Persistent
Posted: Sat 23 May, 2009 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Thoughts, Weirdness 4 Comments »And now, a question :
The scenario : You’re dropping off something (letter, bill, leaflet, whatever) at a house, and your child insists on putting it through the letter box. From inside the house, you can hear a dog going completely nutty, barking and barking at the people the other side of the door. (i.e. barking at you and your child) But your child is – for whatever reason – having real issues with getting the envelope through the letterbox.
So – the question…
Bearing in mind that the dog is going mental, and sounds really aggressive, would you keep on letting your child try to post the envelope, or would you take over, get the job done, and bugger off so that a) the dog could calm down and b) your child didn’t get their fingers nipped if they put them through the letterbox?
I’d hope that, if the dog’s owners had a dog likely to bite someone posting something through the door, they’d have a mesh box on the inside of the door to stop the dog biting the deliverer then chewing the letters up… Or, better still, have an external letter box.
If the dog were to bite the postman, Royal Mail would likely have a thing or two to say. Probably that they weren’t delivering there again until the door had been made secure.
Oh, am I missing the point? 😉
Yep, you are.
The dog doesn’t bite, but does bark like a loon and go mental.
I know you’ve talked about Hound’s problems before, and I am totally sympathetic to them. Plus I know nowt about dogs specifically as they are one of few domestic animals I have never had.
But, with my professional hat on, I have to congratulate the mother who persisted in getting her child to finish the posting task. Had she allowed/encouraged the child to ‘run away’ (leave the situation) because of the barking, she could very well have built up a very real phobia for that child for the rest of its life. This sort of phobia is very hard to extinguish.
Well, I’d say that it depends on how it’s done.
While I do understand the entire “let the child complete the task” thing, I suspect I’d probably have said something like “That dog’s being very noisy because it knows we’re on it’s property, so let’s put the letter through, and we’ll bugger off so she’s quiet again”, rather than enforcing/reinforcing the “fierce dog” bit.
And personally I’d say that running the chance of getting nipped by a fierce dog (which Hound isn’t, but sounds like she could be) would have far more phobia-inducing effects than the barking bit.