Bluh. Recently got a more-or-less untrained dog foisted on the house people. Somewhat leash trained, sorta' housebroken, and that's about it. I... don't really have the energy or baseline give-a-damn-about-the-dog to really do what needs to be done on that front so far as attention and effort goes, to make sure it's trained enough it's not going to mess up the house or charge off and get itself run over and/or maimed by the neighborhood cats (this is not a very large dog, it's mostly been a house dog, and as near as I'm aware by itself in that realm. The strays around here will fuck this dog up if it tries to have a go at them, and whoever had it last didn't break it of chasing behavior to even the least of degrees). Doing what I can, but the animal needs the sort of consistency I can't really manage, particularly when there's other people involved that's, well. Old. And already settling in on insisting to do stuff that reinforces bad behavior the dog came to us with. For folks that have never worked with animals in any capacity, it is a complete motherfucker to train an animal when it's regularly interacting with people that incentivize/allow behavior you're trying to stop. Consistency of treatment is absolutely integral to inculcating desired behavior in animals in general and dogs in particular. There's more leeway once the behavior's been more or less ingrained, but for the process getting there, there's very much not much leeway.
It's... not a good combination, in the sense of I'm not sure the dog's lifespan is going to be very long if it stays here. Probably going to see if I can talk someone into sending the thing to obedience training of some sort, but I don't know how much that would actually help, long run wise. Usually better than half the problems a dog has is problems the owner has, and in this case they're problems that might not be able to be addressed.
Alternate (much, much better, but the lot of us here in general and me in particular got no warning it was coming and no consultation on whether it was wise to begin with) idea is to try to convince the other-family that brought the animal that the people here really need a both a different breed of dog, and one that's well trained and coming from a untroubled background.* Pretty doubtful that'll be on the table, unfortunately.
* This one has very clearly been hit before, and hit by something and not just by hand, ferex. Don't really think it was abuse, per se, just a kinda' piss-poor previous owner. Some folks -- usually the same sort that are casually accepting of corporal punishment for kids, tbh -- don't quite understand the problems involved with causing a pet pain in an attempt to change its behavior.
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Topic: Things that made you mildly upset today thread (Read 859932 times)