>As when a family has children and dogs, the dogs need to understand that in
>the grander scheme of things, the children are more important than they are,
>and we feel this is the same for dogs and ferrets.  Just as I wouldn't allow
>my dogs to behave aggressively toward my children, nor do I allow them to
>behave that way to my ferrets.  So we make sure that they understand this
>right away.
 
A dog is incapable of understanding the grander schemes of things.  They can
only relate to things in terms of canine, not human, psychology.  Consider
the following hypothetical situation:
 
Your dogs and your children are lost in the desert alone and starving, and
by some miracle they find a cache of food.  What happens next?  Well, taking
a wild guess (said with a smirk), I think the food would disappear down the
dogs' throats!  They definitely would not stop to think, "Gee, my mom has
made me to understand that her kids are more important than me in the grand
scheme of things, so I better let the kids have the food." A canine can only
react in a way geared to his own specie's psychology, he cannot reason in
the way that his human might want him to reason.
 
While you can argue that a dog can be trained to let the child eat first,
this kind of training is situational, requires constant reinforcement, and
the presence of the alpha figure.  Even after all these conditions are met,
there is no such thing as 100 percent obedience, and when a dog is starving,
or in lots of pain, the rules are ignored.  That's why a dog that NEVER
bites become a dog that bites when he is struck by a car.  That's why even
the best-trained police dog still occasionally gets in the accidental bite.
Dogs are just dogs.
 
I have been told by a trusting canine mom that her dog would never, but
NEVER retaliate against anything her child did to him.  This same person
cannot comprehend that the same abuse could occur over 1,000 times and then
suddenly, on the 1,001 occurance, the dog decides that he's had enough, and
he SNAPS and the child is bitten and the dog is euthanized.
 
Or perhaps someone's German shepherd or pit bull has suddenly, for no
apparent reason, "turned" on his owner.  Meanwhile, the owner, who doesn't
understand the complexities of his pet's mental wellbeing, and what happens
inside a dog's mind when he experiences too much frustration, pent up
aggression, effects of repeated abuse, etc., claims that he wasn't treating
his dog any differently than how the dog was normally treated... the dog
just went crazy.  "Perhaps he got a brain tumor," the ignorant owner
surmises.
 
Does everyone remember Tyke the elephant?  Tyke went "mad" during a circus
performance, killed her trainer, assaulted several people, charged out of
the ring, ran down the street on a rampage, and was finally gunned down by
the local police.  Why did the elephant suddenly go "mad"?  Someone
suggested that her trainer (or the other guy) surprised her because she
didn't know he was behind her.  #$@Q%!@#!!!  What happened was that Tyke
spent several years being used for public entertainment, submitting to
various trainers and their training methods, and meanwhile her own personal
pychological needs were held in check.  The inhibitions that this elephant
possessed were tremendous... even the most patient and well disciplined
human being would never be expected to possess such qualities.  But, year
after year, because Tyke was not allowed to roam like a real elephant,
because she was kept in too small an enclosure, because she was trained at
the same time she was exercised, because she was not allowed to interact
freely with other elephants, and because she was not allowed to breed (a
female elephant has a psychological need to breed)... in other words her
deeper psychological needs were ignored year after year... the poor
elephant's psychological volcano finally erupted.  Yet... the entire time
(many years) that this volcano was simmering, a person that did not truly
understand elephants would have deduced that Tyke was stable, happy, and
healthy.  She wasn't.
 
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that animal-human relationships can
be very complex, that it's easy to make mistakes, and that many people who
claim to know what they are doing can be wrong.
 
-cadel
 
[Moderator's note: Yes, it *could* be ferret related, so I'm letting this
post stay, but I'd like to ask that we please not further diverge from the
topic of ferrets.  A couple of other posts today (not necessarily from
Cadel!) were indeed rejected for being too far off-topic.  BIG]
[Posted in FML issue 1837]