Stupid Dog Don’ts That People Do

This post is intended to be read by peo­ple with a sense of humor, because it points out and pokes fun at how we “more intel­li­gent higher species” can be so dumb.

I think I have seen and heard my, your, and your brother’s fair share of stu­pid dog don’ts that peo­ple do. Even to this day there are still times I shake my head and think, “What?!?!!?”  Here are my favorite top five:

1.  Bite your dog on the ear.  -  This has got to be my absolute favorite.  Why in heaven’s sake would you delib­er­ately put your face near the pointy end of a reac­tive dog?  Even bet­ter, who actu­ally thinks they are fast enough to not get bit?  Why would caus­ing pain be a good idea in the first place and what is it sup­posed to teach?

2.  Reach your hand out to strange dogs so they can sniff you. — This  one is good for a chuckle.  Like the dog can’t smell you unless you reach out your hand.  Like we live in an invis­i­ble force-field immune to a dog’s snif­fer.  Besides that “duh” fac­tor, how smart is it to reach right for the face of a strange dog?  Believe it or not, that’s quite rude to do to a dog.

3.  Train my dog not to bite my kid even while he’s: pulling his tail, smoosh­ing his face, hug­ging him, using him to learn how to stand and grab­bing onto his fur with a vice grip, smack­ing him, pulling his whiskers, yelling in his ear, etc, etc, etc.    No, sorry I can’t.  Because every liv­ing crea­ture has their break­ing point and con­stantly push­ing your dog past his by bad par­ent­ing and lack of super­vi­sion can’t be fixed with­out real­iz­ing your kid can’t treat the dog like crap.  Sorry.  Get a stuffed ani­mal for your kid to play with.  I always want to drop the pro­fes­sional polit­i­cally cor­rect nature of myself and ask peo­ple, “Can I poke your eye, yell into your ear, steal your lunch right out of your hand, grab your husband’s ass, and any­thing else I can think of that is just com­pletely cross­ing every bound­ary of respect and per­sonal space and see how you like me?”

4.  That dog must be friendly because his tail is wag­ging. — Yet another pop­u­lar thought many peo­ple believe (and usu­ally fol­lowed by stu­pid human faux pas #2.)  Under­stand­ing basic canine body lan­guage is not too dif­fi­cult and the big fat rule numero uno is look at the whole dog! Even if you don’t take into con­sid­er­a­tion the envi­ron­ment or any trig­gers, and zone into just the tail there are an array of tail move­ments and car­riages.  Is it low, high, stiff, only wag­ging at the top, fast, slow, hair stand­ing up on it, method­i­cally back and forth.…

5.  Say­ing a cue over and over until phys­i­cally mak­ing the dog do it. — An exam­ple of this would be, “Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit.Sit. Sit! SIT!”  and then just push­ing the dog’s bum.  I never got that.  Why waste your breath?  Clearly the dog doesn’t under­stand “sit” in the envi­ron­ment he’s in or there is zero moti­va­tion to do so.  Either way, it’s silly to nag your dog.  Next time, just bring a block of cheese with you or train for gen­er­al­iza­tion around dis­trac­tions if you expect results.  Just because a dog can sit in the kitchen doesn’t mean he will at the vet’s.  That’s the same as assum­ing a new dri­ver can drive on the inter­state just because they drove around the block a few times.  Sorry, you can’t have my car keys.