For Rottie and Bully Breed Owners in Illinois

Oh that's just pure bullshit. The DNA analysis has been done. (See National Geographic 2002 for a good treatment and citations of the original research.) The Pekinese is one of the first differentiated breeds, going back about 8,000 years. Hard to say what they were using it for in prehistory, but throughout thousands of years of recorded Chinese history it was nothing but a family pet. The Maltese goes back at least 3,000 years and it was also a house dog. In fact it was a palace dog: the Maltese has been derisively known as "the lap dog of the Roman empresses" practically forever.

Rottweilers were not originally bred to live inside houses but they were bred to be draft animals and therefore were expected to be as "trust"-worthy as horses.

Lhasa Apsos, my personal breed, go back at least a thousand years and they were bred not merely to live in houses but to live in Tibetan temples. You going to tell me that Buddhist monks didn't expect their dogs to be peaceful?

And I mentioned the Anatolian Guardian in my previous post, which has been bred for about 4,000 years. Muslims do not tolerate dogs that even touch people, much less harm them--even their enemies.

 

Oh, I just caught up with the rest of the posts. Indeed, any breed can be gotten to produce vicious dogs through bad breeding or bad rearing. Notwithstanding the pacifist history of Lhasa Apsos, during the 1970s American breeders got hold of them and started "puppy milling" them (breeding studs back to their own daughters) to meet the demand for "apartment dogs." As a result, in the 1980s more Americans were bitten by Lhasa Apsos than by Dobies or pitbulls. It's taken us 25 years to clean up the gene pool.

 

Geeze, do you people really accept Wikipedia as a reliable source? Wikipedia will allow you to post an entry! When I told my dentist I had seen an upsurge in anti-fluoridation articles on the internet he blew his top (I shouldn't have done this while he was working on me

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) and said, "The internet is a cesspool of writing that has not undergone peer review."

There is no bigger, more attractive cesspool of un-peer-reviewed writing on the internet than Wikipedia! Yeah, they have a peer review system, and yeah they honestly try to use it, but that doesn't mean that at least 25% of what's on Wikipedia at any given moment can't be at best innocently erroneous and at worst deliberately misleading. American universities are drafting a uniform code stating that Wikipedia will never be accepted as a source document in a college paper.

I and the other breeders I know use the term with a specific meaning. A "family dog" is a dog that is bonded more or less equally to every member of the family. He has no particular favorite, but enjoys the company of, accepts orders from, and gives his protection to, all family members indiscriminately.

Not all breeds are like that. When I was little my mother had a dog (a mongrel and I have no idea what breeds contributed to its genes) who barely tolerated my father and would actually bite me if I got too close.

Lhasa Apsos are an extreme case of "family dog." As soon as someone establishes himself as a member of the household, the Lhasa bonds automatically. We once hired a house sitter. After one day on the job our dogs started sleeping with her. We returned and she came over to visit one day and the dogs treated her like a stranger.

Of course Lhasa Apsos, having been temple watchdogs, have their own criteria for deciding whether someone can be accepted as a member of the household. They don't always correspond to yours, and you'd better get used to the fact that theirs are more accurate. Our first Lhasa absolutely hated my parents and we could barely stop ourselves from laughing when he growled at them, because we didn't think too much of them either. We let a tradesman do a long job for us once, and his standard pose in our house was limping around with a Lhasa Apso jaw clamped around his boot. Once again we should have taken our dog's advice: turns out he was a con man.

Hey, I can be pretty intolerant of small children myself. Sometimes they get so bratty that only their parent can love them. You have to understand that domesticated dogs see this as one big multi-species community. They treat our young the same way they treat their own: they believe it's their job as responsible elders to knock sense into them and help them grow up to be civilized. If they do something impertinent they get bitten. Dogs are very old-school, I mean like downright Neolithic. They don't believe in permissive parenting but they do believe in corporal punishment. They also play rough. I was bitten by a few dogs when I was a wee tad--very mildly but I got the message. I learned a very important lesson that a lot of today's kids don't learn until too late: it is possible to make somebody so angry that he will become physically violent.

That said, Maltese are probably the most docile dogs in the world. They are loving, playful, gentle, intelligent, curious, and have keen eyesight (for a dog anyway). And they have about a zero percent incidence of alpha behavior. You could cut their toes off one at a time and they wouldn't bite you. I need to see proof of a healthy Maltese ever getting bitchy with a child who didn't really, really deserve it. They've been used as performing circus dogs for centuries, they interact safely with strange children in excited, active situations routinely.

As I've stated, Rottweilers were originally draft animals and had a much different personality than the one that they've lately acquired. Because of their size, people have tried to turn them into guard dogs. It takes a long time, and I mean more than just a century or two, to change a peaceful dog's instincts into one who will attack only the people you want it to attack. People who think they can simply take a dog and train this kind of behavior into it are dangerous fools.

Lhasas are known throughout the dog world as "hard headed." They have a very high incidence of alpha behavior, which is what makes them comfortable being alone for long periods and therefore makes them good apartment dogs. But this also means that they don't get the idea of owner-and-pet. You're just a really nice roommate who buys all the food and they're just a really nice roommate who keeps the temple-looters at bay while you're at work. They do not take any crap from humans. You kick a Lhasa, he'll bite you every time he sees you for the rest of his life. You spank him, he'll take a whiz on your pillow. Small children can be unintenionally rough with small dogs. Lhasas are not unaware of that, but they believe it's their job to set the "little bastards" straight just as they do their own babies. We don't normally place our dogs in families with toddlers. Although I know some families who could really use a few.

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If you work with dogs you learn to understand them. They have body language just like humans, and they read the signals that we unconsciously send out. A dog doesn't stick his face in a strange dog's face, that's not how they introduce themselves! So it would be stupid for us to try it.

Most dogs (all but the breeds like Lhasa Apsos in which every single dog regards himself as a pack leader) are extremely pack-oriented. If you're an outsider to the pack (whether that's an actual dog pack or a human family of which he's a member), then you simply can't expect to be accepted as a friend immediately. You have to be formally accepted by whoever he regards as his pack leader, or at least by one of the top lieutenants. You're better off to concentrate your attention on the owner or on the alpha dog in the pack, then work your way down the hierarchy.

Sure some dogs will warm to you immediately, but just because that happens three times out of four doesn't mean that the fourth time won't be a really tough lesson in dog pack dynamics for you.

If a dog doesn't act obviously eager to be your friend, then the best thing to do is to run the relationship on his terms instead of yours.

 

Humans have been living with dogs for about 13,000 years, since the late Mesolithic Era, when we were still living in tribal communities that were wary of each other. We learned to get along with dogs before we learned to get along with other people! As I have posted on several other threads at greater length, I believe that the pleasant shock to our belief system of learning that we were capable of caring about and living peacefully and cooperatively with "people" who weren't even of the same species and who couldn't even speak gave us the impetus we needed to learn to do the same with people who merely had different skin colors, languages, gods, and attitudes.

If that first human tribe and that first wolf pack (DNA analysis proved that wolves and dogs are a single species) in what is now China hadn't decided to try to complement each other's skills and hunt together, I wonder if we would ever have invented civilization and learned to care about people on the other side of the planet who are nothing more to us than abstractions.

The first dogs were self-domesticated. The ones who didn't like the idea of hanging around with humans simply stayed away. The ones who thought that eating an occasional baby human was easier than hunting didn't survive. The ones who didn't accept humans as the alphas--the pack leaders--went through a few rites of passage, but if they didn't straighten out they were eaten.

Domestic dogs did not bite people, much less try to kill them. It was simply not a survival trait. Thirteen thousand years is a lot of dog generations, you can bet that that particular psychological trait was selectively bred out of the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris a long time ago. First it was by culling: killing off the untrustworthy individuals so they didn't reproduce. Later, after we started practicing animal husbandry, it was by deliberately breeding the most respectful individuals to each other.

What went wrong? Why do we now seem to have an epidemic of dogs that attack humans?

For starters, I wonder if it really is an epidemic. There are about as many dogs on this planet as people. There are bound to be a sprinkling of individuals who are psychotic, insane, brain-damaged, abused, or throwbacks to their wolf ancestors. These days the media focus almost exclusively on bad news and they have the unerring ability to find it anywhere. Just how many killer dogs are there? I suspect it's a lot less than the number of humans who have been convicted of murdering each other. The media flout statistical methods and urge us to believe that the tragic and tawdry images they throw in our faces are representative samples of life--because frightened people pay more attention to news and increase the media's profits and influence.

I've been on this globe for more than sixty years, and when I was a kid nobody got killed by a dog. Not counting the idiots who teased junkyard dogs or tried to escape from police dogs and even they were seldom actually killed by the dogs. This is a recent phenomenon, something that's popped up in the last 25 years. People in the inner cities want man-eating dogs for protection. Rappers and gangbangers want man-eating dogs as status symbols. Dogfighting is a booming sport and as with any popular activity that's pushed underground (like drugs), safety and quality are not top concerns.

Dobies, rotties, pitbulls, Presa Canarios, all the dogs that have the temperament and the prowess to become killers... their bloodlines have fallen into the hands of opportunists, antisocial types, psychopaths, militiamen, and other people with little skill, less patience, and no scruples.

For the better part of the last 13,000 years humans did not want our dogs to fight each other to the death. When these one-percenters decided to make a sport out of it, they had to reverse a fundamental trait in the animal's basic personality, one that had been selected for since prehistory. This is not easy, to put it mildly. It can't be accomplished in a few generations.

Since we've also ingrained in dogs the instinct that humans and canines are a single multi-species community, in many ways they regard humans and other dogs in the same light. If you teach them that it's okay to kill dogs, it's a pretty subtle distinction to say that it's not also okay to kill humans.

As a dog lover with a sense of history and destiny, I would not be terribly disturbed if the people who have been trying to develop killer dogs were rounded up and dumped into the sea with their dogs. This is a Frankenstein thing. Dogs love us, dogs risk their lives for us, they will starve to death before they will regard us as food, they will allow the perverted among us to abuse them without fighting back. They protect our livestock, our children, and our other pets against predators. They put up with all of our crap and all they ask for in return is our companionship. In many ways they're better "people" than we are.

For someone to try to turn them into killers--of either dogs or people--is beyond sick. It's downright Evil. We shouldn't be euthanizing killer dogs. We should be following them home and euthanizing their owners.