If you can’t or won’t train your dog, get a hamster
I’ve never understood why anyone would want a pit bull, but according to dog trainer Beth O’Connor, the wrong people are owning them anyway.
“People who should own hamsters are getting pit bulls,” O’Connor told me Monday.
That’s a refreshing way of stating it.
However, I still wouldn’t want a pit bull. Seems you’d always be walking on eggshells around a dog like that, wondering if something might set it off. O’Connor disagrees.
“Any dog can be trained against their breeding,” she says, noting that schnauzers, for example, are bred to kill rodents, but that she has trained her own schnauzer to stop chasing a bunny on command.
Regardless, the main problem in off- leash areas is bigger than just a single breed, and if you go to one of these parks, you can see immediately what that problem is. It’s very simple: Dogs don’t come when they’re called. Owner after owner can be seen pleading with their dog to “Come here,” “Here, boy,” “Max, come!” or some variation thereof, over and over, and the dog ignores it and does what it pleases. Eventually, the owner gives up and the dog wanders back to the owner’s side of its own volition, and is given a treat. The dog has just been rewarded for overruling its owner and choosing to come back in its own time.
O’Connor says that as part of learning to become a dog trainer, she had to go to an offleash park and observe how 100 people there talked to their dogs.
“People repeat their commands so many times. One person repeated a command 30 times. The dog was like, ‘ I don’t want anything to do with you.’ The dogs had no interest in their owners,” she says. O’Connor estimates that if there are 100 people in an offleash park, only one per cent of those have properly trained their dogs.
Being cynical, I’d guess it’s even fewer than one per cent. I’ve never seen a well- trained dog at an off- leash park. I’ve seen quiescent ones that ignored human passersby and other dogs, because it was in their lackadaisical nature to do so, not because they were obeying any commands.
And that whole obedience thing goes back to a dog’s sense of usefulness, according to O’Connor.
“When you call your dog, when you know they’re not going to listen, you’re wasting the command ... It’s not just basic obedience; you have to give them a job to do,” O’Connor says. Our contemporary lifestyle means that a dog’s job “is just to sit inside and bark when people walk by the house.” Without that sense of having a job to do, a dog in an off- leash park won’t want to come when called, she says.
“But if people are getting dogs thinking and doing stuff, they are more likely to come back when called.”
Unfortunately, people will let their dog off leash when it doesn’t listen to them first onleash. “Off- leash is a privilege, not a right,” O’Connor says.
The trouble is that owners don’t expect their dogs to do much else but mill around the house aimlessly or lie on the couch.
And, incidentally, they should not be on the couch or bed because that’s the humans’ territory and the dog needs to learn its place in the pack hierarchy.
“Dogs are so much smarter than people give them credit for. When a dog is sheltered and inside, and pampered and on their little pedestal, nobody expects anything of them,” O’Connor says. She advises owners to “stop being surprised when a dog does something right. Be surprised if a dog does something wrong.”
Nor does she have much patience with people who own small dogs and who take those dogs for walks by carrying the dog on the walk. To the dog, this evokes its mother picking it up in her jaws as a puppy, to protect it from danger.
“What are people teaching their dogs when they pick them up? They’re teaching them to be afraid,” O’Connor says. And when you teach a dog fear, its natural reaction is to bite to defend itself.
“I’d be afraid more of a Yorkie than a Rottweiler because people coddle small dogs so much. People treat a Rottweiler like a real dog,” she adds.
I still wouldn’t want a pit bull. But despite the recent rash of incidents involving attacks by members of that breed, I suspect there are far fewer pit bulls frequenting off- leash parks with their stereotypical macho- man owners than there are golden retrievers, Labs, poodles, mixed breeds or what have-you belonging to ordinary people who haven’t trained them properly.
The problems so prevalent in off- leash parks — dogs fighting with other dogs, dogs leaping on passing humans, off- leash dogs chasing cyclists on paths, dogs ignoring their owners — would be resolved, and those parks would once again be pleasant places to go to, if only people cared enough to do right by their dogs.
Otherwise, they should consider sticking with a hamster.