Your dog shredded a cushion, and now sits there with ears flat, head low, eyes sliding away. It looks like remorse. Research on dog cognition points somewhere else, as the Nebraska Humane Society explained this week.
In a 2009 study on guilty expressions, owners were told to forbid their dogs from eating a treat, then left the room. Some dogs ate it, some did not. When the owners came back, the ones who scolded got the guilty face whether or not their dog had actually broken the rule, and dogs who had done nothing wrong looked guiltier than the ones who had.
The look is a response to you. Tucked tail, whale eye, cowering, hunched posture, yawning, lip licking, flattened ears and averted gaze are appeasement signals, and they turn up when a dog expects conflict. Your dog has learned that this posture softens you. Call it a peace offering rather than a confession.
What this means for your dog: the scolding teaches fear, not the lesson. Dogs link consequences to whatever they are doing at that moment, so a correction delivered an hour after the chewed shoe lands on nothing useful. Manage the room instead, crate or gate what you care about, leave a chewer something legal to destroy, and reward the behavior you want. Our explainer on why dogs chew up the house is the place to start.
One more thing worth knowing: dogs watch our faces closely, which is what brain scans of dogs viewing human expressions showed earlier this month. If your dog suddenly looks worried with no obvious trigger, that is a vet question rather than a training one.