(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Woof, with tears. Thoughts on dog training and owner responsibility [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-12-11
Asta, the aggressive German Shepherd. She is in a good mood, notice the smile (front teeth are covered), no forehead wrinkles, wagging tail, and erect ears. Also notice the cable - she never was outside my positive control as long as I had her.
There has been a tragic story on the KOS for a few days about a woman who was severely mauled by a couple of neighborhood dogs. Part of the commentary wandered off the topic of this dear lady’s condition and into the weedy field of dog ownership, breed selection, and responsibility. As so many have stated, this is a tragedy beyond words, and all our hearts go out to her and her husband, who recently added that his wife is going to hospice. Bless her, may her transition go smoothly and may she light the way for him to continue in this life until The Mother is ready to call him home.
But as inappropriate as the discussion about dog ownership was in his comments thread, it is an important discussion to have. I’m starting this thread to give people a place to vent or to defend.
I am a dog owner, daughter of a dog trainer, and I love dogs. I have two big mixed-breed (Labrador-Newfie cross) for whom I would lay down my life. I got my dogs as tiny puppies, and spent hours and hours with them, training them to do the standard obedience tasks of sit, stay, come, “leave it” and to recognize their names. I expect nothing of them but complete obedience no matter how exciting the temptation, and I trust them at home. I have been rather laid up for a number of months so they have not been out in challenging environments. I am now pretty much over the medical stuff, and they will begin resocialization training as soon as the weather is fit for more than the occasional day at a time. Meanwhile, they are under my or my spouse’s positive control when they are outside. That means a leash strong enough to control a 60-lb animal and 110% attention to both dogs and their surroundings.
I mentioned that Dad was a dog trainer. It was his second career, and he was very good at it. He pressed on me and on my siblings that if you are going to have a dog, you have to be the Alpha in the pack. When you take on a dog, whether a Chihuahua or a Great Dane, you have taken on complete responsibility for the well-being of this animal, its life, its behavior, and its welfare. You have taken responsibility for a creature with the reasoning ability of at least a two- to three-year-old child but the strength of a grown man, which has a mouth full of dagger-sharp that can penetrate skin easily. Your job as owner is to make sure that the dog respects you, has confidence enough in its environment that it will not react in fear, and that above all it can count on you to protect it from what it perceives as threats, whether they are or not. If you are not prepared to do that, don’t get a dog. It is not fair to you, the dog, or the people and creatures around you.
Besides training Labs for field trials, Daddy rescued Great Danes that had either gone feral or been mistreated. He would take them to his little farm outside of Richmond, VA, and work with them for two weeks or so. If he felt they could be rehabilitated such that someone else could handle them, they were put up for adoption by the rescue club he worked with. If they were beyond rehabilitation in his view, he would recommend they be put down. He kept the ones he knew he could handle, but was not sure they would bond appropriately with someone else. Sometimes he would have four or five of these huge dogs in his house, sprawled around the living room like small mountain ranges.
I once had the opportunity to take a course in avalanche rescue with an internationally recognized rescue dog trainer. He taught me that a dog is the best mirror of its owner there is. If you are calm and thoughtful, the dog will be calm and thoughtful. If you are careless and impulsive, so will the dog be. If you are undisciplined, forget about having an obedient dog. Some dogs, particularly males, will challenge for the Alpha spot now and then, but if you are a good pack leader, it will not be an ongoing challenge or a particularly dangerous one. But all dogs will react badly to poor leadership. In the canine world, they want a strong leader, a good Alpha, who will take charge. If they don’t trust their Alpha, if their human gives in and abdicates his/her role, they will either try to take charge themselves or they will become neurotic and frightened. Either one is a recipe for tragedy.
My first real experience with understanding how dogs think was when I was about 12. A neighbor had a pair of very aggressive Beagles who would chase anyone on a bicycle, howling at the tops of their lungs and nipping heels. One day I got down off my bike, bent over so I was about eye-to-eye with then, and imitated the sounds they were making. Both of them stopped dead, tucked their tails up under their bellies, and slunk back into their yard. They never bothered me again. I don’t know for sure what I said in Beagle dialect but it must have been pretty terrible!
When I was a young teenager, Daddy came home with a 6-month-old German Shepherd who was beautiful with a pedigree about six feet long. He had been confiscated from a “puppy factory” and was considered marginal for rehabilitation. I was too young to get a summer job, so Daddy charged me with training the dog. Rufus and I became constant companions, and in about a year he was pretty reliable and very sweet. When I went off to college I left him home with my parents and siblings, who were as much a part of his Pack as I was.
Some neighbors across the street had a Shepherd also, and two nasty boys who constantly tormented him. One day when my two youngest sisters and Rufus were playing in the yard with another neighbor boy, that dog got out of his pen and charged into our yard and attacked the boy. Rufus attacked that dog and kept a tragedy from happening. On Daddy’s word, that poor shepherd was confiscated and euthanized. It was sad, but necessary and I suspect that the dog was happier for it.
If you want a predictable dog, you should start with a puppy. Whatever neglect, misunderstanding, or mistreatment that a dog might have suffered before you get it will always be lurking below even the calmest exterior. I once took on a German Shepherd, Asta, who was about five years old, who had been captured as a feral dog. She and I bonded quickly, and she probably would have walked across lava to protect me, but I never could trust her under anyone else’s care. She was both dog-aggressive and to an extent human-aggressive. I think she may have been a junkyard guard dog because to the end of her days she hated the particular click-click sound of a diesel engine. When Spouse joined me I had had her for three years, and his staying really depended in part on whether the dog could accept him. She did, thank goodness. We kept her until I had to put her down after a moose attack broke her back. But the entire time I had her, I treated her as if she were a loaded gun. We never had any real incidents, but we came close a number of times. To me she was a good dog and a good friend, to Spouse she was a decent pet, and to the entire rest of the world, she was a bomb ready to go off. I never forgot that.
While we had Asta, we were offered a big beautiful two-year-old McKenzie River Husky, about 90 lbs of young neutered male. He gave indication that he had become the Alpha in his pack (family) and his owner was ready to put him down. I carefully introduced the two dogs, starting with allowing each of them to pick up the scent of the other one, moving to seeing and hearing the other one, and then to a very careful face-to-face introduction. Yukon, the husky (that’s the name he came with) and Asta the shepherd became fast friends, both part of my Pack, and both looked to me as Alpha.
One day, though, as Spouse was leading Yukon into the house from the back yard, the dog nipped him in the butt. That was easily recognized as a challenge to Spouse’s Alpha status. In a pack, the lead dog is usually the Alpha. Immediately I “rolled” Yukon, reaching under his body for the opposite front leg, and forced him to lie on his side. I lay down on him and held his muzzle shut. Spouse lay down on his hindquarters and helped control the struggle. After what seemed like an hour but was probably under five minutes, Yukon stopped struggling. When he sighed and went completely limp, we let him up. He went voluntarily to his kennel, lay down, and collected his thoughts such as they were. This hard lesson drove home that he was not Alpha, that he had two very capable Alphas that would keep firm hands around his behavior, and maybe Beta status wasn’t that bad. We never had another incident of aggression from him.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO THIS MANEUVER UNLESS YOU HAVE HAD TRAINING IN HOW TO DO IT!!! This one’s for the pro’s, and I thank my Dad for teaching it to me.
In my work as a speech therapist in home health, I encounter dogs of all sizes and all degrees of training in the homes of people to whom I am providing services. I am not required to enter a home where the pets are not confined, but I usually do anyway. I never question a client’s offer to confine their pet. I have a lot of experience in reading a dog’s behavior, how it uses its tail, how it shows its teeth, the position of its ears, whether the growl is likely to lead to something worse, what kind of smells it finds on me, and a lot of other tells that I can’t always describe well. Most of the time my clients’ dogs (and cats) at least tolerate me, but if they show the least sign of true aggression, I ask that they be confined.
I have a gift from The Mother that animals usually like me. But I never ever lose sight of the fact that they are animals, and that their perception of the world is very, very different from mine. I am always looking for information on animal thinking processes. I really love the books by dog cognition expert Dr Alexandra Horowitz, “Being a Dog,” and “Inside of a Dog.”
There is a lot of good information out there on how to create a good dog, including books, videos, and best of all, obedience classes with AKC or other dog clubs that are vetted and taught by skilled trainers. The first step though is to examine your own commitment very closely. It is wrong, plain wrong, and immoral, to take on a dog if you are not prepared to make a commitment that actually is as deep as the adoption of a child or a marriage. It is not something you can blow off. Regardless of breed, a well-trained dog is a true joy to have around, but a poorly trained dog is a danger to any people or other creatures it may come near.
If you aren’t ready to make the commitment to train your dog, don’t get one.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/11/2141280/-Woof-with-tears-Thoughts-on-dog-training-and-owner-responsibility
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
