"The amount of times I’ve been walking on a beach with a lot of people around and just about been bowled by completely uncontrolled dogs…"
You must be unlucky with dogs wayno. :-)
"A dog loves a social order. It loves rules and disciple that is how they behave naturally."
Gaiters nails it. The big mistake people make with dogs is treating them as if they were just hairy, somewhat stupid humans. Absolutely they are not.
If took me years to learn this, to start to see and respect dogs for exactly what they are. Basically they're a massive nostril on legs that want to run all day. With their own instincts, and subtle ways of communicating.
Too many people don't seem to understand that dogs DO NOT understand English. But they do read, body language, tone and pheromones just like you read the pixels on this page. Their sense of past, present and future is less structured than ours, and if you want to link cause and effect for them effectively ... it is really important to do it NOW. In the present. They cannot link an action they did a minute ago, with you yelling "bad boy" at them now. Sure they know you are angry with them because of your loud, barking tone and stiff, threatening posture ... but they have absolutely, blissfully no idea why.
This isn't the place for a lecture on dog psychology. Suffice to say in my experience (and I too had to figure it out the hard way), almost all problems people have with dogs arise because we don't respect them as creatures in their own right, and we don't communicate with them effectively. Crucially as Gaiters says above, this lack of communication means the dog is left without social order, work and purpose. Which then stresses them and creates anti-social behaviours. (As it does in all creatures.)
It's hard to put into words, but we've been around many, many dogs and have never, with one notable exception, been bothered any 'bowling' or charging us. The exception was a neighbors animal that was bred as a hunting dog, but had been brought to town as a pet. A very bad idea, because lacking the social order and work it's particular instincts demanded, it could not control itself properly in a human environment.
It's another whole story, but one day it all came to a head, and it was another highly socialised, but very dominant dog which came to my rescue and sorted it for me. Quite a spectacular moment.
Dogs live in this remarkable, dependent, almost symbiotic relationship with humans. For the most part they do their very best to adapt to us ... sadly too many people fail to hold up their side of the bargain.
This post has been edited by the author on 30 September 2016 at 22:46.
