29/06/2021
There’s a strange asymmetry I see over and over: Dogs engaging in all manner of poor behavior—from the annoying to the truly dangerous—and owners who are more concerned about hurting the dog’s feelings, or making them sad, than they are with ensuring that they the owners aren’t compromised, saddened, stressed, anxious, or even injured. It’s a strange, dysfunctional, and unhealthy world where we as owners place ourselves so low on the priority list, and our dogs so high.
Is there much difference between dysfunctional, unhealthy, abusive human-human relationships? Of course many of the dynamics are different, but far too many are the same. The allowances, the excuses, the rationalizations, the justifications. At the end of the day it still comes down to allowing others to compromise you because you’re not willing to stand up for yourself, value yourself, and draw the line. And while it’s definitely more complicated with human-human dynamics, that should be good news for sorting the dog-human dynamic.
Dogs are amazing. They’re also incredibly opportunistic. And if the “right” dog comes across the “right” human, pain, suffering, and problems will occur. It’s up to you to reset the priorities. It’s up to you to value yourself over the concern of hurting your dog’s feelings. We’ve become so disabled in this regard that the shear volume of struggling owners, and terribly behaved dogs grow daily. And while we continue to see dogs as angelic creatures, capable of only good, and ourselves as less than, and therefore deserving of less, this dysfunctional, sad, and unnecessary dynamic will play on.
