thousands of years of purpose in their genes, whether we remember that or not. We bred herding dogs to move livestock across open fields for ten hours a day. We bred guardian breeds to notice and respond to anything unfamiliar coming near their territory. We bred scent hounds to follow a trail until it resolves, and terriers to hunt down anything small and fast.

Then we moved them into apartments. Fenced backyards. Six-foot leashes. Nine-hour workdays home alone.

The instincts didn't disappear. We just took away everywhere they used to go.

So when a Border Collie mix starts nipping ankles at a birthday party, is that a behavior problem? Or is that a herding dog doing exactly what herding dogs were built to do, because it's the only outlet left? When a dog barks at everyone who walks past the window, is that stubbornness, or is that a watchdog with a job and no actual territory to patrol?

It's worth sitting with that question for a minute before jumping straight to a fix.

Why we jump to the label anyway

We like clean answers. A diagnosis. A protocol. A plan that says do this and the problem goes away.

And to be fair, training does matter. Learning matters. Clear communication with your dog matters, a lot. None of that is in question here.

But there's a real difference between changing what a behavior looks like on the surface and actually understanding what's driving it underneath. If we only ever address the visible part, the barking, the pulling, the guarding, without asking what need is behind it, we can end up managing the same symptoms forever. Or worse, we shut down the one outlet a dog had for something they had no other way to process, and call it "fixed" just because it got quiet.

That's not resolution. That's a dog who learned that expressing themselves doesn't work anymore.

What's actually underneath the behavior

Once you stop asking how do I make this stop and start asking why is this happening in the first place, a totally different picture shows up.

A dog's behavior never exists on its own. It's shaped by genetics and breed history, by what their nervous system has come to expect from the world, by their environment past and present, and by who they are as an individual: their health, their age, their temperament, everything they've been through.

And underneath all of that sits something even more basic. Does this dog actually feel safe in their world? Do they trust the people and situations around them? Are they getting real support when something is hard? Do they have any meaningful choice in how they get to move through their own life?

Safety, trust, support, choice. Those four things tend to be sitting quietly underneath almost every behavior we're tempted to slap a label on. A dog who guards resources may not feel safe that good things will keep showing up. A dog who can't settle when guests arrive may not trust they'll be supported if things go sideways. A dog who shuts down or explodes at the vet may have simply never been given any choice in how that experience happens to them.

None of that shows up on a training plan. But it shows up in the behavior, every day, whether we notice it or not.

Welfare and behavior aren't two separate things

Here's the part worth carrying with you: a lot of what gets called a behavior problem is actually a welfare problem wearing a training costume.

The dog isn't broken. Most of the time the dog is doing exactly what their biology and history prepared them to do, in an environment that was never built to hold it, without the safety, trust, support, or choice that would help them cope with that mismatch.

That doesn't mean every behavior gets a pass, or that training has no place here. It means training works better, and actually lasts, when it comes after we understand what's really going on for that individual dog. Not instead of that understanding. After it.

Where to actually start

If any of this has you looking at your own dog a little differently, good, that's the whole point. The real question isn't how do I stop this behavior. It's what is this behavior trying to tell me?

That's what a Behavioral and Wellness Assessment is for. Before any training plan, before any behavior modification, it's a chance to look at the whole picture, your dog's history, their environment, their genetics, their inner world, and figure out where safety, trust, support, or choice might be missing for them right now.

Your dog isn't the problem. Let's find out what actually is.

Ready to understand what's really going on for your dog? Book a Behavioral and Wellness Assessment to get started.