My friends are having babies.
And putting their babies very close to their dogs. Too close.
Their babies are being babies - screaming at things, grabbing, touching anything near them.
Including the dog.
And then they are putting photos and videos of these interactions on social media and getting hundreds of likes because of how cute it is.
It's not cute. It's dangerous.
Young children to a certain age don't understand boundaries or body language in people, let alone dogs.
Dog attacks in young children continue to occur because these kinds of interactions are promoted as cute and "clickbait".
If you have a kid and young children, educate yourself on signs of stress in dogs. Constantly supervise children. Don't let small children interact too closely with dogs. Educate children on respectful ways to interact with dogs.
Don't feed this massive pile of misinformation that's currently trending on social media.
It does not matter how child-tolerant or even child-social your dog is. Closely supervise every interaction.
My first dog absolutely adored small children and babies. He’d army crawl and whine towards strollers. While I was in college, my grandparents let my dog live with them. My uncle(derogatory) used to go over every day and he’d bring his 8 month old baby with him. And my cousin would play with my dog.
Then one day, after a month of this, I got an irate call from my uncle demanding I euthanise my dog because he was vicious and going to hurt my cousin. I refused and demanded to know in turn just what the fuck had happened because Aussie loved kids and if Uncle was supervising their appropriate interactions everything should have been just fine.
Well, turns out that my uncle’s ideas of ‘supervising’ was ‘sitting 20 feet away in the living room’ and his idea of ‘appropriate interactions’ was... allowing my cousin to dig his razor sharp baby nails into my dog’s face, ears and around his eyes. And that day, after a *month* of putting up with this, Aussie had slightly lifted a lip and growled at my cousin.
Aussie was 60 pounds of catahoula and lab, with an enormous prey drive for any non-human mammal 30 pounds and under. Anything that ended up in his jaws was dead in seconds because he would shake them in a figure 8 while pivoting on his hips. The width of the shake was roughly 5 feet and he would do this at prodigious speed. Necks and spines snapped instantly.
If my dog had wanted my cousin dead, there is absolutely no way my uncle could have protected his son when he was sitting 20 feet away. And if my dog had been even an iota less tolerant, my cousin could have been severely injured or killed. And Aussie’s level of tolerance was inordinately high, most dogs couldn’t begin to approach how much he loved kids and yet if I’d had kids while he was alive I would still have never left them alone with him. It’s not safe.
Do not let your kid sit on a dog, ever. Do not let them pull on faces or ears or tails or grab skin. Hold their hand or wrist while they are petting the dog to enforce ‘gentle’. And always, ALWAYS, be physically right there to intervene.
