04/21/2026
DOG TALK TUESDAY: Leaning
Where a dog’s body weight is leaning during an interaction can tell you a lot. Are they leaning away from who they’re interacting with? Or towards them?
Leaning away is going to be a distance increasing signal - which occurs during attempts to avoid an interaction and can also occur during submissive displays.
The dog on the left in the picture is clearly creating distance and leaning away from the dog on the right who’s closing in on the distance. The dog on the left is attempting to avoid an interaction with the dog on the right (who was a puppy, here) while also giving several other distance increasing signals at the same time (averted gaze, eye whites, closed mouth, puckering of the lips, + a paw raise).
Where the dog is leaning can give you a good indication of what their intentions are!
As always, when reading body language we have to remember to read it like we would read a sentence. Understand that it’s all the words together that create the meaning of a sentence, not one word alone. Thereby we also need to take all of the dog’s body language signals combined to create a meaning, and not focus on one single body part by itself.
