01/07/2022
AMEN. 🙏🏼
My dogs know their place.
Every year, I hope the people spewing nonsense about being pack leader, about being the alpha, about how you need to show the dog who’s boss, will disappear. Every year I’m hopeful that they will pick up a book (that isn’t written in their little echo chamber), do a course worth its salt, or even just watch the most basic YouTube video explaining why they are wrong.
Every year I am hopeful that I won’t see any more dogs wearing prong collars, e-collars, being strung up on a slip lead, being yanked back, alpha rolled, pinned to the ground, shaken, prodded, hissed at, kicked. Dogs that are just babies, dogs that are traumatised, dogs with behavioural problems that, whenever they ask for help or reassurance, are punished. Dogs that are petrified of something scary, only to be told “Stop crying!” as the thing they’re phobic of is drawn closer and closer to them.
Every year, I’m disappointed.
It’s 2022. The basis of this training was debunked DECADES ago. Why do people still feel it’s acceptable to treat dogs this way? To lazily slap the word “dominant” or “stubborn” on their foreheads and take that as an excuse to now treat them however they like.
Do freaking better.
“Oh, but my dog is a German shepherd/ Rottweiler/ staffie and they need a strong hand”
No. If you are incapable of handling a powerful dog without beating the crap out of it and walking it with ligatures, sometimes spiked ligatures, constricting their throat, seriously consider getting a smaller breed. It doesn’t make you look like a tough man, walking an incapacitated large breed dog, it makes you look like a coward. Nothing screams “I’m an incompetent trainer” like somebody reliant on choking their dog just to get them to walk nicely.
One day, we will look back as a society on the people who treat their dogs like this, and be totally repulsed. We will think “how did they get away with it?” I hoped, by 2022, we would be at that point already. But clearly not.
Yeah, my dogs know their place. It’s right beside me.
TLDR: you’re not the alpha, you’re insecure.
