I'm paid to deal with dogs, not children!

[Primer]

My oldest dog (of 6) is a full blood Rat Terrier. She is now almost 11 years old. When she was young, we would take her with us to Civil War reenactments, primarily to help socialize her. For some reason, she never did like kids very much; we don't have any, and living out in the country, we have no neighbors, either, so she was rarely exposed to kids. I would have to hold her in my arms while she was getting petted, and I could feel her tense up when she'd had enough, and I would end the session before she
got too upset.

(edited to remove reference to my avatar--that's another dog---the Dachshund mix)

[Sapphire Silk]

My cousin had a rat terrier. It was a nasty dog, very poorly socialized. My cousin didn't know the first thing about training dogs, and babied the poor animal excessively. It was very defensive and overly protective of her. It bit my nephew who wasn't listening to both me and his mother tell him to stay away from the dog.

Stumps didn't like this dog, or the fact it was in HIS house. But he was a cool customer. He just sat on the floor staring at the little beast. When the dog went after Stumps, Stumps proceeded to kick his ass.

My cousin was not amused. She got hysterical, in fact.

I love my cousin. But I was glad when she went home and took the little rat with her.

[Seshat]

Our neighbourhood seems to be full of children who are reasonably well socialised about dogs. When Violet (our dog) is being walked, and we encounter children, the children almost always listen to the instructions about how to greet her, and how to pat her.

Thankfully Vi is small enough that if we do encounter an exception, we can just pick her up and walk away from the offending human.


But in general, they're very good about 'let her sniff the back of your hand' and 'okay, she seems happy - and she likes to be petted like this' (followed by a demonstration of Vi's favourite pats from strangers).

Vi does get fussy about how she's patted by strangers vs how she's patted by her family/pack. But she's a good girl and gives us plenty of signals for when she's ready to stop, so we can tell the kids that she's had enough.



Now for a horrible story...


When I was a kid, we had neighbours who were ... hm. Not the most effective at raising children. Let's just put it that way. They had friends who were even worse.

One of the children involved was a little girl called Summer. Probably somewhere around six or seven. And she wanted our persian cat. (no, not a purebred - a stray that adopted us.)

The children would jump the fence between our yard and theirs: the adults did have an agreement that with permission, we could use their swimming pool and they could use our swings and seesaw and cubbyhouse. But this was with the neighbour's own kids, not the kids of their friends - which didn't seem to matter.

So Summer was in and out of our yard one day, along with the other children that happened to be next door. And Mum realised that she hadn't seen our cat for a while. And had last seen him being held (badly) by Summer.

So she went next door to ask Summer if she'd seen him .... and Summer stood in front of the chest freezer and announced "He's not in here!"


.... of course he was. In the FREEZER.


Thankfully he'd not been in there long, and he was at least part-persian, with the long insulating fur. And was fine. But if Mum hadn't gone looking .....

[RootedPhoenix]

I do not know how I'd restrain myself from going hysterical. That is so...awful. Glad Kitty was okay.