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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2292 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024

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My dog escaped four times this weekend while I was gone. He’s crazy and super anxious but we love him.

Has anybody had success just drugging their dog into less anxiety? What do you recommend?

+1 to @AhhhTheFrench. We had a high anxiety dog like that who had been poorly bred and separated from his mother too early. Lots of expensive training, lots of systems. Nothing really fixed it.

We tried drugs, and it made him no less anxious but essentially drunk. He'd run into walls. Had to rehome him once we had kids.

Ahh, tragic story to hear. Yeah we have been through a lot of expensive training with him, although he's not so bad we would have to rehome him. Hopefully! I love the dog and don't know if I could actually make the decision to let him go.

This is going to sound terrible. But that is a defective dog. If you get a different easier dog you will love it just as much, and you can do that. Your life will be much better for it, so will everyone's life that has had to deal with your bad dog.

I think this perspective discounts the transformative power of dog training. There are a lot of changes that can be made by a skilled trainer. Here is some information about what happened to dogs rescued from Michael Vick's fighting ring: https://bestfriends.org/sanctuary/about-sanctuary/animal-areas/dogtown/vicktory-dogs/champions-film/stories-about-dogs

It may be worth paying a trainer to help your dog learn less anxious behavior if you don’t have the time/skill. Also, it is worth considering how to adapt the environment to make the dog less anxious. Maybe put the dog in doggy daycare, or hire a pet sitter, if you are going to be for extended periods.

I have seen someone that had success drugging their dog, but I don’t recall the drug. The outcome was that they gave it to the dog when they had guests and the dog would become sleepy. I don’t think the dog had any other issues, it just got excited in friendly ways when new people entered its environment.

The best ways to avoid dog behavior problems is to adopt one slightly past the puppy stage that has all the behaviors you want already trained into it. Or do extensive training when the dog is a puppy and seek external help if you can’t train the desired behaviors yourself. Once a dog gets past the ~puppy stage it takes a lot more effort to change its behavior.

The vast majority of his dogs went to a sanctuary. They say “adopted” and that is technically correct- but they went to the dog equivalent of a zoo. They also removed the teeth from some of them and Mr. Vick paid almost a million dollars for their rehab and future care. Most were never integrated into homes and lived out their days in a very nice kennel.

The fallout from all of this has been 15 years of pro-pitbull propaganda and an incredible increase in dog bite attacks, disfigurements, and deaths. We have plenty of dogs, put the bad ones down.

The vast majority of his dogs went to a sanctuary. They say “adopted” and that is technically correct- but they went to the dog equivalent of a zoo....Most were never integrated into homes....

The point of the link I shared was that his dogs went to the sanctuary, received rehabilitation, and then most were then able to pass the Good Canine Citizen test and be adopted by individual families into their homes.

The fallout from all of this has been 15 years of pro-pitbull propaganda and an incredible increase in dog bite attacks, disfigurements, and deaths. We have plenty of dogs, put the bad ones down.

The crux of this issue is determining if the increase in dog bites is caused by bad dogs or bad training. I think the evidence points to bad training being the cause in more cases than not. Pit bulls were a popular breed of dog in the 1900s and earlier. It doesn't make sense that they would be popular if they were an inherently bad breed. Generally, pit bulls are intelligent and loyal which makes it easier to train aggressive behaviors into them. Some people wanted a dog trained with this behavior (people living in dangerous situations that wanted a protective companion) and just happened to choose pit bulls because they are one of the easiest to train to do this. There are certain characteristics that are specific to the breed, but others like biting are more influenced by how humans train/raise them.

Pit bulls were a popular breed of dog in the 1900s and earlier. It doesn't make sense that they would be popular if they were an inherently bad breed.

Bad for what is the question. Violence may be maladaptive today, but the past is a different country; Dangerous and aggressive to others with a small risk of attacking you was a decent deal in the past for many, but nowadays the upside is worthless (how often do you need to fight?) and the downside is amplified (society is ridiculously safe otherwise).

Seems hard to find the actual stats on their site besides that they received 22 dogs out of the ones seized.

Pitbulls were bred for fighting. In 2020 they accounted for 72% of dog attack deaths while making up about 6.2% of the total U.S. dog population. They are also the most likely to bite, period. The findings showed that dogs with short, wide heads who weighed between 66 and 100 pounds were the most likely to bite.

Pit bulls were responsible for the highest percentage of reported bites across all the studies (22.5%), followed by pit/mixed breeds (21.2%), and German shepherds (17.8%).

Pit bulls were found to have the highest relative risk of biting, as well as the highest average damage per bite.

I believe this in many cases, but it is overstated. Dog HBD is real... And some early life traumas like premature mother separation don't seem overcomeable imo

Slightly off topic, but does anyone else have the impression that there bas been a general increase in just bad, poorly socialized, aggressive, or anxious dogs? Probably over 75% of the dogs in my dog-sphere (friends' dogs and neighborhood dogs that we see often) have some sort behavioral issues that makes me not want to spend time around them (the dogs). I could count the number of "actually good dogs" amply on one hand.

I don't remember it being this way in my childhood. But obvious issues with trying to compare today to my childhood memories.

I read recently that cats have been evolving to be less friendly to humans, at least in the West, because friendly pet cats are spayed or neutered, as are strays that are caught by people. The cats that are reproducing are strays unfriendly enough to avoid animal control. Seems plausible the same effect is occurring for dogs.

Unlike cats, where large stray populations feed into the pet population in the west, most pet dogs in America were deliberately bred.

It seems like there’s notably more poorly behaved dogs these days than there were, but some of that is just dogs being tolerated more; a bad dog back in the day would have been sent to the shelter and modern day pet ‘parents’ are less willing to do this.

There is a generation of dogs that are poorly socialized on account of covid lockdowns, or at least that is the explanation their owners give when I have asked them about it.

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