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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   26031 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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The general feeling I get (not a dog owner myself, FWIW) is that people have been conditioned to think they are special in some way. Their dog (or kid, or whatever) is better than everyone else's. That mixed with a bit of main character syndrome and you get what we see now. Maybe this is what happens when you give everyone awards when growing up?

Another angle that would support this same outcome is that it seems to be considered rude to tell someone not to do something or that whatever they are doing is "weird." You make the accused a "victim," and suddenly, they have that as a bludgeon to wield against you. I'm not a proponent of bullying, but that tended to keep people more in line and enforced a sense of shared social norms.

I have no idea how to get back to "normal."

I was at a public park not long ago when one of my children, who had only just begun to toddle, wandered about fifteen feet away from me. Not a big problem, I thought, and of course I was keeping an eye on him. On the far side of the park, at least a minute's walk away, a young woman showed up with a big dog and let it off the leash. It slammed across the park faster than I could believe, a missile headed right at my child. I know dogs, I've raised dogs, I've hunted with dogs, and I've worked with professional hunting dog trainers. This dog was trying to kill my baby, and it was so fast I almost couldn't react in time. Only my experience saved my child. My wife just watched with a glazed expression as all this played out. She does not know dogs. Anyway I was able to get close enough in time and yell and managed to get the dog to swerve at the last minute and back off while I scooped up my kid. Then I prepared to fight it to the death as it gave every indication of being about to try to jump up and snatch my kid out of my arms, which I've seen pit bulls do in videos, so I was ready. I kept yelling and there was a bit of a standoff until finally the owner showed up and leashed the dog. She seemed flustered and mostly wanted to avoid acknowledging what had just happened, and quickly left.

It was a terrifying experience. Dogs are not casual objects of entertainment or companionship. Modern people are so divorced from the realities of animal husbandry that I'm amazed we don't have more horrific catastrophes as a result.

I still take my kids to that park, but now I'm a helicopter parent in a way I never expected to be. At least for the smallest ones.

This is the main reason I don't want dogs around me and my family much anymore. A lot of dog owners seem to have zero appreciation of how disturbing it is to experience this.

You have no idea what that dog was trying to do.

  • -23

That is STILL A PROBLEM.
If a large dog is charging at a small vulnerable child with uncertain intent, it would be utterly irresponsible to let the dog do whatever mysterious thing it's planning to do when it reaches the baby.

An experienced dog owner can absolutely tell when a dog is charging playfully or aggressively.

Big dogs that aren't properly socialized around little kids are also known to play overly roughly and hurt kids by mistake. With a toddler, there's simply not a lot of margin for error. A strange dog actually charging at my child would get the same reaction, and I grew up playing rugby with the dog.

He did the right thing. Dogs are predators and have been known to eat babies (NB: dingoes are feral domestic dogs, not wild creatures; there are no native canids in Australia); scaring a dog away unnecessarily does not remotely compare to "child eaten" in badness, so even a tiny chance of it justifies what he did.

👍

There are some dog breeds which are both not for an inexperienced owner, and very appealing to women with little experience with big dogs. I am not quite sure why.

Offhand, it's always occurred to me as very clearly compensatory.

The little dogs, Yorkies and the like, have always struck me as the ones that substitute for babies and toddlers. Not the big pits that some women who don’t know how to manage dogs own.

The big ones are substitutes for horses or even husbands, for the natural desire to tame a beast. (This isn’t just a gendered thing, either.)

They could also serve as "don't-rape-me" dogs. I notice that, in my suburban neighborhood, you almost never see a (white, non-immigrant) woman on the sidewalk without at least one dog.

They're not compensating for a child. They're compensating for a man. A big, masculine, muscular, loyal, protective force.

That would explain why they let it tell them what to do, I suppose.

You might be assuming everyone around you also thinks that bringing dogs to cafes etc is weird. Maybe a larger proportion likes seeing dogs around the place. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case just from how much attention a cute dog gets from strangers when out in public.

Yeah — it seems that some believe the only sin is saying “no.” The question is why.

I think this is a rather localized phenomenon. I never see dogs* in stores where I live and, as a dog owner, the idea of wanting to take my dog with me to the store makes no sense. The only people I've met who do so seem to have picked the idea up living in the south western US (eg, CA, NV), either having grown up there or moved later in life, and people around here have no problem telling them to keep their dogs home.

*With the rare exception of seeing eye dogs and police dogs.

I never see dogs*

*With the rare exception of seeing eye dogs and police dogs

  • No dogs are permitted on the premises under any circumstances.
  • Any animal assisting a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.
  • Any animal entering on police business shall be deemed to be a wombat.
  • Any animal which the Speaker wishes to admit shall be deemed to be a mongoose.

--supposedly from the rules of some Oxbridge debating society.

Further evidence that debators are far less clever than they think.

It was also a big thing in Washington (at least Seattle) when I lived there... restaurants, grocery stores, whatever.

I worked at Amazon (office, not warehouse) and it was company policy that you could even bring your dogs to the office if they were well behaved. I honestly enjoyed it when my coworkers brought in their dogs -- but much of that was that they weren't random dogs so you got to know them. The 404 page on Amazon still has pics of people's dogs. The real differentiator here was that this was all done with permission and vetting.

I'm now in Nashville and I'm not seeing this effect as much here. Though people have a habit of not leashing their laws out where I live. Admittedly, I'm out in the exurbs, so that might have something to do with that phenomenon.

Dogs with jobs are a very different thing in any case. Real service animals are a true boon to their owners. Police dogs are in a similar boat.

A classic post from Ask a Manager on this subject. It has interesting updates which are linked at the bottom of the post.

To be clear, my post wasn’t intended to capture things like seeing eye dogs.

Oh, I totally got that from your original post. I was just responding to the last bit thrownaway's comment above mine.

I also get really annoyed at all of the "emotional support dogs" that people claim are protected by the ADA, which they aren't really, hence "real service animals." Though I would love for someone to have an emotional support miniature horse just as a troll. (They also are mentioned by the ADA along with dogs as being eligible for being service animals)

My cousin had an emotional support falcon.

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