Should Strangers Pet Your Dog in Public?

I'm Dale Buchanan, and this is Puppy Talk, the podcast that offers free advice and tips for raising a happy, healthy, and obedient puppy. For more information on this podcast, visit us online at puppytalkpodcast.com. Welcome to Puppytalk episode number 141. I'm your host, Dale Buchanan. Today I'm going to talk about an important topic. Should you let strangers pet your dog in public? The answer may surprise you, and the information I have in this podcast may be some of the most important information you've received about your dog in a long time. First of all, there are no rules in dog training that says that we're going to train your dog to be pet by a lot of different people unless they're training to be a therapy dog. My dog Dixie is a therapy dog, and she is highly trained and skilled to sit with people who are sick, who have terminal diseases, and give them love and affection by letting them pet her. She's six and a half years old. She is a calm, zen, very well-behaved dog, and I worked for a long time to get her in this state so that she can be a therapy dog and give that healing energy to people. However, I see a lot of people bring their puppies and dogs in public and they let everybody pet them and everybody touch them. And sometimes those dogs can get uncomfortable. They can have stress and anxiety and fear, and they can even get aggressive and snap at people. This is not something you want to teach your dog or puppy. To answer the question whether people or strangers should be petting your dog in public, the answer is no. They don't have to do that. Even when we test dogs for the AKCK9 Good Citizen, which is a very high-level set of social skills, for your dog to be doing pretty much anything in a public setting, the petting for the dog while they're sitting is done by the evaluator, who's the dog trainer, not by a stranger in public. We don't want the dog jumping on people, we don't want the dog nipping people, we don't want the dog being aggressive towards people if they get uncomfortable. And this is why we do that. Because even with dog training, even when dogs are going through a training program and they're being tested for the AKC canine good citizen, things could still happen. Things that you don't want could still happen. Here's what we teach dogs in our obedience program. We teach basic commands with vocal and hand signal. We teach the owners to learn how to control unwanted behavior such as jumping, barking, chewing, and play biting. We teach leash training, which is loose leash walking. We teach socialization skills. And these socialization skills are not being pet by everybody in public and being nice to every dog that they see. Socialization means that your dog can go in public and not be affected by the distractions, such as noises and sights and different floor textures and different temperatures and things like that. In other words, we take dogs to Home Depot and Lowe's and home improvement stores where they're introduced to sliding doors that move very fast, like forklifts, pallet jacks, flatbeds, shopping carts, or in the South they call them buggies, to a lot of different people and a lot of different announcements and music in the background. The dogs have to learn to be desensitized to these things and learn to cope with those types of distractions in public situations. We also take dogs to outdoor malls and to bass pro shops, or in some states it's called cabellas, where there's a lot of stuffed animals on the wall and a big fish tank and a lot of commotion going on. When a dog is exposed to this amount of stimuli and distractions, they may be uncomfortable in the first place. So allowing perfect strangers to come pet your dog may be a liability. I've recently had several dogs that I've worked with who went to public places and they got very uncomfortable by growling and doing air snaps and so forth and lunging towards people. And that's just not appropriate. There's no rule in dog training that says that people or children must pet your dog. Nothing. You don't even need to worry about it. I love these vests that say, dog in training, do not pet. Even though some people may ignore them, they're great things to have on your dog while they're in training. When people want to pet puppies that we have in public, we tell them, no, he or she is not very comfortable. They're in training. And the people back off, oh, okay. And kids run up to dogs often and want to pet dogs in public, not even thinking twice about it. The parents need to keep these kids back from any dog that they don't know or have not been previously introduced to. In addition, the dog has to be very calm when being introduced to somebody new, and they have to be on a leash and they have to be under control. If they're not under control and they're hyper, then they don't get interaction with anybody, period. Safety is number one when it comes to dogs in public. You don't want to have to walk around with a muzzle on your dog because they have shown aggression to people that make them uncomfortable in stores that they've never been. Think about the dog to begin with. They're going into a public location that they've never been. There's a lot of people in the store, there's a lot of cars in the parking lot, there's a lot of distractions, there's a lot of potential triggers that could throw them off. What you want to do is put them in a downstay, have them relax, have them decompress, have them learn to bring it down a few notches. They don't need to be interacting with a lot of different people. They need to learn to go to the stores, lay down, watch, and do nothing. This is the skill set for a high level of socialization. I can tell when a puppy or a dog is really getting it. When we take a dog to the store and I'm talking to the owner or I'm talking to a bystander who's watching the training session and they are asking questions about the dog, and the dog lays down voluntarily on their own, this is a good sign. This means that the dog is getting what socialization actually is. When we are with them in public and we are shopping or talking to somebody, the dog stays out of the way. They're not demanding attention, they're not getting jealous, and those types of things. So, in review, like I said, unless you have a trained therapy dog that has been highly trained to be interacting with people and allows the people to pet them, then your dog does not go in public and be pet by anybody under any circumstances. To add to that, what I learned from taking Dixie through therapy dog training is that the pets are not for the dog. The pets and the affection are for the people. So the dog could care less if they get pet or not. They'll rather go to the socialization training, go to the field trip, come home and get a belly rub from their owners. I hope this information was helpful to you. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me through the website at puppytalkpodcast.com. Have a great day.