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If your dog pesters you for petting when you need to be doing something else, break off visual contact with him. You can use your torso to push him away with a body block (remember not to use your hands) or turn your head away (chin raised) in a benevolent but royal dismissal. It’s amazing how fast dogs will go away if you break off visual contact with them. It’s equally notable how hard it is for us humans to do that when we’re trying to get our dogs to do something. All of our instincts seem to have us look at our dog, just as primates do when they are trying to communicate directly with another individual in the troop. But the look that works best, that we use ourselves when we’re not thinking about it, is that slightly snobby, hard-to-get look when we turn our head away in dismissal. It works with dogs as well as with humans. Honest. Dogs can take you for granted just as anyone else in your social group can, and most of us hate being taken for granted. You might be stuck with it from some of the people you know, but you don’t have to put up with it from your dog. [The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs-Patricia McConnell, Ph.D. · 2009]

What's the meaning of the 'it'? here

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    Strictly speaking, "it" in this context is the look that works [would work] best. But we use negated constructions like Don't think about it in many similar contexts where it might not be so clear-cut, so possibly even many native Anglophones might struggle to answer this question. Note that about it is often not explicitly stated, in contexts like Don't stop to think - just get on with it!, where nobody would ask Think about what?
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Mar 21 at 11:35
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    No or some possibility for us to consider the [it] as 'a dog or our dog'?
    – gomadeng
    Commented Mar 21 at 12:15
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    It wouldn't make sense for "it" to refer to the dog in this context, because the subject (the person) must be thinking about the dog if he's trying to get the dog to leave him alone. But like I said, the referent of "it" in such contexts can be "uncertain", so in some other similar contexts "it" might be the dog.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Mar 21 at 19:34

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"The look that works best, [the look] that we use ourselves when we're not thinking about it..."

What we are 'not thinking about' is the expression on our face.

'It' can't mean the dog, as the author has, earlier in the paragraph, referred to 'him'.

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  • Your answer is dependent on "him". A dog could be "it"?
    – gomadeng
    Commented Mar 21 at 15:55
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    Yes, a dog can be 'it' if its gender is unimportant and it isn't a pet known to the speaker; but no-one would change pronouns in the middle of a paragraph. As I tried to show, the sense of the sentence requires 'it' to be the dog owner's expression, not the dog.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Mar 21 at 16:13
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    It's not really the switch from "him" to "it" that rules out "it" referring to the dog. It's the fact that the subject (the addressee) is specifically preoccupied with the dog because it wants to be petted, and the owner is trying to make it leave him alone.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Mar 21 at 19:37
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    It should be obvious by now that it doesn't actually matter exactly what "it" refers to. If the writer intended one referent, but a reader assumes something different (such as here, whether "it" refers to the dog itself, or to thinking about getting the dog to go away), this makes no difference to the overall communication. It's a pointless investigation into a distinction that doesn't affect true meaning, only syntactic analysis. There is a level below which the search for "meaning" becomes meaningless.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Mar 21 at 21:37
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    No, his answer is not dependent on "him". The subject is mentioned in the sentence: "the looks". I get the feeling gomadeng is trolling tho
    – Raestloz
    Commented Mar 22 at 7:03

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