I’ve owned a dog training business for the last 20 years. My dad has been a K9 officer since I was three years old. I have practically been around dogs my entire life!
I love dogs, I love training dogs, and I love sharing my life with dogs. But I refuse to share my daughter with the dogs I have grown to love my entire life. Please understand me; it’s not like I keep her from ever interacting with dogs. That’s not the case at all. Any interaction she has with a dog is 100% supervised and controlled by me.
My competition dog Genghis adores the attention he gets from her when she’s sitting on my lap, and we put him together. We approach each cage while I hold her hand when we walk through the kennel, and she talks to the dogs through their doors.
The 3rd word she said was, “DOG!”
There is no question she has the same love and passion that I have had for dogs my entire life. Why wouldn’t I want to share with her the same joy and love that has filled my heart?
The answer is simple: she is a baby, soon to be a toddler. Dogs and babies cannot coexist without the parent or an adult supervising every detail. The reality of this hits too close to home for me, being in the field of dog training.
Dogs can bite a baby, and babies are too young to understand how to treat the family dog. My barely one-year-old grabs, pinches, pulls, falls on, and stumbles daily. This unpredictableness creates unnecessary stress for my dog.
Instead, I am teaching my daughter that when we play with the dog, we sit calmly and pet him together, or she goes in her stroller and walks next to her. Anything more at this point in either of their lives creates anxiety for me. A dog is too powerful to correct a baby, and a baby is too fragile to learn through a dog’s correction. There is a better time to allow free range coexisting between them. I love them each too much to risk that.
