IS MY DOG IN PAIN,
OR JUST STUBBORN?

Behavior Starts in the Body

A dog's whole sense of safety runs on incoming information. Eyes, ears, nose, skin, joints. Take away any one of those and the dog is not just missing details, they are missing the ability to predict what happens next. Prediction is where calm actually comes from. A dog who can tell what is coming can let their guard down. A dog who cannot, cannot.

So when the body stops giving good information, the nervous system has to guess. And a guessing nervous system guesses dangerous.

This is not a small or rare thing. A 2020 review in the journal Animals, led by Daniel Mills, looked at pain in behavior cases. Across the referral caseloads of the authors, the share of behavior cases with pain involved ran from 28 percent to 82 percent. Sit with the low end of that. Even at 28 percent, more than one in four dogs sent to a behavior professional is carrying something physical.

Which means not looking is not neutral. It means a predictable share of owners pay for months of training that was never going to work, while the dog gets called stubborn for telling the truth.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

This is the part that catches people. Pain, vision loss and hearing loss almost never look like what they are. Here is what they look like instead.

When the eyes are going

• Fine at home, a different dog somewhere new. A familiar house can be run from memory. A new place cannot.
• Startles when someone appears close by, then settles the instant they get a sniff.
• Worse at dusk. Stops at the back door after dark, or balks at stairs they used to take at a run.
• Reacts hard to another dog far away and is calmer up close, which is backwards from most reactive dogs and a real clue.
• Sticks close to their person outdoors, like they appointed you their guide.

When the ears are going

• Knows their name but ignores it, and gets called selective or spiteful for it.
• Looks the wrong direction when called. Deafness in one ear is common and it is invisible, so these dogs get a reputation young.
• Startles hard, sometimes with a snap, when touched while asleep.
• Comes to the treat bag but not to your voice. Partial hearing is not proof of hearing.
• Recall that works beautifully when they can see you and falls apart when they cannot.

When something hurts

• A dog who used to be fine and now is not, with no event to explain it.
• Grumbling or snapping when touched, lifted, hugged, groomed, or when somebody sits down next to them.
• Worse on cold days, worse in the morning, worse the day after a long hike.
• Will not sit, or sits slowly and crooked and pops right back up. A sit is a loaded joint position.
• Stopped doing stairs, the car, or the couch they used to own.
• Play that starts well and ends with a snap ten minutes in.
• New noise sensitivity in an adult dog. There is research behind this one specifically.
• Sleep that changed. Pacing at night, circling, never quite comfortable.

None of those is a diagnosis. Every one of them is a reason to stop and ask.

How We Approach It at Scentsible K9

We are dog trainers, not veterinarians, and we are careful about that line. We do not diagnose, we do not name diseases, and we never tell an owner not to worry about something. What we do is look, say what we saw, and tell you who should check it.

• A body check at every consultation. Eight questions and about a minute of watching how your dog sits, stands, gets up, and holds their face. It takes two minutes and it goes in your notes whether we find anything or not.
• An honest answer about what we found. Clear to train, train while you get something looked at, or stop and see a vet first. That last one costs us the booking and we still say it.
• No pressure on a body we are not sure about. If a dog's hips hurt and we drill sits, we are hurting them on a schedule. If a dog's neck hurts and we add leash pressure, we just taught them that pressure means pain. That is how a dog gets worse under competent training.
• We build on the sense that still works. For nearly every dog that is the nose, and scent work is not a consolation prize. It is the one channel that keeps working when the others fade, it lowers arousal while they do it, and the dog solves it themselves, which is why the confidence it builds actually holds.

A dog who cannot see well, cannot hear well, or hurts is not a dog with less to work with. They are a dog who has been asked to use a part that is not working. Stop asking, build on what is intact, and a lot of what looked like defiance quietly goes away.