Why some pet photos make me nervous...

[Chris]

Annie Laurie used to do well with children until one little boy got on her last nerve by yanking her mouth open. She now doesn't trust children . Older ones can pet her on the back if we are there -- she's very happy with that -- but frankly, we just don't like to take the chance. We tell the rare child visiting, "Don't pet the little brown one -- she bites."

 

[Lunatic59]

Follow up re: Eric (son) and Pierre (husky).

Pierre was never an overly snappy dog, although there were a few incidents with some people who weren't very dog-savvy. Pierre was 3 when Eric was born and we made a special effort to make sure Pierre's routine did not change because of the baby. Eric was just something new in the house that didn't effect him, for the most part.

To Eric, Pierre was akin to a piece of furniture. He was just there. He never teased, poked or in any way was annoying to the dogs. But the time he was walking we had taken in Koti, who was a sheltie/pom mix. Pieere was 90 pounds and Koti was barely 15 soaking wet. Pierre was incredible tolerant of her puppy antics, too.

Most importantly, they were never EVER left alone together.

The roughest day of my life to that point was the day I had to take Pierre to be put down. He had a spinal condition that at 11 made him completely paralyzed in his hind end. Nothing the vet could do.

I don't think we properly socialized Pierre and that was our fault due mainly to inexperience with dog parenting. All our other dogs have had the benefit of what he taught us and we try to pass that on whenever we get the chance.

 

[Jess041]

Justicemom, I have a similar story, except the dog was our family border collie puppy! She was probably 12-13 weeks old, and it was a couple days before Christmas when I was 15. Our sheltie always reacted funny when you blew in her face, sneezed and would just do silly things. So I blew in this puppy's face and she would bite at your face. My dad had kept telling me to stop doing it, she didn't like it. I was clearly stupid. Did it one last time, I was holding her close enough to where her little puppy teeth got caught on the wire to my braces in between my two front teeth, and the wire pulled out about an inch and twisted in front of my teeth. It didn't hurt, but being that the orthodontist was closed for Christmas, my mom was out Christmas shopping, I was hysterical. My dad was soooo mad. Luckily our orthodontist had people on call, so we met an assistant there and she put everything back together. My dad made me feel so guilty about it. A few weeks later when I went to the orthodontist for a scheduled check-up, written in the top of my chart was "Dog pulled wire." He gave me a hard time about that for the next couple visits. He said it looked like it could be one of those joke newspaper headlines. I have never blown in that dog's face since.

One thing that makes me cringe at the dog park in when kids will just go up to strange dogs and wrap his arms around his neck and hug them. And he usually does this to the BIG dogs, he can't catch Missy to do it. I told him to stop the first time I saw him doing it, and somebody else (not related I don't think) said, "Oh, he comes here all the time." Really? You're really going to be ok with a child hugging dogs he doesn't know? What happens when the dog he's hugging whips around and bites him? And he didn't go there all the time, because that was only the second time I had seen him and I go there all the time!