I’ve never had an issue being alpha to a dog.
I learned so much about dogs when I was surveying residential property and had to enter every single back yard, of every single house that we surveyed, and measure the fence and distances from the fence to the corners of the house, sketch the exterior, measure slabs and patios, and so on.
Every dog can be beaten, and some of them easier than others, for one thing they give up, they will try to maintain guard dog duty posturing, but in time they just fade out and go lay down. I would sometimes spend a half hour measuring the outside of a fence if I could, and constantly keeping the dog reacting to me, then if he was real tough I might sit down on the ground against his gate, and smoke a cigarette or two, and then I would just confidently open the gate and walk in when I knew that he was used up.
Another thing I that I had to learn, was that they don’t know if you really belong there or not, so your confident body language can confuse the heck out of them when they think that they are ambushing you and going to lay down the law to you.
The truth is that there is a little grain of doubt in the dog, especially in it’s owner’s own yard, after all, they know that they can’t kill every friend of his who comes out of the patio door, so if your body language and attitude is right, you can almost see the confusion in their face, about whether you are supposed to be there... or not?
After dealing with many 100s of Houston dogs and their 6 foot wooden fences, it feels like mastery over a pretty simple beast that is trying to read YOU, to figure out what HIS role is, the dirty little secret about dogs is, they don’t really know with 100% certainty, what they are supposed to do.
People see them lunging at them with their vicious snarling faces, and they think that the dog is a completely focused machine, but he isn’t, he is just a dog, with limited intelligence, and a limited attention span.
I can’t tell you how many times the homes owners came home from work while we were just finishing up, and thinking that we were just starting, tell us how fortunate we were that they came home early, because their 1 or 2 or 3, or 4 Rottweilers, or pit bulls, or dobermans, etc would never let us in that back yard.
Great post!
That illustrates the power you can have over a dog!
You are right about the body language in regard to dogs-my neighbors who keep livestock also have huge scary-looking dogs to guard the place-the current dogs du jour are mastiffs and bullmastiffs, and even UPS just drops the packages at the gate if one of those dogs confronts them. When I go by while hiking, they never bother me, and a big gray one just about knocks me down when I visit her owner.
Our customers always take their dogs where they won’t bother me when I’m doing an estimate, or when we are working, which is very considerate, I think.
The only dog I’ve owned that was not on the bad/dangerous list was an Australian Shepherd-the others were German Shepherds and a Chow-one of the former appointed herself guard to my cub from the time the kid was about 3, and she did a fine job of it, too. Everyone who came to our house was terrified of our Chow-he was scary looking and big, but it was all show-he was a sweetheart. Huskies are even on that stupid bad dog list...