( See here for information on treating resource guarding.) Willie’s eyes went hard on me once, just once, when I was toweling off his back legs. Of course, exactly what you do next depends on many things–is it your dog, or someone else’s? When did it happen, and do you know why? After little Nell’s eye went hard over a treasure in the grass, I began conditioning her to enjoy it when I reached for something she wanted by associating it with food more wonderful than what she was guarding. If you are trying to enter the house of friend who is on vacation and whose dog needs to be taken outside to potty, throw treats behind the dog before entering the house. How should we respond to a dog whose eyes have gone hard? Don’t faint, but I am not going to say “It Depends.” At one level, the answer is simple: “Change what you are doing.” If you are reaching toward an object that the dog is guarding, stop reaching. I see it as a clear threat: “Continue doing what you are doing and there will be consequences.” In a few rare cases, I suspect the message is “Make my day.” Ever see it in a person? Scary.) Most trainers and behaviorists associate the look with the potential of aggression. W hatever causes them, “hard eyes” can be signs of trouble. This seems to be the best explanation I’ve heard so far. Actually, I think the only accurate description is that the eyes “go cold.” But how do eyes “go cold?” My major professor, Jeff Baylis, speculated that eyes go “hard” when the sympathetic nervous system engages and the eyes momentarily stop their usual “nystagmus.” Not the large, lateral movements associated with vestibular disease, but the microscopically small side-to-side movements that the eyes of all mammals do to help locate objects in front of them. Nor do I think the pupils always constrict. Handelman states that hard eyes are “squinty,” but I haven’t found that always to be true. I’ve looked at other photographs in books under the “hard eye” description (Handelman’s excellent Canine Behavior: A Photo Illustrated Handbook, for example), and none quite captures what you actually see in person. The dog below, a lovely little girl named Fly, is staring intently at Willie at the moment, the better to play “you move and I’ll smash into you! Won’t that be fun!” Her eyes have something of the quality of a “hard eye,” but not because she is challenging anyone, but because her stare is so intense. The look is as hard to capture in a photograph as it is to describe. To me, those kind of photographs don’t look appealing, they look flat and strange, like some alien whose semi-human form looks chilling precisely because he is human-like, but then, isn’t. I’ve thought about this for years, and the only thing I can compare it to is one of those hyper-edited photographs, the kind you see in some magazines in which the”color saturation” and “resolution” was set on high, so that what you see doesn’t look quite real anymore. I know now, too, why it’s so hard to describe. Since then, decades later, I’ve seen it far too many times, from dogs as large as ponies and as small as squirrels. All anyone could say was “Their eyes go cold” or “You’ll know it when you see it.”Īnd I did, when Nell’s eyes turned icy and my body told me to stop reaching toward her. Everyone could tell me what is wasn’t, but not what it was. “No, it’s not about the color or the pupil dilation or constriction,” they all said (although pupils changes can be important). “What changes when an eye “goes hard” I’d ask? “What should I look for? Does the color change? The pupils constrict?” “How will I know it when I see it?” When Nell came to visit I had just finished my degree in Zoology, and had been well trained in the importance of detailed and accurate observations.
“But what does a ‘hard eye’ look like?” I’d ask. “Watch out for it,” trainers and behaviorists with more experience than I had at the time had told me. And then I realized that Nell’s eyes had gone “hard,” a look that people had been telling me about, but I had never seen.
I didn’t even know why at the time, it seemed to happen automatically, and too fast to consciously evaluate. As I got closer, she turned her head toward me, and… I froze. Her face was buried in the tall grass by the driveway and I could hear her snuffling at something under her nose. However, one day she didn’t respond when I called her. A sweetheart of a dog, she melted when petted and came when I called, eyes shining, radiating joy and exuberance. Little Nell, a fox-faced Border Collie, came to visit the farm over twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting started as a behaviorist.
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