| I identify with this story massively. Particularly the attitude towards dogs. Dog is dog human is human and everyone is happier for knowing their place. Dogs get babied a lot in the US and get very confused as to their role. We get gushing admiration of how well 'trained' our dogs are. The dirty secret is they've had barely any conscious training from us, it is an attitude, energy, "I'm the leader here" approach that they respect and understand. Dogs will train dogs too, if you have one older, well behaved dog the others will copy. This goes very far, the copying, we had a new puppy who's only other dog to copy in the house was old and had gone deaf thus he didn't bark at random noises, even thunder and lightning he barely reacted to, walking past other barking dogs etc., no probs - he couldn't hear them! The puppy copied this - she could hear of course but she saw the I didn't react, the older dog didn't react and we calmly continued thus that was what she did. The older dog has now passed away (aged 16!) and she is the oldest dog aged 2 now, we have a 1 year old rescue we just got from the hurricanes here in Houston and he whilst skittish at first from mistreatment by humans (had to dock his tail someone had put a rubber band round it and cut the blood flow off, regrow all fur from mange) he picked up the way to act from the older dog and from us. A third 'generation' displaying the behaviour started by a dog dead a year. |
Nothing we did could get him to stop - it was intolerable. One weekend we went to visit a friend of ours that owned an older shep (actually a cousin of our shep's, from the same breeder.)
My dog went for one of the owner's shoes. The older dog gave him a nip on the muzzle, and that was the end of it. He never again, even after we came home, went after a shoe.