Dog Behavior Assumptions Are Not A Good Idea
Watching dogs is a long time hobby of mine, because they do such interesting things. No, really, watch your dog for just 10 minutes while he is outside with you. If you don’t have a dog, I suppose you could always borrow a friend’s (with permission, of course). The point is, you can learn a lot from simply observing.
Dogs are unpredictable creatures because they are first and foremost conscious, intelligent animals that we don’t always understand. So, when we look at them and note their behavior, we have to look at them and understand that perhaps we don’t understand them as well as we’d like to think.
A person who is walking in the park and encounters a dog on a leash barking and freaking out at them may make a few assumptions or conclusions. The first might be that the owner of the dog is not a very good one, since they can’t control their dog. Another might be that the dog is aggressive and shouldn’t be out in the first place. Unfortunately, a lot of these assumptions, whatever they might be, are wrong.
