We Can Learn So Much From Dogs.
Dogs read us like a book, they know you far better than you know you. You are a catalogue of smells and a bag of emotions, but they love us anyway. Dogs are sentient animals, not brainless automatons that need to be conditioned for everything.
Dogs can teach us so much, but we have to step back and understand them, listen to them. An old fellow once told me – you have 2 ears, 2 eyes and 1 mouth – you should be doing twice as much watching and listening than talking.
Dogs don’t carry prejudice, humans to. People have come at me for using my little dog to mentor other dogs, but that plainly shows lack of understanding of a dog. Monty doesn’t care about breed, the size of a dog, the color of a dog – it’s just another dog to him. He doesn’t see skin color or sexuality, he doesn’t care if you’re ugly or missing limbs. Blind or deaf? Who cares. That’s the dog.
They don’t have the best of eyesight, they are color blind only able to see blue and yellow, their nose and the rest of their body is incredible and they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed at times. They have detected impending heart attacks and strokes, have alerted to cancer. Yeah, your dog knows every inch of your smell, you’re catalogued. If the dog gets suddenly weird around their female owner – you may be pregnant or have other hormonal problems. Dogs know a woman is pregnant far before the woman does. This is not a brainless automaton that needs reward and punishment to learn.
I’ve always carried the attitude – if I wouldn’t do it to a child, I wouldn’t do it to a dog. I have to ask, how far does that divide have to go before people start asking questions? As tempting as it may be, you wouldn’t lock your child in a crate. You wouldn’t wrap an e-collar around your childs neck and shock it. How far does that divide have to go?
Dogs learn through social cognition.
We really need to rethink how we treat our dogs. And it takes stepping back to understand the dog and the associated behaviour vs trying to fix behaviours. Been talking to many owners on facebook from around the world, and what they tell me is heartbreaking – being told, don’t bother, the dog can’t be fixed. Or hire a trainer when you’ve already been through 5 or more. And we wonder why owners become defeated.
The dog needs to get their brain back, they need to think,