DOGS

xp
Yeah the young guy was obv a prick.

My own situation is still annoying a lot really because it's a really nice park with a moated island at bottom containing the remains of ancient hall. And I'd been frequenting the place for 10 years without any troublesome encounters until last year. I definitely wouldn't apologise to any of the people I've previously told to fuck off there.

I probably would’ve hit her with a ‘really?!?’ and some kind of obvious disdainful facial expression before moving right along, because you don’t owe people like that, who are spoiling for some kind of confrontation, anything at all.

Having said that, my puppy is the dickhead who will steal your dog’s ball and run circles around any human or beast until he’s bored. Thank goodness most of the other people walking their dogs around here are pretty nice.

I've had a very few encounters like this, but Deflatormouse, I think you're in the right.

I guess I just try very hard to be a good and conscientious dog owner, and when people accuse me of being otherwise when I'm clearly not doing anything wrong, it gets me riled up.

What annoys me is my dog has grown up a lot in the last year and his approach to other dogs is more often than not impeccable these days. He takes it slowly and kowtows down for a minute or two. He never just runs up to them unless he knows them. He's almost perfectly socialised at this point and people want to shout at me.

But the danger is when you are constantly rowing with these types of ill mannered angry ants you might just become as bad as them and there is only a finite amount of people you cant tell to f-off before they start forming a club to do you in!

It's funny to say "put it out of your mind," (which is obviously the right thing to do) because when something like this happens at the start of a dog walk, well, you now have an hour or so to do nothing but chew over what was said to you and what an asshole the other person was.

I also find that, for me anyway, humour can help (also my dogs are small). Shouting things like "you thieving little bastard!" at them when they rob a ball and run off with it, or "you don't own the path, you know" when they bark at other dogs can help to defuse potential narkiness. Most of the time. But my god, my list of grievances is long and the retaliatory speeches I compose in my head are extensive and detailed.

The other day we were in the dunes and the things I thought were grassy tussocks were in fact camouflaged soldiers from the local army base, all pointing guns at us. The dogs were NOT amused, and barked A LOT at the soldiers and even ran towards them. "If this was Lebanon we'd all be shot, you dopey shite!" I told them. The soldiers smiled a bit, which is probably the best you can hope for in that situation.

haha whoa.

My experience is that little yappy dogs are frequently instigators, and most of those times their owners brush it off by saying it's cute or otherwise babying them. This has always struck me as fucked because regardless of size, they are being aggressive! And I say this having once had a gigantic Great Dane who was completely docile and loving, and as a result got bullied by Chihuahuas and other little shits repeatedly.

Mostly these days I take the dog (a rescue hound mix) to the local park, and she does well. Lately her game has been to get her mouth on a ball, whether one I brought to play with or one of the many abandoned at the park, and take it to other random people, drop it, look at them, and then start howl-barking hound style at them until they throw it. I also use humor to deflate those situations (“they're not here for your entertainment”, etc) and I don't think anyone has gotten seriously annoyed, but I do wish she'd stop because it gets old.

wow!

yeah Trishyb, I still have a whole speech prepared to the guy who yelled at me across the local green a few years ago about letting my dog poo there. he started yelling at me as i was picking up the business, saying, "kids play there, curb your dog means take it to the curb, etc" and i just stared at him dumbly because what he was saying was so demonstrably hostile and stupid that i had no idea how to respond. (kids don't play there, the playground is on the other side of the green, that isn't what curbing your dog means, please shut up)

Holy shit, trishyb

I found that kind of dog aggro was almost always preemptive, often obnoxious and generally unnecessary. People's reactions are several steps ahead sometimes, like they're responding to a worst possible scenario which has not yet occurred and is not going to occur when it comes to dogs.

It def made my blood boil sometimes, I remember a lot of encounters like the one Table described and a few truly astonishing horror stories.

There has got to be a thread on here for posting the prepared orations against assholes we've carried around for years, and if not there should be.

My dog is frequently an instigator, but it's from anxiety rather than aggression. He gets very anxious if it seems like another dog is coming straight at him, it doesn't really matter how small or harmless the other dog is. When he gets anxious he gets very loud and sounds frankly a bit scary, snarling and barking to let the other dog know that he's capable of anything. He reacts the same way to other things that make him anxious, such as loud trucks passing by.

Young one dive-bombed our older pup today *while she was taking a poo*. I've never been so angry with a dog.

Has anyone used CBD stuff on their pups? I don't want to get him on dog xanax, mostly because it's very expensive and he is quite a normal puppy, but Christ, we just need him to calm the fuck down.

mine was nuts when he was a pup and I had to put him on a muzzle for six months because he would try and eat literally anything outside, including dogshit and spent condoms. And inside I had to constantly watch after he nearly died from a sock blocking his small intestine. It can be a very stressful period but I think more often than not there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Yeah, they really can be little bastards, but eventually they calm down and cop themselves on and it gets easier.

I guess we just got lucky with our first one, who had a few bad behaviors but has always been pretty mellow.

Part of the issue is that this guy came from a sort of unknown (assumedly abusive or traumatic) situation, and is developing late, so he's 10 months old but acts like a 4 or 5 month old puppy. Wouldn't be a problem except he's getting honking big!

Widget tries to eat loads of random shit off the ground but accepts me whipping the things from his mouth.

yeah I've done the same thousands of times, the problem I have is that it turned into a game with him and he's got a very competitive game-playing nature. One day I bumped into two climbers who were practicing on old train bridge. They had a wooden hand brush which I assumed was for brushing moss off the sandstone where they are climbing. Anyway the little bastard knicks it and it took 20 mins to get it back off him and he was gleefully running rings around us all!

We just got Josie, who is a Mi-Ki. They look like tiny Chewbaccas or Ewoks:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51057693562_0993b0cb39.jpg

okay i died

so little!

It’s National Puppy Day!

https://imgur.com/gallery/ZeX6amL

Long-term ambition fulfilled. Finally got a dog.
Doonie has come to live with us.
Day 5, I'm exhausted and very happy.
https://imgur.com/a/ELLKRVK

OMG! Total cutie!

very cute.

Cute AF.

Aw

the other day this dog walker with a little Maltese type looking dog falsely accused my dog of biting her dog for the second time. I said I can't take you seriously when you lie like this, my dog get's bullied by French Bulldogs and doesn't bite other dogs, particularly smaller ones and never has. He just playfully ran around the dog when it barked at him, even with my shit eyesight I had 20/20 vision on the whole *incident*. I replied just go to the park if you are too uptight about your dog interacting with other dogs and stop trying to spoil this place for everyone else you miserable arsehole. And she replied menacingly "just you you wait till you pass my house again". And then pulls out her phone and threateningly looks at me me like she is ringing the police. I just thought fuck it I'll carry on with my walk and ignore this deranged arsehole. I walked another quarter of a mile and saw this angry dot on the landscape shouting death threats at me. And then it dawned on me she had called her thick as pigshit lump of gammon boyfriend to come out and beat me up! I have a good idea who he is and am not remotely scared of him, but because a lot of the time I'm with my autistic son, she has effectively put me in a situation where I can't bring him there anymore with the dog because you do have to do a risk assessment as a carer, occasionally. Anyway the whole unsavoury incident reminded me why I mostly prefer walking with the dog in deepest possible cuts of nature locations and avoiding bumping into as few a humans as possible.

A dog in Russia grabbed the reporter's microphone and ran away during a live broadcast pic.twitter.com/R1T8VZ5Kpt

— Ali Özkök (@Ozkok_A) April 2, 2021

Anyway the whole unsavoury incident reminded me why I mostly prefer walking with the dog in deepest possible cuts of nature locations and avoiding bumping into as few a humans as possible.

I mean, this is me most of the time anyway, but doubly so if there's a chance of drama.

I'd gotten a bit lazy in the quagmire season but am back to 6-7 miles a day now - so it isn't all bad.

We're not allowed go more than 5k from our house.

I'm talking two daily walks here so I wouldn't be breaking Irish rules either!

If you are one of those people with a new puppy, please please please get them acclimatized to having their claws clipped and their hair brushed and people putting their hands into their mouths to take stuff out and all that other stuff. By the time we get dogs in our house, they've usually been neglected to the point that they won't let you do any of those things. I had to take Kittser to the vet today to have his claws clipped because he will bite me if I try to do it at home. It took two nurses to do it, and he was so stressed out by the whole experience that he got sick in the car. He's a poor little sausage.

when Douglas had dry pads that were cracking I tried to apply some sudocrem and he growled and tried to take my hand off and that was when he was quite young. He's used to me taking things out of his mouth without getting so radged although at least thankfully not so much these days. But when I've had to change bandages on his paws he has always had to be muzzled, he feels totally attacked if you go near his paws. My last dog wasn't like this and feel like it might be quite a complex emotional trauma buried deep within his psyche or something!

Yeah, it doesn't help if their paws are already sore when you start handling them, I guess. Poor Douglas.

As a new dog obsessive parent I've been trying to get him used to everything. Brushing is going ok (it's managing his determination to see brush as chew toy rather than any aggro), we're ok around the mouth so far and I've done a bit of paw/claw handling but I'm a way away from a proper clip.

No vaccinations yet, so he hasn't seen much of the outside world - turns into a wriggler and moaner if I try to walk him out in my arms or a sling & clearly wants to be down and sniffing about. We've got a bit of a garden for him to play around in, but the sooner I can get him seeing the world, the better.

But he's a pretty confident & trusting little beast - just hope that I don't screw it up over the coming months.

Nominative DogtermiNism !

hah dogs have been near the front of my mind for a long time!

Widget at nearly six months is happy to be left for a couple of hours if bribed with some kind of bone, a scatter of treats, or (his favourite which he knows by name) BLUEBERRIES. I can do one or two claws at a time - he doesn’t mind his feet being handled at all but if the clipper comes out, he won’t cooperate.

I don't think I've ever met a dog that doesn't love blueberries.

Our AmStaff Canela's favorite meal? Beef and peas. We serve it to her every year on her adoptiversary.

Our young one is an annoying little shit and we're all still getting used to each other. He just doesn't have any goddamn manners, so it will take a bit...luckily he's very smart and still young, so very trainable.

(Also strawberries, if they're sweet. God Nela loves strawbs)

Heeeeeeere's Josie!

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51102126801_c1a8e21b63_c.jpg

is that even a dog???

idk I think she's her own species

or a gremlin

She is so damn fluffy and cuddly and fun. Still working on the whole come-when-called thing though :P

adorable

"Still working on the whole come-when-called thing though"

my dog is 2 and a three quarter years old and am still working on that project, but at least now when I call him he'll stop and wait for me and wait for me to put him back on the leash which is some progress I suppose.

"just hope that I don't screw it up over the coming months."

it's just like with human kids, you should never be too hard on yourself about your failures - because no matter how hard you try they will embarrass the fuck out of you one day and that is where the unconditional love is needed most!

I'm thinking bout castration at the moment and am very conflicted, been through all this before but this time it seems a much tougher decision. I mean wtf gives you the right to surgically mutilate your best friend? I just don't know anything anymore tbh.

Very consistently-voiced "come" commands, coupled with consitently-delivered treats on arrival, was all it took to get out dog to come when called. Then again, she'd probably run through a brick wall for food.