"Hey Donna..." "Yah?" "You know you're supposed to be depressed?" "Really?" "Yah, really." "Oh" "So you can't look like this anymore.""I can't?" "No, you can't. Sorry." "So.... can I look like this?"
"No, that's the you sniffing at something look." "Er, or maybe I should look like this?"
"That's not depressed. That's you waiting for something to happen." "How about this?"
"That's you feeling sleepy and too lazy to do anything... " "This is too hard."
"Hey, that's kind of close to looking depressed I guess."
So I saw this discussion thread on a forum the other day and my simple mind went, well isn’t it a matter of the dog either being intrinsically well-behaved because of its individual personality or a dog being well-behaved because it was well trained to be well-behaved? Regardless of which, the end result is the same — a well behaved dog.
Of course, a dog could be a part-time well-behaved dog. Donna for instance is wonderful when we are at home, but when we are not, there the dog goes on the forbidden sofa, there goes the household plastic goods, there goes the lemongrass teabags hung to keep lizards away, there goes whatever looks like a toy to her. Thank goodness that does not happen too often and through time, we learnt what we need to keep out of reach.
Some dogs behave well at home but get so distracted they behave as they will outside, regardless of their owner’s wishes. Some dogs behave themselves outside but their owners will tell you what holy terrors they become at home. Some dogs probably are well-behaved, except that their owners and the dogs don’t see eye to eye on what being well-behaved really means. Some owners don’t even need their dogs to be well-behaved. These dogs could do no wrong then right?
That one little thing about Donna is, she is generally well-behaved once she knows the rules and expectations. Disaster almost always only happen when routines get broken such as when we fall sick and don’t take her for longer walks or as regular walks/loo breaks. But sometimes people don’t really see that good behaviour. Somehow, people think that it is normal for dogs to be noisy, to bark, to pull on the leash, to do all sorts of doggy things. And when they visit and see Donna sitting and staying on her bed quietly, they ask what is wrong with the dog? Is the dog depressed? Why is she so quiet? And when they pull too hard on the leash and Donna obediently stops and sit, they ask why is the dog so lazy and keep sitting down?
Even when Mr P explains that Donna’s behaviour is a result of training and not because she is depressed, some people still find it hard to reconcile that there is nothing wrong with the dog. We spent a lot of time bonding and working with the dog, gaining its trust and from there helping it learn to be a well-behaved dog that will not frighten friends and strangers who are scared of dogs. Unfortunately this effort and Donna’s good behaviour sometimes are overlooked because people already have preconceptions of how a dog should behave and being well-behaved is just not a part of it.
