I’ve owned a dog training business for the last 20 years. My dad was a k9 officer since I was 3 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 don’t misunderstand me; it’s not like I keep her from ever interacting with dogs. That’s not the case at all. Any and every 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 pet him together. When we walk through the kennel, we approach each cage while I hold her hand, and she talks to the dogs through their kennel doors.
The 3rd word she said was, “DOG!”
There is no question she has the same love and passion that I have had towards 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 are not safe to 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 are capable of biting 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 when we play with the dog that means we sit with him calmly and pet him together, or she goes in her stroller, and he 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. Now is not the time to allow free range coexisting between them. I love them each too much to risk that.
