Q. How do you approach a dog you don't know? A. You don't!

I was at a BBQ recently where I saw an all too common sight: A woman was restraining her chihuahua so that a 2 year old girl could come up and pet him. Problem was that the feeling wasn't mutual and the wee chi quite clearly did NOT want to meet the wee girl - he was alarm barking up a storm as she approached. His owner told the wee girl "It's all right honey, just put your hand out for him to smell..." Which the child did, resulting in more barking from the panic stricken chihuahua. At this point I intervened and told the owner that her dog didn't appear to want to interact with the little girl, and explained to her that he was trying to communicate that via his barking. The thing that really got me about this scenario was that the chi's owner KNOWS that he was never socialized with kids and doesn't feel comfortable around them, yet was still putting him in a situation that could have literally and figuratively ended in tears. It ends up that she thought that by asking the little girl to approach "the correct way" with her hand extended, that all would be well and her chi would stop barking. After all, she'd always read that that was the "right" way to introduce yourself to a dog. Later in the evening the wee girl's mum approached me and said that she'd been quite uncomfortable with letting her daughter approach a barking dog like that, but had gone along with it because the dog's owner had said it was "ok". We ended up having a great conversation about appropriate ways for kids to meet/interact with dogs. Here in the intake department we have a lot of experience meeting new dogs as on a weekly basis we interact with 100+ dogs at the source shelters on rescue run day. On thing you won't see us doing is sticking our hands out for the dogs to smell. Instead we enter the dog's kennels and let them choose (or not) to approach us. Legions of children (and adults) have been told over the years to "extend the back of your hand for a dog to sniff..." as a way of meeting strange dogs, and I have to say, every time I see it happen I cringe a little - if we as humans decrease distance when meeting a strange dog we've just removed one of the dog's modes of communication, namely choosing to create distance, so if that dog doesn't particularly want to interact with us what other methods does he have left to try to communicate that to us? The ones humans find alarming - namely growling, barking, snapping etc. Right now I'm sure there's a chorus of folks out there saying "Well I've always done that when meeting a dog without any problems...." and my answer to them would be "Yes, but you've probably been lucky enough to meet dogs who want to meet you - what happens when you finally come across the dog that doesn't want to meet you?"

Recently, our vet here at ARF, Dr. Heather, sent out a link to an online article about a study conducted in Hungary regarding dog growls. The article included three mp3's of different types of dog growls: a playful growl, a threatening growl, and a food guarding growl. Basically the study was trying to see if dogs understand and react to different types of growls. Dogs were played the sound of a "food guarding" growl as they approached a meaty bone and from the group of dogs used in the study, only one continued to approach and ate the bone, the other dogs backed off or if they did engage with the bone, walked away from it when the "food guarding" growl was played a second time. Interesting stuff. I played the mp3's of the different growls at home on my laptop to see how my own dogs would react. When I played the "playful" growl my Chow-Pug mix, Nugget got super waggy and animated. She didn't react to either the "threatening" or "food guarding" growls. But my corgi mix, Stella, who slept through the "playful" and "threatening" growls woke up and looked very concerned, scanning the room, when I was playing the "food guarding" growls. Stella, by the way, can be a wee divil about guarding stuff from Nugget. I'll wager that Stell knew EXACTLY what that growl meant, she's just not used to hearing it from another source! Play it for your own dogs at home and see what they think!

try walking around in your dog's shoes for a bit, they might be a bit small, but it'll be worth it...

Imagine the scenario: You see some friends walking towards you and they're with someone you don't know. This someone looks interesting/cute/unusual so you go up to say hi to them. But as you get nearer and extend your hand in greeting they start backing away from you - at first they're quietly saying "I'm warning you, don't get any closer...." but you don't notice because at that exact moment you look over to your friends and say "Who is this? They're so interesting/cute/unusual...." By the time you look back towards the person you're trying to greet they've started shouting at the top of their lungs "GET AWAY FROM ME!!! DIDN'T YOU HEAR ME THE FIRST TIME??!! JUST BACK OFF, I MEAN IT NOW - GET AWAY!!!!" You don't understand because, hey, you're a nice person, don't they realize that? "It's ok" you say as you keep advancing on them, "I just want to say hi...." By now the panicked person has lost all control and before you know what's happened to you they've punched you in the face.

Seems like kind of a ridiculous scenario doesn't it? I mean, who amongst us would keep advancing on another person, that we didn't know, while they were shouting at us to get away? Some of us would've noticed the person muttering "I'm warning you, don't get any closer...." and thought to ourselves "No problem pal, I don't intend to!" And if we had missed that sign we most definitely would've backed off when confronted with a hysterical shouting person, right? Yet time and again folks DON'T show dogs the same courtesy - I walked by a situation involving a guy trying to say "hi" to his friend's new dog and it was basically identical to the one related above - only difference is that the dog DIDN'T bite - this time.... Next time though, the person saying "hi" might not be so lucky... Moral of the story? Folks need to try walking around in a dog's shoes and see things from the critter's perspective. Owners need to advocate for their dogs and recognize when they're uncomfortable/anxious/scared and then endeavor to get them out of that situation ASAP. It's perfectly ok to say "Sorry I don't think my dog wants to say "hi" right now...." And while we're dreaming of utopias, wouldn't it be great if the general populace could become well versed enough in basic dog body language to be able to recognize when a dog doesn't particularly want to say "hi" to them? Hey a gal can dream, right?