If you have been around dogs long enough, you will see these “dominance” focused trainers, owners, and rescue volunteers end up seriously injured. These stories sometimes make the news. All it takes is one dog that decides it is time to do a rank attack, being from a lower status, or from a higher status, and deciding that it doesn’t want to be bullied. Especially dogs that have, or are developing, the canine version of PTSD. Then it is clobbering time.
You haven’t heard the stories of trainers, owners, breeders, rescuers who had to fight for their lives? I have. Do some internet searches, you’ll see the accounts.
I get frustrated and want to argue when I see these social media videos pop up in my feed. It’s basically varying versions of rank challenges between the trainer and the dog. Not respecting the instinctive rules of dog society.
What happens when a dog bites and won’t let go of some important part of your body? Some heavy handed K9 handlers have learned the hard way, when their dogs have turned on them. Sometimes the dead dog is still holding on and must be pried off the officer. You can find those stories by searching the internet. Cops have shot their own dogs.
What happens if you are alone at home and one or more of your dogs come at you because they have had it with your threats? One grabs a leg, the other your ribcage, and then they pull you down and go to work.
Bully and threaten the wrong dog, and if the dog can get you, say the leash breaks or the muzzle comes off, it can be lights out. Game over. Dog training career over, or maybe your life is finished. Fingers lost, arm gone, scalp removed, rib cage damaged, intestines pulled out, foot severed, no more bicep, throat ripped out, lost an eye, face crushed and disfigured. You don’t think that happens? You haven’t been around long enough.
That’s maybe when they realize that what they had been seeing on social media, TV, etc. was the wrong way, and they need to try something different. Different, indeed.
Someone once accused me of being “afraid” of dogs. No, it isn’t that. I respect dogs and what they can do. The last thing I want to do is to knowingly escalate a dog to the point of inciting a life-or-death fight with me, or anyone else, and instilling the resulting trauma memories in the dog. It is one thing to make a mistake, it is another to make it a habit of provoking dogs into a fight. I’m not referring to proper and useful protection training, I’m referring to foolishly pushing a dog into a “it’s you or me” attack. Do you not realize that accounts for some of the dog attacks in animal shelters where dogs are pushed around in that stressful trap and eventually fight back? Have you ever seen photos of a real dog attack? I have and it gruesome.
Gamblers don’t always win. These trainers, and their students, eventually get what is coming. It isn’t worth arguing. If they won’t listen to the dogs, then they won’t listen to you, or me.
Plan accordingly.