What shelter dogs need most has absolutely nothing to do with brick and mortar. Dogs do not care about the color of the wall paint, the modern design that a shelter has or that you can even feed and drink them without opening the doors. It is not the structure of the building that makes the difference, it is the people inside the building, the quality of the staff and it is the carers that will make the difference.
Why are we building more shelters when we were told that spay/neuter campaigns were supposed to take care of the overcrowding? We should be closing doors, not opening new ones to even bigger shelters… When technology takes over the details of feeding a dog, the dog loses the human touch, the hand that would have touched it and the face that would have touched it. I would have smiled. to the. A better solution would be to educate people in our communities about the need to train their dogs to live in a world of people and to educate them about natural dog behaviors and body language.
Thousands of adoptable dogs are destroyed each year in animal shelters across Canada. To understand the magnitude of this unnecessary waste of life, think about a pet you like and all the qualities of the animal. Then think of the thousands of pets just like your crush who want nothing more than to be part of a loving family, but are killed every day in Canada.
Why do we breed more and more dogs when most of the time we can choose exactly what we want from shelters, the vast majority of destroyed dogs are not inferior to those that come from breeders or pet stores? Shelter dogs can be better companions than those bred for sale as pets. Police dogs, service dogs, sniffer dogs come from shelters.
And even if you’re looking for a purebred dog, that’s not a problem anymore, the days of just locating strays are long gone; Twenty years ago you wouldn’t see a Boxer, Shih Tzu, Corgi or Cocker Spaniel in a shelter. It’s quite a different story now; You will find pugs, butterflies, bichons, huskies, german shepherds, chiwawas, labradors, goldens and border collies.
There’s a dog waiting to go home with you, so why don’t we adopt our companion dogs? Don’t buy your dog from a breeder, don’t buy from a pet store, don’t buy online, don’t buy from a puppy mill, buy your dog from your local shelters or breed rescues, you may find that dog once in a lifetime .
And if there aren’t enough homes for dogs in shelters and obviously there aren’t, we should take the best and not the worst, we should hold the owner accountable or better yet, we should hold the breeder accountable.
We should empower people to take responsibility for their pets when they behave inappropriately in society and in their homes instead of leaving them for someone else to fix. Maybe try them before they arrive instead of after they drop off. When the owner comes in and says I don’t want it anymore, the person doing the interview might ask the owner to groom it for about ten minutes. If the dog does not tolerate being touched by the owner, how are they going to find a new home? They could do a lot of work with him at the shelter, but not all shelters are equipped with professional groomers who teach the dog to accept being touched and handled.
Then mix up a bowl of food and ask the owner to pet you while you eat, you won’t need a judging hand now that you have the real deal and are the owners. And if the owner knows that he can’t touch the dog while he’s eating, he’ll refuse to do the test in front of you anyway. That prevents the dog from going in and maybe coming out with problems that the staff might not know about, and it also avoids all these extensive and difficult tests to do at shelters that are time-consuming and expensive. Wouldn’t this tell us a lot more about the dog being left behind?
Only accepting waivers that are adoptable would make it less difficult to find them a home and get them out of this highly competitive, high-stress environment faster while saving time and money that could be better spent elsewhere. Then you could ask the owner to walk with other dogs and if your dog lunges at other dogs, do not accept it. In other words, the shelter is not responsible for a dog that is already a problem. Shelters would then be in the business of finding nice dog homes.
Then, if the dog didn’t pass the test, I’m talking about the owner leaving it, they would have to go through some kind of training at the owner’s expense before being accepted for adoption. Thus returning the responsibility to the owners. What are we teaching the next generation of companion dog owners? Do we want them to think that our companion dogs are something that we can get rid of for any reason? What about our children and grandchildren, will they follow our paths or can we start to make a change by doing things differently and setting new goals for unwanted animals?
We can start with how to improve the way we train companion dogs. There is no longer a demand to train our dogs to do precision work with their heels, to sit with their owner in sight or to come forward on a call and then finish on their heels. This is for competitive obedience; it serves no purpose for a companion dog owner. Something as simple as teaching people how to teach their dog to walk well on a loose leash; could save dog lives.
Teach owners to make their dog sit on command, or to be able to send their dog to their mat or bed, or to teach dogs self-control. And how about how to use emotions to give dogs feedback. Emotional language is universal just like body language and no one uses it anymore, you don’t need words for dogs to understand you all over the world.
And here is the big one. Before this last decade, the idea of socializing a puppy involved familiarizing our puppy with a variety of different people in different circumstances and settings. We did this because domestic dogs live in a world of people. Over the last decade or so, there has been a shift in emphasis from socializing dogs with people to socializing dogs with other dogs.
I think there may be several reasons for this change. Undeniably, guilt plays a role here. Then our lifestyles have become increasingly complex, which means that our dogs mean much more to us. What better way to repay our dogs than to allow them the opportunity to break away from their own kind and become one with their inner dog?
Although that sounds ideal, it overlooks several realities that I find troubling. First, humans have spent more than 10,000 years, 40,000 maybe even 100,000 years domesticating dogs, so dogs prefer humans to canine company. Do we really want to encourage dogs to play by canine rules rather than human ones, while at the same time demanding more of them in their intimate interactions with us?
And finally, don’t forget to ask why you think your dog needs this type of activity. If your dog is well-behaved and healthy, chances are he’s perfectly content spending time with you instead of other dogs. Isn’t that why we call them companion dogs, to be companions to people rather than another dog’s companion?
I love the fact that my dogs would rather play with me than any other dog they know. They are being normal and balanced dogs by choosing me. I don’t want to be treated like just another canine. I want to be all that I can be to my dogs in return I also want them to be all that they can be to me after all I control everything in their world I want them to want to be with me because I am a great much funnier than any dog they have ever met . Dogs that prefer to interact with other dogs than with people are not normal but the exception.
Does that mean you can’t participate in canine activities because you enjoy the company of other people who also like dogs? No problem. However, just be sure to select those activities that meet your dog’s needs and not just yours. So if owners took responsibility for their dog’s education, we would have dogs that would be better behaved and stay in their homes, with their families and alive by looking at the changes we could make:
1. Make training and education a requirement to own a dog
2. Effective training and useful real-life exercises
3. Accept only good dogs from returns
4. Have the owners conduct behavioral tests, as this will tell us a lot more about that dog.
5. Put the emphasis on socializing dogs to people, rather than dog to dog
6. Reject bad dogs as surrender until their owner has done some training at the owner’s expense.
If we taught owners in dog training classes useful everyday exercises that they could actually use in their homes where they spend ninety percent of their time with their dog, they might not be so frustrated, they might send the dog to your mat to relax on.
If we taught owners how to achieve loose leash walking, they could enjoy walking their dogs without the stress of shaking and yelling at them, which causes owners to inadvertently terminate their dog. We could make such sweeping changes while slowing down a disease known as “Throwaway Pet Syndrome.”
By the way, nothing I say is necessarily right, but nothing I say is necessarily wrong either.
