pet connection

So, for about the four hundredth time since I moved back to the city, my dogs were innocently walking with me, leashed and quiet, when out of nowhere, two border collies and a lab mix came racing up, off-leash, owner nowhere in sight.When I say “racing up” I don’t mean they came within ten feet of my dogs and stopped, wagging their tails. Nor do I mean they attacked my dogs. No, they ran up to them, tails indeed wagging – right up to their faces. My dogs, one of whom was actually pooping when this happened, reacted with alarm, and the result was tangled leashes, everyone stepping in or rolling in dog poop, and my very real concern that the lab mix, whose hackles were up, wasn’t particularly friendly.

I grasp that city dogs have different body language, a different idea of what “good manners” are, than country dogs. My dogs have until now lived their lives in the country and going to dog shows, and learned a completely different set of rules for dog/dog interaction. I accept that as strangers in a strange land, it’s up to them to learn the local customs. That’s not the problem.

No, the problem is me and my inability to comprehend how someone whose dog completely ignores their verbal commands would ever allow that dog off-leash outside of a fenced dog park.

Let me explain something, not in my capacity as a dog trainer, which I am not, nor even a dog owner, but rather as a writer and editor: “Voice control” means you can control your dog with your voice.

I had a dog like that once. She would do anything I said, instantly. I could call her, and no matter what she was doing, she’d turn on a dime and race back to me. Then she’d gild the lily by sitting in front of me, looking up with the canine equivalent of a smile on her face. So I really do understand that all those people with dogs genuinely under voice control will deeply resent my attitude.

All six of you.

But for the rest: If your dog is not under your voice control, either train him until he is, or keep him on a leash outside of fenced dog parks. If your dog listens to you in the family room when you have a cookie in your hand, but completely ignores you when she’s flying at top speed towards two leashed giant breed dogs half a mile from you, she is not under voice control. She’s just smart.

Yes, this means you, Mr. Nature Lover, who finally came and retrieved your poop-smeared dogs, and glared at me for not laughing it off and agreeing that dogs will be dogs. I guess I should just be glad your dogs found my dogs interesting enough to stop their headlong flight up the path, at the end of which was the road, and that instead of dealing with a dog hit by car, all you had to cope with was your border collies’ snow-white feathering being liberally coated in Scottish Deerhound poop.

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