I became the dog owner I complain about
We recently adopted Karl, a dog who had been fostered his entire life. Karl is a sweet, goofy, and anxious boy on 40 mg of fluoxetine. This past Saturday I rather stupidly convinced my partner to bring him along to the beach. This was a terrible idea.
We thought it would be OK because we went so early in the morning, but there were already a lot of other dogs at the beach. The truth is I suppressed that nagging feeling telling me it was a bad idea. No one was hurt, but it probably put Karl a few steps back. My partner and I spoke about how hypocritical it felt, how upset we would be if someone else brought their anxious lunging dog to the dog beach where of course dogs will run up to other dogs. We resolved never to bring Karl to the beach unless he's undergone some drastic improvement in his temperament.
In a small way, I was contributing to this rotten USA dog culture I've been so critical of. At the park near our house, mind you not the dog park, people obnoxiously collect at 5 PM and let their dogs off-leash. I cannot bring Karl to the park at 5 anymore. Karl freaks out and will try and bite other dogs. It's not an off-leash park! I've seen other neighbors have to walk back home because they couldn't bring their reactive dog near the 5 PM chaos.
There is a broader discussion about how it feels like Americans are taking less and less responsibility for their crap, which maybe I'll touch on later. But the dog culture alone is enough to piss me off. If you've been in the USA recently and been around dogs, I'm sure you've felt that entitlement of bad dog owners yourself.
At least for my part, after going to the beach, I'm determined to not be part of the problem. Our anxious boy needs a lot of love and support and I just have to make sure he's not someone else's problem. So I'll be pouring my time over the next couple months into training him. This is for his own sake, so he can socialize with more dogs, and for others' sake, so he stops scaring the crap out of my kind neighbors.
I'm not trying to solve a systemic problem with my individual action. I'm just trying to be accepting of the fact that I can't take on more than a handful of systemic problems at a time. It's probably enough for now that I'm not going to make the problem worse.
Also, it would be criminal not to share a picture of the dogs after talking about them, no? Here are the boys right after our bad idea beach trip.
And one bonus picture of the anxious boy. Hopefully he can be a little less fearful, he deserves it.
