Treating your dog like a Human

You got a new puppy and you are so in love. Your dog is your child, your child with four legs that you will almost love or actually love more than your two-legged kids because your dog loves you no matter what you do or what you tell it or how bad you have failed and it doesn't talk back nor fail at school nor keep you up all night worrying about being a good enough parent and training them well enough to keep them from doing drugs or becoming something that is not good for them. Dogs are easy to love and we want them to be happy and we humanize them because we need them to love us in spite of our imperfections and failures and this is where we completely fail them!

STOP TREATING YOUR DOG LIKE IT IS A HUMAN. I have been practicing veterinary medicine for 25 years and never have I seen as many messed up dogs, and kids for that matter, as I do today. Your puppy that you love oh so much is a dog! It is not a kid, it is not human and it does not have rational thought. The more you treat your dog like a kid, the more you screw it up and make its life miserable because it is never going to understand later when you stop being able to make it the center of your world.

Dogs are pack animals, they like being in a pack and when you become their pack, their sole source of entertainment and company and never let them figure out how to just be a dog, you destroy not only them and their life but also yours because they become anxiety-ridden and destructive when you are not around them and then you are both miserable. The only difference is you can take your dog to the shelter for being destructive and go screw up another one but your dog can't ever learn how to be ok without having a human doing everything for them and they go from home to home to dead all because you could not let them be just a dog.

When you come into my office and tell me that your dog has separation anxiety, that is your fault. I am sorry, hate me all you want but that is the cold hard truth! You have caused that dog to depend on you and now you want freedom and they don't understand it and never will because you made yourself their everything and then you left them because you have a life outside of them but they have no life outside of you.

STOP treating your dog like a human! Stop being their entertainment, stop making everything about them. They are perfectly capable of creating their own fun and their own entertainment and being alone and being ok with being alone needs to be something they learn to do, just like your kid for that matter. We have stolen all coping development from not only our children but also our puppies and dogs by feeling sorry for them and doing everything to entertain them instead of letting them figure out how to entertain themselves and learning to cope with not getting everything they want or think they need.

If you do not want a miserable dog and a miserable you, stop being everything to your puppy. They are going to love you the same whether you do everything for them or let them figure it out on their own but you will grow to hate them if you make them dependent on you because they will destroy your house and your life because you get to move on and they do not.

Dogs do not need to be the center of your world to be happy, they just need to be a part of your world. Stop ruining their lives by making them something they can not be. Let them be a dog, let them figure out how to entertain themselves, don't let your world revolve around them when they are little and it is just fine if they are bored and in the corner taking a nap alone. Let your dog be a dog and you see a shrink to figure out why you feel the need to treat your dog like a human.

-Desert Cross Veterinary Hospital in Arizona