"My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."
"My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
"If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
People "trust" dogs to a ludicrous degree, even dogs that clearly can't be trusted.
You don’t have to ever consider the behavior acceptable and it’s never your job in particular to deal with it or be around them but that doesn’t mean that the owner’s empathy is invalid. And it sucks when owners are unwilling or incapable of helping their dog. But they’re also right — dogs really don’t bite for no reason.
Actually it's the exact opposite. We reduce these complex living beings to a "all dogs are good, only people are bad".
> But they’re also right — dogs really don’t bite for no reason.
People don't assault and kill for no reason either, doesn't mean their victims, or the person bitten by the dog is at fault.
DDG "dog kills child" and come back to this thread.
Back in Russia a neighbour's pibull would regularly attack and bite small children playing on the playground, drew blood, left scars. They refused to believe there was anything wrong with the dog's behaviour. Only when the dog attacked their own kid at home, they finally accepted the fact and, sadly, put down the dog.
Some people are crazy, some dogs are too. Indeed, nothing happens for no reason, but the reason might be screwed up chemistry in the brain. Or it might be traumatic upbringing, or something else totally unrelated to the person that suffered.
But even with that in mind, I remember the one time my dog was playing with another dog, and suddenly the play turned to aggression on a dime, and I had to pull those dogs apart, and one ended up with a piece of it's ear gone. Neither dog had a history of aggression, neither has done anything like that ever again. There was no warning, it just happened.
Why? I have no clue, and I never will, because dogs aren't people. I can't even know what another human is thinking when a violent outburst happens, much less another species.
So are drug-sniffing dogs reliable? I bet they are, but just like people sometimes they can be wrong, or they can have a bad day, or they can give the answer they thought the trainer wanted. Who knows? We don't know how they experience the world enough to even make a guess.
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
A dog who is snarling and snapping is doing the canine equivalent of screaming ‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW’. Actually trusting that dog would have to mean believing it when it tells you it is uncomfortable and feeling threatened. If you trust someone and they tell you they need to be removed from a situation, you do it.
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
Honestly, this is the other side of people ‘trusting’ dogs too much. Most people who get bit by dogs are doing something extremely stupid, and most people who get bit by other people's dogs are doing something extremely presumptuous and invasive.
If what you're interested in is whether a dog is vicious (i.e., how easily it can be rehabilitated or accommodated so that it never bites anyone again for the rest of its long, happy life), the secondhand judgment of someone who got bit by the dog is generally unreliable unless it's accompanied by a detailed account. Unfortunately, being a ‘dog person’ or someone who ‘loves dogs’ or ‘has had dogs their whole life’ doesn't at all assure that a person can read basic canine body language, either.
Then, when I met it again three years later, tried to do the same thing but by that point they'd wised up and anchored its leash to something. Although, you know, maybe there existed a more constructive solution.
And my cousin was bit three times (required stitches) by a dog she never approached, and backed away from carefully after it became obvious that it was unfriendly, running away after it bit her the first time. She did accidentally enter the owner's property, though, while jogging. The property boundary wasn't marked.
I don't think you can generalize this stuff, unless you've made a detailed survey of the conditions concerning situations where dogs have bit people.
Anyway my point is not to deny someone that they've had unpleasant or even traumatic experiences with dogs, but to point out that moderately detailed stories, like the one you just shared, are much more informative than judgments given without context.
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
If you ever hear this, the dog is being socialized in a bad, counterproductive way before your very eyes. The owner is ignoring manifestly severe distress, as well as generally unacceptable behavior in public.
> "My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."
The word ‘allowances’ here is kinda strong, in that it sounds like you're not only giving up on eliminating certain negative behaviors/feelings in your dog, but also in managing them.
But it's really close to something that I think is fair to say, which is that you can't expect your dog to instantly recover from trauma, and that you will have to make gradual progress on teaching your dog that the world is safe for them and how you expect them to behave in it. At the same time, it's your job to manage those behaviors along the way, so I'm not sure that counts as ‘making allowances’ in the sense of simply permitting otherwise unacceptable behavior. So it might be fair to give that one to the GGP, too.
> "My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
This is useless information even if it's true, and it pushes responsibility for the dog's behavior and comfort onto others (probably including random strangers, given the character of the examples). This is poor socialization in action again.
(Aside: growling is good. It is good for dogs to give warning. You probably want to address the thing they're growling about (food possessiveness, fear, anxiety, mistrust of strangers), which may not be good. But you probably don't want to suppress growling per se or treat growling as bad behavior. That's a good way to get a less predictable dog.)
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
If someone says this about their own dog, they're showing a stunning level of disinterest in their own dog's behavior, comfort, and impact on others. If someone tells you your dog bit them, you need to be very interested in all of the details so you can figure out what was going on and what you need to do about it.
A dog who doesn't like to be touched by random strangers is not a bad dog, and strangers are not entitled to touch her! I'm 100% with you on this one. Many people seem to think that all dogs should actively enjoy all kinds of invasions to their personal space (that they themselves would never tolerate), and it's ridiculous.
You're also not, in my opinion based on this description, ‘making allowances’ for any unacceptable behavior. You're just keeping your dog (and people around her) safe and comfortable, despite the misplaced sense of entitlement of some strangers.
That is a reasonable thing to do. Dogs like people get allowances within reason for having unique failure modes. We all have them.
Telling people they're not welcome to pet the dog isn't an allowance, it's management.
Making allowances, to me, would mean simply permitting a behavior you otherwise wouldn't, and actually allowing the dog to practice the behavior instead of managing the environment to prevent the behavior. People who simply do nothing about a small dog who snaps, growls, bites because 'he's harmless, he couldn't hurt anyone if he wanted to', for example, I would say are 'making allowances'.
My point is the owner is not in control of whether someone suddenly pets the dog, and it bites them.
So the warning before, is also the allowance after. Depending on circumstances the owner can only partially control.
If the warning were not also a reasonable allowance after a bad incident of the kind the owner imagines is possible, then instead of a warning the owner should be avoiding any possibility of the situation.
I don't take her to dog parks or places with lots of people. Avoiding any possibility of the situation would mean not taking her for daily walks around the neighborhood; this is just the reaction when somebody who is not familiar in the neighborhood sees her for the first time (often people just walking down their driveways toward me). I don't think that fully isolating her from ever seeing a person she doesn't know is necessarily the best choice for her either.
For somebody to suddenly pet her, there would have to be a person who is hiding behind a hedge or car waiting to jump out and pet a strange dog, which would be a bad idea regardless of the dog's disposition to strangers.
I understand your point, but I think you're making the assumption that I'm putting her into avoidable situations that are higher risk, rather than the bare minimum necessary proximity to people in order for her to get her exercise and the psychological necessity for anxious dogs to scope out their surroundings regularly.
All my unpleasant dog encounters have been with people who can't take their dog to the off leash park ...