Читать книгу Dogtography - Kaylee Greer - Страница 23

This is not any reference to Moby Dick and his gorgeous little peepers. This is dog training slang for a body language signal that dogs give with their eyes. “Whale Eye” refers to when a dog is prominently showing the whites of his eyes. The biological, primal, instinctual reason for this phenomenon has more to do with making their eyes as big as possible to see as acutely as they can to scan for any stimuli than it is to do with crazy eyes. Here at my house, my dog Joshua gets these a lot—when the crazy eyes come out, you know you’re really in for it. In Joshua’s case, these eyes almost always mean that he’s about to get a bout of the “zoomies” and really get wild—or that he’s about to get a new toy or a very high-value treat and his anticipation is reaching max levels of excited stress. While in Joshua’s overexcited whale-eye case, his overall feeling of excitement is a positive one, if a dog gets too stressed in either direction, you risk him heading into the red zone, which is a behavioral place that it’s hard to pull them back from. It’s super important to keep an eye out for whale eyes on your shoot, and try to calm and maintain an even energy if you’re seeing any signs of it.

1.9

FIGURE 1.9 Joshua is one of the most expressive dogs I know, and I can often look to him to discover some form of dog body language or another presented to me with crystal clarity. When Joshua gets hyper focused on a top-notch favorite ball or toy, his crazy eyes, or “whale eyes,” come out in full force. It’s easy to infer from this image that Joshua has gone full bananas. Not necessarily a look I want to use to tell his timeless and heartfelt story, if you catch my drift.