An open letter to dog owners

[swan_tower]

This post has been brought to you by the behavior of a very large dog at the post office today.

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Dear Dog Owners of America:

Please train your dogs.

To those of you who actually do, I say, thank you! I appreciate your effort, and your dogs are probably lovely creatures. Unfortunately, you are in the minority, and the other dog-owners and their pets are making you look bad.

It used to be that whenever the Great Pet Debate came up -- dogs vs. cats -- I found myself wondering, why don't I like dogs more? After all, the qualities ascribed to them sound great. I liked Platonic Dogs very well, but Actual Dogs much less, and I didn't know why.

Then I realized that was because the majority of the Actual Dogs I meet are badly behaved.

They bark. They bite. They chew on stuff. They jump on anything and anyone they can get near. No, their "enthusiasm" is not adorable. In small dogs, it's annoying; in large dogs, it can be outright dangerous. You know what's adorable? A dog who knows how to express his enthusiasm in a socially acceptable fashion. Which is to say, a dog who is trained.

And no, a dog who brings the ball back when you're playing fetch and sits (sometimes) on command is not "trained." If you have to drag your dog down off the counter of the post office, your dog is badly trained and badly behaved. If he barks for a minute straight every time the doorbell rings, he is badly trained and badly behaved. If you have to bribe him with treats to get peace and quiet during dinner, he is badly trained and badly behaved. If he draws blood through my clothing because he tried to jump on me and his claws went raking down my thigh, he is badly trained and badly behaved.

A well-trained dog is one who knows how to behave like a civilized member of society.

I have met far too few of them in my life.

So please. For the love of god. Train your dog. Teach him when it is and is not okay to bark. Teach him to show enthusiasm with tail-wagging and jumping in place, not on people. Do not reward his bad behavior by giving him commands and then, when he ignores them, rewarding him with whatever it was he wanted. You owe it to your dog to be consistent, to give him a framework within which he can operate and be happy. And the rest of us would appreciate it very much.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Actually, since I had this particular realization, I've paid more attention. I notice the well-behaved dogs now, in a way that I didn't before -- and I have reasonable certainty that for the majority of the dogs I meet, their training mostly ended with teaching them to wait to do their business until they're outside. In particular, it seems like vanishingly few of them have been taught not to jump on people -- and that includes the big dogs, who really need to learn it.

I agree that some of this can be mitigated by behaving properly toward dogs. But given that my default behavior toward them is "ignore them and stay away from them," I don't think that's the root of the problem here. They're the ones throwing themselves at me, not the other way around. In fact, very few of the behaviors that bother me the most are a response to aggression (except insofar as entering their territory is "aggressive").

If most dogs were badly behaved, we couldn't keep them.

Only if the threshold for calling it "bad behavior" is high enough. What I see is a high tolerance for behavior that I think can and should be trained away.