Petiquette - Are you a "good boy or girl"?

As a pet owner and animal lover, I am just one of the 10 million Indians trying to be a "good girl". This number has its source in the India International Pet Trade Fair in 2014 and the number is growing with 6,00,000 pets being adopted/bought every year. That is heartening to know but the question that begs our attention is this.

Are we ready to adopt the best practices in pet ownership?

According to training professionals, “India is anywhere between two or three decades behind the west in pet ownership culture.”

Frankly, I am not surprised since my personal experience concurs with training professionals and I am referring to the educated and rich lot of people who can afford to keep a pet dog.

Love for a dog doesn’t always translate into responsible ownership. In fact, most people in India do not relate to seeing a dog as a companion. It’s hard for most to see a four-legged domesticated being as anything but an animal. The horror at equating a dog to a human pops up in my head when I recall my cousin being nagged by relatives to find a companion. To everyone’s shock, she expressed her preference to investing in a four-legged dog over a two-legged human being. I also have friends who made the decision of raising dogs over human babies and I totally get it.

It may be an alien concept to most, even dog owners. But the impact of keeping a pet dog on one’s overall well being is multi-fold.

“There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.” – Ben Williams

Our tail wagging, ball fetching, dirt digging, squirrel chasing furry companions are usually our protectors and our best friends and the strong bond between dogs and humans has been around for centuries.

But the cultural practice of keeping a pet dog to provide companionship rarely exists in India. Is it because we consider owning a pet dog, a trophy? Or is it our religious sentiments that see dogs as filthy creatures? Or we regard them as lesser beings, incapable of matching our superior intelligence?

Whatever the reason, the absence of seeing a pet dog as a companion and pet ownership culture can be found almost everywhere, when:

“We treat barking at odd hours normal!”

Apply this to your human companion. Would you encourage or ignore your two-legged partner to burst out in screams or howls in the middle of the night? It would be treated as a sign of madness or a malady that needs your immediate attention. If your partner is “ooing” and “ahing”, you can comprehend these incoherent expressions as a sign of discomfort, pain or just plain ramblings. They don’t sound music to your ears so you try and address it. It takes a different kind of understanding to decipher your pet dog because unlike your human partner in discomfort, who can tell you to “bugger off” or “call a doctor” or “get me my pills” your four-legged pooch speaks in dog Morse code or Enigma. So unless you are trained and keen on learning dog speak, there is little chance of displaying responsible dog ownership under the lame excuse of “he is a dog and will bark/howl!”

“We treat their poop as manure and don't pick it up!”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Dog’s have a high protein based diet that creates a very acidic excrement or waste product. It is not a fertilizer. In fact dog’s feces contain millions of bacteria, and could also contain parasites that could infect humans with diseases like Parvo, hookworms, giardia, roundworms and trichinosis. It also takes a long time to fully break down, so a single pile of poop could be sitting in your yard for an entire year if it isn’t disturbed.

“We lock away dogs when we have visitors!”

You wouldn’t do that to your human partner unless they are raving mad, in which case you are better off sending them to an asylum. It’s a safe heaven because they won’t be of any harm to themselves or others. By that logic you shouldn’t keep a pet dog either because you have defaulted on your responsibility of depriving them of proper socialization.

“We give-in to our child’s desire of having a puppy!”

Would you have a child for the same reason? I hope not! Even if you did, would you leave the newborn to be attended to by your toddler? I don’t think so. For those of you finding these questions preposterous, let me enlighten you. A dog’s mental maturity can be compared to a two-year old human. Hence, the need for timely training, supervision and repetitive discipline is the difference between a well-mannered pet and an ill-mannered one. The problem is not the pet but in your inability to raise a “good boy/girl”.

“We don’t establish hierarchy!”

Like children need a good role model to look up to, dogs need a leader. If you are someone who jokes about your pet dog “having a mind of its own” or “a rebellious teenager” or “being moody”, chances are you have not established yourself as the leader. Dogs are hardwired to be pack animals with well-defined pack hierarchy. So if you don’t establish yourself as the leader of the pack, the pet dog will assume that leadership role which translates into all the above jocular sentiments expressed by you. But jokes apart, it is a serious concern when the only way you can control your pet is by locking or muzzling him or her. Imagine having to do the same to your human pet! Ludicrous, right! Negative reinforcement works on humans and dogs to desist from repeating unwanted behavior. The only difference is that we have to be more consistent with dogs since they are creatures of habit and it takes much more effort and commitment to break a dog’s bad habit if we have failed to establish ourselves as the leader.

“We expect the world to follow the “love me; love my dog” philosophy!”

“He is very friendly”, “She doesn’t bite”, “Tail wagging means he likes you”, “Go ahead, pet her”. As all model Indians we like to show-off our miniature copies, human or pet. “Show aunty your dance”, “Recite your favorite poem” and it goes on and on ad nauseam while the guests can only suffer in silence. So the next time you throw your canine pet in to the company of others, expecting it to perform, please read your dog’s body language and prevent yourself from embarrassment or something worse. The rules of engagement are very clear in the dog’s mind; it’s you who are confused and unfamiliar about a dog’s way of dealing with new/strange smells and body signals. A wagging tail is not always a sign of “I am approachable”. Dogs view the act of petting their head a display of dominance and can act out to resist it. Sniffing butts and private parts is their version of a handshake. Staring at a dog makes it uncomfortable as much as it makes humans feel intimated. Showing aloofness should be respected and maintaining a healthy bodily distance is a dog’s way of communicating, “I am not interested”. So don’t force the dog or human to meet and greet just like you sometimes wish to not acknowledge someone you see. It’s wiser to take care of your broken heart than a broken bone or your bruised ego than an actual bruise.

“We put the cart before the horse!”

We make decisions related to our life, career, marriage, finance etc. with utmost care and after due diligence. We also follow a certain order in doing things. Conventional wisdom says to marry and then raise a family. I have nothing against people who choose to have children regardless of their relationship status. Regardless of the status, the child needs to be well fed, clean, comfortable and loved. We don’t hear often of a mother clueless of breast milk or the natural act of a baby pooping and peeing. So it shouldn’t be rocket science to prepare oneself mentally, physically, emotionally and financially before bringing a pup home. Yet, I hear many dogs in my complex whining and howling through the day because they have not been adequately fed food or water or left out in the balcony for extended periods of time because someone at home is allergic to dog dander or managed by the house help because cleaning-up after them is gross or worse, abandoned because they are not suited to their owner’s lifestyle. My reaction is a combination of shock at the lack of preparation by humans and despair for the voiceless dog. Call me judgmental, but it’s disgraceful to not educate and prepare yourself before bringing a pet dog home.

“We anthropomorphize dogs!”

Dogs can make the best of companions/friends but that doesn’t make them human. Wearing matching hoodies to putting nail polish maybe cute but can cause unnecessary distress to the animal. The worse effect of anthropomorphism is explaining dog behavior on human terms, because this inhibits our true understanding of our pet. A small example is of dressing up dogs in clothes. Since the dog cant talk, there is no way to tell if he/she is uncomfortable in being dressed-up, we assume he/she is okay until we educate ourselves to understand its body language and signals. Failure to accurately see them as what they are can hugely diminish the possibility of knowing what they want or need setting them up for dire consequences like getting hurt or sick or worse, being labeled “aggressive”. It also increases our fallacy of predicting their behavior which is a recipe for disaster.

The raison d’etre for my soliloquy is the huge backlash, committed and responsible pet owners face due to a large number of negligent and irresponsible dog owners. It’s bad enough to live with humans who consider themselves more entitled than all other species in the world and dog related incidents compounds this mindset. It leads to unnecessary conflict between neighbors. For every small step pet owners take in enabling peaceful coexistence, an accident or incident, puts us back to square one.

For all the people who claim to be dog lovers, it is not enough to shower love at your convenience. After all, you wouldn’t do that to your human child so why do it to a dog who has a short life span but a huge capacity to follow your lead. Sometimes I feel that there should be an exam that one needs to pass before becoming a parent of a human or dog. But it is only an imagination like Plato’s idea of an ideal state – theoretical and extreme.

So I come back to what is doable – our ability to care for another species like our own without humanizing it. Respecting the uniqueness, knowing the purpose and need of a dog. Then and only then bring a pup into your world.