When people see dogs do bad things on the street and in the park, they often think that it is the dog at fault. Mostly this is the furthest thing from the truth.
Some people will try and convince you that ‘problems arise from the dog and secondarily from the dynamics in the environment.” However if you spare just a small moment you will see that every case is almost always traced back to human interference.
With the mass of dogs being abandoned in US shelters daily and ill equipped owners taking these dogs on, after they have been damaged by the previous owners it is easy to see the recipe for disaster. Damaged dogs that I regularly see are those that are restrained in their yards and never walked. They are not introduced to other dogs and rarely played with by their owners or owner families.
These forgotten dogs are laughably not called abused, because the owners are not physically leaving marks on the dogs, but the mental scars run deep. When a puppy is not socialised properly in the first six months of its life, they will be much harder to socialise at any time in the dog’s life. Separating a rescue dog from other dogs just reinforces any anti social dog behavior.
Then some treatment companies will tell you that they will diagnose then follow up with a treatment program. You should know that there are very few dogs out there that fit into a category that requires extensive analysis and ‘treatment’. The sad fact is, that very few ‘dog training companies’ have it in their own financial best interest to tell you just to walk your dog daily!
The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly if they tell you to do this and you do, you won’t be their client. Secondly, nobody wants to hear that they are going to have to walk their dog daily after they have been walking their dong once a week or less so far. Such a demand will be offensive, or will bring on pangs of guilt or who knows what else human emotion.
What is ‘ dog mis-behavior’ ?
This is the crux of really identifying the cause of the problems.
If an owner does not take their dogs to off lead dog parks, how would they know how their dog really behaves socially with other dogs? You may also quickly learn that many partially social dogs on lead will act very aggressive to other dogs, based on the fact that they are picking up the nervous energy of their owners and become unstable, misguidedly feeling they have to protect their owners.
Many owners do not know that their dogs are actually so unstable, because they have never been outside with their dogs. This seems to suit the owners and dogs fine, because few conflicts will happen in the house. You should remember that nearly 50% of human deaths by dogs in America occur within the family home.
The boredom, mass of dog poos in the yard, the physically and physiological unfitness, the excited jumping on strangers, the digging, barking all the craziness. These will all be unfairly levelled as a dog behaviour problem, that could be fixed simply by walking.