This Time, I Said Something
I’ve written previously about times when I didn’t say anything to other dog owners, even when I had a good opportunity to, and my reasons for making those decisions. This last weekend, I had the opposite experience- I said something, to a total stranger, interrupted his conversation to do so, in fact, and we weren’t even at the dog park.
My writing group meets every other Sunday morning at a Starbucks. I get there an hour or more early in order to have some dedicated writing time. I sit in the comfy chairs. Because the comfy chairs are located in the corners, grouped together, I often end up sitting fairly near other people and can see what’s on their laptops or overhear their conversations.
This Sunday, I was sitting working on a rewrite of a major scene in my novella while this man and woman, obviously old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while, talked. I heard most of their conversation about weight loss and exercise and leaving keys on the counter at the book store. Then their conversation moved on to family members and, and I heard him give her advice about forcing her daughter to take the SAT, and claiming that kids who start at community college take longer to get their 4 year degrees. (Let’s discount the fact that most people getting a “4 year” degree now a days take 5+ years to do so.) Through context I came to understand that he’s a professor at a local private, and quite expensive, university, so I guess he comes by his bias “honestly”.
The woman is also apparently a single mom and might be dating, and he said something about her having a “problem” with pets- ie she had too many of them. (I never heard an exact number, but from their conversation, I would say she had maybe 3 dogs.) And then she, obviously being a bit of a dog person, asked about his dog.
He started talking about his rule of one pet per family, not per person, but per family, and how he was having to put the kibosh on someone (I think his partner, but it could have been a teenaged child) bringing home more pets. And that once their current dog passes, any new pet will be a puppy, because he can handle his own crazy, but he’s tired of dealing with the current dog’s issues, which were apparently caused by someone else’s crazy.
I want to pause and say that up until this moment, I wasn’t really eavesdropping. Due to the location of the chairs, he was sitting less than 2 feet away from me, and I don’t listen to music while I write my fiction. I find it more inspiring to hear the people around me. It’s just that usually, I only get snippets of conversation, instead of hearing an entire one. But when he got to the point of talking about his dog’s crazy, well, I’ll be honest, I started paying more attention.
I was thinking that maybe the dog had been abused or something before they got it, that it might have actual bits of crazy. (And since the novella I’m working on has the human animal bond as a prime feature, this could kind of be considered research.) And then he told her what made his dog so crazy: Any time the dog was being walked on a leash and he saw another dog, he started barking and lunging toward the other dog.
That was it. Every day reactivity was his dog’s “crazy”. Now, I know that not everyone who has a dog is a dog person, and this guy obviously wasn’t. But still, reactivity is not all that crazy, and, it can be trained away, you know, if you bother training your dog. To go along with that, simply getting a puppy next time they get a dog is no guarantee that that dog won’t be reactive.
So, I butted in. I apologized for interrupting and said I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. I told him that his dog’s behavior is known as reactivity, and that there are a number of trainers in the area that can help them train their dog to break the cycle of behavior. (Fellow Seattleite Gretel over at You Did What With Your Weiner has been taking classes like this.)
I explained the flight or fight response as our trainer with Moree had explained it to us. That when on leash, the dog does not feel it has the ability to run away, and therefore feels it must fight. And as we all know, a good offense is a good defense. I talked about needing to have your dog trust you to protect it, and learning to break focus. (Which has been key with Larry dog.)
I then apologized again, saying that I had reactive dogs, and this was a topic close to my heart. She smiled at me and waved off my apology. He actually looked thoughtful and said “training, huh” as if the thought had never really occurred to him before.
They went back to their conversation- not discussing dogs. And shortly after, another member of my writing group showed up.
Will I have made a difference in this one dog’s life? I don’t know. I don’t think this man was someone to spend a lot of money on pets, so might find going to training classes too expensive for the dog. But maybe I will have made a difference for the theoretical future puppy, simply by planting the idea that if you want your dog to behave a certain way, or not behave a certain way, that perhaps getting some training might be a good idea.