I invite you to make the following mental picture for the purposes of clarity in making this mental picture. When our children of say, 3-5, at a kids Birthday Party get rowdy and do a lot of screaming and yelling and running around, we resort to perhaps raising our voices telling them to stop, or perhaps take the worst offenders aside and give them a time out or use a miriad of other methods to slow them down and have calm and peacefulness return, don’t we?
Our K9 friends are not children, they are not human in nature, expression nor action! An excited dog pack does not have adults with time outs and yelling to sort out issues of high excitement, such as described above. When high levels of excitement develop within the pack, the dogs will commence to scrap and fight quite ferociously with each other. Anyone who has more than one dog knows that when the mail man arrives at the door, one dog will start the barking racing back and forth from the window to the door and any others will join in. Frequently, they will scrap amongst each other to be the first and the loudest in their quest to send the mail man away. Thus demonstrating to us that they believe success was theirs because the mail man did go away!
Is it any wonder then, that the mail man is at serious risk should these animals ever get access to the out of doors when the mail man (or other uniformed types) approach? This is just one very common even that replays itself out thousands of times a day, in every country world wide. The risk factor of serious injury to uniformed types of individuals approaching a residence with “pets” is enormous then is it not?
We as owners can no longer simply call out saying “Oh, he/she won’t hurt you, he/she is just excited to see you”. This in itself is a true statement, however, in our innocence or ignorance in the understanding of the ramifications of K9 excitement are placing innocent individuals at huge risk of physical harm ranging from inflicting fear to outright dog bites!
Look at the picture on the above. This dog does not even respect its owner, never mind “love” him. This dog is displaying typical pack leader ownership behavior. The alpha dog in the pack places him or herself on top of the underling in various manners depending on the situation. This dog has been “allowed” to overpower the owner and it may make choices in the future with others that can get him into very serious circumstances.
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