I was walking alongside a local common this weekend, as it happens, without my dog. I noticed, coming towards me from the opposite direction, a woman walking a Cavalier King Charles spaniel on an extendable lead. The dog was several feet ahead of the woman and, as she got nearer, she let it veer across to the other side of the path to carry on sniffing. This meant that about 10 feet of lead was stretched across the path about a foot from the ground.
When she got to within a foot or two of me, the woman suddenly jerked the dog by the neck and, without reeling in the lead, hauled it across the path, simpering at me to show how considerate she had been.
The dog was extremely startled and, needless to say, the woman oblivious to its feelings.
I wondered how many times that this woman inflicts this treatment on her dog. Then I wondered how many owners are meting out exactly the same treatment to their dogs, day after day.
This week most right-thinking people would have been outraged by the thug who throttled his Staffy, booted his head and then swung him against the side of a train carriage. There is a petition to ask the prime minister to intervene and increase his sentence from a meagre 21 weeks. Punishment alone is unlikely to change his behaviour but this does seem a pretty feeble reaction from the judiciary who no doubt would have imposed a much tougher sentence had it been a child. The poor dog died three days later.
It is easy to feel outraged by blatent cruelty such as this, but most people are oblivious to the daily cruelty that they inflict on their dogs, choking them, shouting at them or just being mostly cross. Not training a dog to walk properly on the lead (or to cope with the environment in which they are forced to live) and lazily using gadgets such as flexi-leads, halters and headcollars in lieu of their own lack of input inflicts constant, continuous insults on dogs and damages their trust in the very people that no doubt, declaim their “love” for their pet.
Which is worse: a sudden, voilent assault or constant daily battery? Not much of a choice is it.
This is probably one of the saddest “Idiot of the Month” posts that I have had occasion to write. Dogs loose on roads, forced to run alongside bicycles or following jogging owners, dogs largely ignored by owners who nevertheless profess to “love” them etc etc. are par for the course.
Following yet another incident with dogs stolen from a careless dog walker, the time has surely come for much stricter controls to be brought against so-called professional dog care and walking organisations.
Everyone needs a little help sometimes but dumping your dog on a walker all week because you are at work is not acceptable. The chances are, most of these dogs are untrained, allowed to run riot when with the walker and, frankly, there is no guarantee that they will be safe.
Normally, most of the things that I see people doing while with dogs annoys me. So, I was gratified to see two owners on consecutive days using successful distraction techniques as I walked past with my dog on a lead. Perhaps non-aversive training is beginning to percolate through after all.
Meanwhile, a bizarre conversation with a bus driver gets the thumbs down for TFL. I boarded the bus with my dog whereupon the driver thumped his window at me as I was moving towards the rear. Assuming that he hadn’t seen my pass, I went back only to be informed that “There’s a baby on the bus”. As I do not suffer from deafness or anosmia, I was only too aware of the fact. My reply: “Yes, and?” The driver just repeated himself and I carried on being wilfully obtuse. Eventually he said “I’m not taking responsibility….”
The BBC and The Guardian have produced items today that implied that sniffer dogs at Manchester airport have not been sufficiently well trained to do their job: the BBC headline is “Airport sniffer dogs find ‘cheese and sausages’ but no Class A drugs”.
