I don’t know if it’s just me, but every time I take my 12 lb small dog out for a walk and we come across another small dog, the other owner discourages the dog from socializing and keeps on walking. I can understand if their dog is intimidating, big, or dangerous. But surely, you can let your chihuahua or pug and my dog sniff each other for 30 seconds just to say hello.
I don’t want to misunderstand anything, so I’m hoping there’s a good reason for this. I do take him to our local dog parks to socialize with other dogs, but there’s something neighborly about letting our dogs say hi, and it makes me sad that it’s not a thing anymore.
Any thoughts on this are welcome. Thanks!
My personal experience is that small dogs tend to be absolute monsters far more often than big dogs. That’s not because they’re less trainable but more just because they’re small enough that many bad behaviors are ignorable so bad owners don’t bother to correct them. A lot of the people I know who have small dogs couldn’t train a dog to save their life so they got a dog small enough that they could just call the bad behaviors cute rather than actually doing something about them. If a big dog gets agressive towards every other dog they meet, you kind of have to fix that issue very quickly or completely stop taking them on walks in public. But with small dogs, a lot of people seem perfectly content to let them be agressive towards every other dog they meet and rely on the physically larger dogs being well trained enough to not retaliate.
Of course none of that is to say that you’re one of those bad owners. It doesn’t sound like you are anyways. But it’s for those reasons that I would be perfectly content letting my dog socialize with a larger dog someone was walking but I would sooner cross the street than walk past a smaller dog with them.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I never thought of it that way. I guess I’m spoiled, we adopted our dog when he was 10 years old, so he outgrew any naughty behaviors. lol
I have a small dog. It’s very clever and well trained, but it’s still an aggresive asshole.
The issue is that it’s difficult to socialize small dogs to begin with, when all the other puppies are quadruple the size.
We try it sometimes, when she seems interested in other dogs, but it always ends up the same with her getting scared and aggressive for no particular reason.
It might be easier if I had had an older dog to begin with or something.
She’s not aggressive against humans at all though.