An open letter.

[theweaselking]

Dear owner of the snausage-with-legs that attacked Piper:

Your pug has been returned in one piece because my dog, unlike yours, responds to voice control and knows that I am allowed to take food away from her.

By "food", of course, I mean "your dog, after it bit her".

Piper now gives me this look because I took her squeaky wriggling meat toy away:



Obedience and socialisation training: Just because I *can* grab your dog and chuck it like a football does not mean I should have to.

No love,
Me.

(For the record: No harm done, to either participant. Defective fuzzy rat-creature returned to apologetic owner. Piper now distracted by The Mystery Of Is There A Squirrel and once again all is right in her mayonnaise-witted little doggy world.)

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Related: I'm strongly tempted to head over to her house tomorrow and offer to show her the basics of dog obedience. She's my neighbour, so the dog is always around. And she doesn't know how to control the dog without picking him up.

[maelorin]

that simple gesture might transform her life in ways she can't imagine.

she probably has no idea that she has allowed (and encouraged) her pet to play up for attention. and that mommy will carry it if it annoys her enough.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Please do this.

My in-laws live right next to someone who runs a kennel with a horde of untrained miniature pinschers. The owner does zero discipline training to the rat-creatures, and they run wild in the yard.

Couple of years ago the alpha bitch of the pack made a slip through a crack in the fence, and dashed to my in-laws yard; it wouldn't have been so bad, if the bitch hadn't started to harass their dog.

A dog which is approximately a generation and half removed from a wolf.

Now, Inu -- the said wolfbeast in question -- had been trained, and was known to treat female dogs with awed reverence, no matter what size they were. But when the rat-thing began to get to his face...

*chomp*

It was just a single bite, but because of size difference one tooth punctured the rat-thing's lung. The dog managed to make a dash back to her own yard (Inu was properly leashed, so he couldn't follow and wasn't particularly interested to follow, either, he just wanted the damn thing gone), and the owners took the loudrat to the vet, but the injury ended up killing the dog anyway.

The neighbors did not raise a stink about it -- it was their fault in every possible way: the hole on the fence was on their side, the dogs were outside without supervision, the dogs were unleashed, and they had not trained the ratbeasts to behave or obey commands.

Out of all things that went wrong? They fixed the fence. And that was all they did.

I'm honestly astonished that anyone buys dogs from them -- it is not just lack of obedience training from the larval stage, but the owners do not keep bitches and males separated, and there seems to be quite a lot of incestuous crossbreeding going on.

[hel]

Depending on your existing relationship with this person, it might be better if you dropped off a note or brochure to a local training school (where better is defined as most likely to lead to her finding out how to train her dog and doing so). Otherwise it might come off as (regardless of intent) "I have come to tell you that you are Doing It Wrong and I Know Better". And while it may be true, people generally don't respond well to things they read as being told "You're Doing It Wrong".