22 AprEpisode 202 | You can say “hi” to my dog, but DON’T BE A DICK ABOUT IT! How well-intentioned people make dogs anxious on the street (and how you can help them be better dog lovers)
Oftentimes, the toughest thing about training dogs is dealing with people. Strangers out in public, however well-intentioned, can be major obstacles to a fruitful training session, further complicating things in what is most likely already a high-pressure environment for your dog. Annie feels for dogs who are basically bullied (often unintentionally) by strangers, or even their own owners, during interspecies greetings.
If people who love dogs so often make them uncomfortable without meaning to, is it fair to judge people by how they relate to their dogs? Maybe not. Annie reads aloud from an article that she wrote for the Boston Globe about how animal welfare is relative and not absolute. (Stay until the end for a rather shocking bit of trivia about a certain genocidal dictator).
Episode includes a special Earth Day offer: a coupon code (good this weekend only) for 20% off the REVOL crate by Diggs.
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Mentioned in this episode:
“Animal welfare is a matter of perspective” – Boston Globe article by Annie Grossman
Related episodes:
Episode 29 | A modern dog owner's guide to sidewalk leash greetings
Episode 41 | New “Diggs” for your dog: Zel Crampton's dog crate revolution
Transcript:
Annie:
So, something that drives me crazy is when I'm on the street training with Poppy, giving her treats, and someone else walks by with their dog, and their dog seems interested in saying hi, and I'm working keeping Poppy's focus on me. Not because she has a problem or because she's reactive, just because we're working.
And then the other person who's just standing there with their dog says like, Oh, it's fine, my dog's friendly. As if what I'm doing has anything to do with whether or not their dog is friendly or not. And it's always frustrating to think about what to say in these situations. I usually say something like, Oh, we're just doing some training or, oh, my dog's friendly too.
Today, I had a thought of what could be said in those situations. In French, there's a term called L’esprit de l’escalier, which is like, when you think of the perfect thing to say after something is over. I thought if someone says to me, Oh, it's okay, my dog is friendly. I could just turn around and say, oh yeah, well I’M NOT!
Would probably make both them and their dog leave you alone.
[music]
Hello. Thank you for being here. I am Annie Grossman, owner and co-founder of School For The Dogs at East 7th street. You can sometimes find me there behind the desk. I curate our retail store, which is also online at storeforthedogs.com. If you don't know about School For The Dogs, check us out. We do so much great training, both in New York City and virtually. We are located on E seventh in Manhattan, and yeah. Schoolforthedogs.com or @schoolforthedogs on Instagram.
If you're new here, go back in time to 2018 and you can listen to the first couple episodes where I talk about what kind of dog training we do at School For The Dogs and sort of introduce how I got into dog training, how it sort of started to affect my worldview, our business, et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, just wanted to get that out of the way as I have lopped the intro off of a lot of the episodes recently. Today, I just wanted to share a couple experiences I had over the last week with dogs outside of School For The Dogs, in my total civilian life.
One was with my dog, Poppy. I was walking her around the block, our regular afternoon constitutional, and this girl, maybe like 12 years old with her mother ran over to us super eager to say hi to Poppy, and Poppy actually doesn't get approached that much in my experience by people necessarily wanting to say hi to her. Not as much as Amos, my old late Yorkiepoo did. He was very fluffy, little tiny, cute black dog, looked like he was battery operated, had an adorable jaunty little step, and people often wanted to say hi to him.
But Poppy, I also work a lot with Poppy outside on keeping her focus on me and rewarding her a lot. So I don't know, we don't do a whole lot of interacting with people outside. She's very sensitive and anxious and I am mostly interested in cultivating good feelings for her about being outside. And I think that makes our walks focused, and people probably see that focus and generally don't come up and say, can I pet your dog?
But this girl was super excited about Poppy, who is very adorable and generally likes people, especially if they're enthusiastic about her. So I might have thought differently about letting her say hi, but I happened to have huge amounts of string cheese on me in my treat pouch. So I said to this girl, sure. You can say hi to her. Why don't you give her this little piece of cheese? And I knelt down next to Poppy to kind of encourage the girl to also get to her level.
So she gave her the cheese. And then she says, “Sit, sit!” And I could just see this whole thing from Poppy's perspective. Poppy's like here we are out on a walk on the New York City streets. Already kind of a stressful thing. And this young person is all up in my face coming at me, which doesn't usually happen. And she gave me cheese and that was good. But now she's asking me to do something and I, it's not like I practice sitting all the time with strangers outside.
I can tell I'm going into my Poppy voice here. She's like, this is a little weird. I dunno how I feel about this!
So I said to the girl, “Just tell her to be cute,” which is like my go-to line: be cute, good job. And I guess she kind of laughed and was still giving her cheese. And then she was like, “Give me your paw, do you know how to give paw?” And she starts reaching for Poppy's paw.
At which point I was like, Okay, this is enough. We have to go now. Because I was feeling like, What? Is she some circus animal meant to perform for you here? She’s trying to survive on the streets of New York, and I just want her to feel good about this person coming up to her. And this person has these expectations that she should be suddenly, what, performing for her? And then the girl's mother said, “Oh, she's been saying hi to every dog the last five blocks.”
I live like prime Manhattan, very busy. So there are a lot of dogs around, and maybe she is from somewhere suburban or more rural where there aren't as many dogs walking down the street. I don't know.
Anyway, I thought, wow, this well-intentioned girl and her well-intentioned mother are terrifying dogs in the neighborhood today because the girl has these ideas about how dogs should behave in relation to us that has nothing to do with how the dog is actually feeling. And, you know, of course it stems from her liking dogs, but with no knowledge of how a dog is actually feeling. And if you like dogs, I don't know. I'm just getting all fired up about this.
I guess the takeaway, as a parent I think, is if you have a kid who likes dogs, teach your kid a little bit about dogs and dog body language, and help your kid understand that it's really important to help our dogs feel comfortable, especially in potentially stressful situations like a busy sidewalk in a busy city long before you earn any kind of right to be asking them to do tricks. And having a kid say “Can I pet your dog” is not enough.
So this brings me to anecdote number two, which was yesterday. And I was with Magnolia, my three year old. We were in the East Village in a little shop. Like the postal shop near School For The Dogs. I was dropping off some packages, and she was in her stroller, and there was a dog in the shop. And the shop was pretty quiet. I think it was just us and these other people with the dog.
And she said, “Oh, I wanna go pet that dog.” And the dog was already saying hi to some other person. And was sort of being, you know, friendly, kind of loose, wiggly. It was a big dog, an older kind of Labrador, I think, with a graying face.
And I hesitate to let Magnolia say hi to dogs, ‘cause it's something that I wanna make sure she's doing in the safest possible way. And I don't want her to develop the habit of just running up to dogs. But we had a minute, we weren't in a rush inside the store, which was pretty quiet. The dog looked, like I said, he looked friendly and the owner said, “Oh, he's very friendly.”
I said, “Okay, Magnolia,” you know, gonna go up, “remember you put your hand out, let the dog smell your hand.” And you know, I should say, I don't think that there is one right way to greet a dog, just like there's not necessarily one right way for a dog to greet a person. It could depend on the dog. It can depend on the situation, but generally speaking, it's a good idea to let a dog come to you. And I think having her put her hand out lets the dog kind of approach and gives her something to do. Lets her interact in some way. I mean better yet would've been if she had a treat to give the dog, but of course then it gets complicated because you don't know if the dog can have those treats.
Anyway, she was perfect and appropriate and put out her hand, and the dogs started sniffing her hand, and he had a happy open mouth and was sort of tail waggy. And then the owner said, “Tell him to sit!” Magnolia started saying, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. And then the owner kind of pushed his butt down.
And right away, I could just tell by the whole interaction, as soon as she said “tell him to sit” that the dog was getting stressed out and started averting his eyes, showing the sides of his eyes, the whites of his eyes, doing some lip licks, backing up. And it went from this like perfectly fine little interaction to to the situation where I could tell the dog was uncomfortable. And then she started saying again “Give paw, give paw.” And the dog actually gave the paw. I think the owner did it. I mean, at this point I was trying to get Magnolia to back up a little bit. And I was saying, you know, like, he doesn't need to do tricks. He's doing a fine job.
Anyway, this dog sat and gave his paw, lip licking, eyes averted the whole time. And then I was waiting for the woman to give him a treat. She didn't, she didn't even like pat him on the head or anything. I mean, there was like no acknowledgement that he had just performed, even though we were an audience that didn't care.
And that was it. And I was just left feeling…sad. I was left feeling sad for the dogs of the world and the well intentioned people who want their dogs to interact nicely with their kids, or with adults or whatever.
Like everybody here wants the same thing. We all want kids to be safe. We all want dogs to be safe. We all want dogs that aren't stressed out. We want dogs who we can have with us in our busy city lives. And the missing piece is actually paying attention to the dogs and thinking about helping them feel good in stressful situations. Anyway.
In thinking of about how easy it is for people who love dogs, people who have good intentions to screw up, or at least to screw up in the eyes of some other people – like the jury is still out on what is, and isn't cruel when it comes to dealing with pets, specifically dogs – -t made me think about an article I wrote just about exactly 10 years ago for the Boston Globe. It was an opinion piece called “Animal welfare is a matter of perspective.”
And I was asked to write this because Mitt Romney who was then running for president was in the news a lot because of something he had done with his dog many years earlier. While I was not particularly a fan of Romney’s, I did think that it was sort of, hmm, hypocritical that the media was dragging him over the coals for the way he treated his dog. Anyway, I went back and read this piece and thought I would share it with you:
In a recent issue of National Geographic, celebrity dog “whisperer” Cesar Millan disparaged the White House’s treatment of its resident dogs. “When you see the president of the United States coming out of Air Force One, you always see the dog in front. When the president goes inside the White House, you see the dog going in first,” he said, referencing his assertion that, in the wild, leader wolves never let subordinates go before them, and that humans must do the same in order to control domesticated canines.
One wonders what Millan will say if America elects a president who has a history of strapping his Irish setter to a car roof. That certainly sounds like a way to exert authority.
On family trips in the early 1980s, Mitt Romney routinely put his dog Seamus in an enclosed, vented crate strapped to the roof of the family car. Once, the dog got sick — but dogs get sick inside cars, too.
A recent Public Policy Polling found that more than a third of respondents said the incident made them less likely to vote for Romney. But I find the whole thing trivial, and certainly more forgivable than some widely condoned forms of animal cruelty, like dog racing, which was legal in Massachusetts during Romney’s gubernatorial term.
The Romneys at least had their hearts in the right place: They’ve argued that Seamus liked his crate and was happier traveling on vacation with his family than he would’ve been alone at a kennel. When it comes to transporting dogs in cars, few of the methods used in the 20th century would be considered humane by today’s standards. The car seat barriers, restraints, and booster seats for dogs that are sold today were not widely available in the 1980s. At that time, Massachusetts didn’t yet require seat belts for humans.
Animal welfare is subjective. When I questioned Scott Crider, founder of the Dogs Against Romney Facebook group, he admitted he’d never spent much time considering the widespread use of things I consider unnecessarily cruel, like electric shock collars or keeping dogs chained outside.
I believe that for all of our best intentions as dog owners, America is home to a lot of unhappy dogs.
As an animal trainer who uses non-aversive, science-based methods to manipulate dog behavior, I am dismayed by the number of people I see using force, pushing, and yelling in attempts to control dogs; I’m saddened that more people use the harsh methods of an unschooled television personality than follow the animal training advice of revered scientists like B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov. Are they misinformed? Maybe. Do they have different ideas than I do about what constitutes animal cruelty? Sure. But I’d still classify most of them as loving dog owners. And I’d put the Romneys in that category.
Were he to take the highest office, Romney would be joining a long line of presidents who’ve made arguably questionable decisions regarding the First Dogs.
For example, the White House released an Easter video of President Obama’s dog, Bo, wearing bunny ears. Bo doesn’t look too bothered by the get-up he was forced to wear, but one could argue that the stunt was Obama implicitly encouraging the current fad of putting dogs in clothing and elaborate costumes. Each Halloween, I watch parades of pups who often look terrified about the massive bumblebees and tutus that have suddenly enveloped them. For all they know, they’re doomed to wear Princess Leia buns for eternity. A tortuous fate, indeed.
One of the more famous dog-lovers-in-chief was Lyndon B. Johnson, who tried to sneak one of his five dogs into his daughter’s wedding. But he also was widely lambasted for lifting his beagles, Her and Him, off the ground by their ears.
Bill Clinton’s chocolate Lab, Buddy, was acquired just before Lewinsky-gate; the dog worked hard to boost his owner’s approval ratings and was often present during photo opportunities. However, the Clintons proved neglectful dog owners: in 2002 Buddy was run over by a car outside his family’s Chappaqua home, a tragedy that could have been averted by a humane dog management device: a fence. He was the second family dog to have been killed by a car.
Then there are those past presidents whose treatment of dogs seemed to trump their ethical treatment of humans.
According to psychologist Stanley Coren in his book “The Pawprints of History,” John F. Kennedy’s groundskeepers feared they’d lose their jobs if they reported bites incurred by his beloved Welsh terrier, Charlie. Herbert Hoover punished his staff for being too nice to his German shepherd — he worried that the dog liked them more than him. And Franklin D. Roosevelt was several times accused of using Treasury money to transport his dogs on planes.
Exactly how winding is the road that leads from the exemplary treatment of pets to the proper treatment of other humans? It’s crooked enough that one hopes we never end up with anyone emulating the 20th-century leader who may have been most concerned with animal rights — one who didn’t eat meat, discouraged tail docking, wanted fish anesthetized before slaughter, and outlawed the poor treatment of animals in movies. That famous dog lover? Hitler.
