My mom adopted a stray Chow Chow. She seemed to like it, and it took to her.
She drove it to the vet to get its shots, have a check-up, etc.
Dog was cool until the moment they got into the vet’s office, at which point it tried to kill the vet’s assistant. It took everyone in the office and my mom to properly restrain the dog.
My mom decided that, yeah, putting it down was the only sane move at that point.
This basically reflects my opinion/experience. I’ve only owned a few types of dogs (goldens, mutts, dauchsunds), but I love dogs and have known many dogs of many breeds. Some breeds, like goldens and wheatens, I’ll say I’ve never met one that was an unpleasant dog. Chow is about the only breed I’ve met more than a few of, of which I’ve had an overall negative reaction to the breed. The best ones I’ve met have been standoffish, the worst, aggressive.
Usually I’ll make a point of contacting with just about any dog I meet - havemet some lovely giant schnauzers, akitas, dobes, rotts, pits… But not chows. The only message I send them is that I’m not afraid of them and not threatening them. But I am a little more aware around them than with other dogs.
The way it’s been explained to me by my vet and dog trainers I’ve known over the years is that the nature-vs-nurture debate is often misunderstood, in that there are different types of aggressive behavior in dogs. Basically, as I’ve heard it, dog breeds have varying mixes of people-aggressiveness, other-dog-aggressiveness, and prey-aggressiveness–although I’m also told that a dog that’s very aggressive in one category can be trained to be across-the-board aggressive very easily. Most of the smaller terrier types are quoted as being highly prey-aggressive so they fixate on small scurrying things, like toddlers, and quick movements. Most of the dogs that are percieved as vicious are highly other-dog-aggressive, like Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, and Dobermans. I’ve often been told that the only breed that has person-aggressiveness as a breed-trait is the chow chow.
Again, it’s all hearsay, albiet from several knowledgable sources.
I know a few veterinary practices that will not see certain breeds. Although the list varies, it always includes Chows and Rotties. Personally, I see a few Chows, and none of those can be trusted. The breed that is #1 IME for unprovoked aggression is the Akita.
I’d heard that as well - tho my good buddy has a sweetheart of an akita, it is the only one I know well. Perhaps it is so sweet to me because it senses how comfortable my buddy and I are together. And it’s tough to generalize from a sample of 1.
Punchline, the akita beat the crap out of a neighbor’s chow that dug its way under the fence and into the akita’s yard. The neighbor got all pissed at my friend, even tho it was his dog that dug into my friend’s yard, and my friend had previously warned him about his dog’s digging.
We have a chow-husky mix.
I love that dog, but she just doesn’t act like most other dogs. She’s very quiet and aloof. She really has a personality more like a cat than a dog. She’s a dainty eater.
One thing about groomers. Chows are notoriously aggressive, but they also have the most difficult coats to work with. Our chow is like a sheep, when she sheds you can literally (I mean literally literally, as in, the literal definition of literal) pull off huge handfuls of fleece from her coat. And she gets dreadlocks all over. The only way to really groom them would be to shave her completely. Combing her out is impossible, since her hair felts so much. We content ourselves with cutting off her dreads and pulling out loose fleece. But I have to just about sit on top of her or she’ll run away rather than be groomed.
She likes some people…if you’re a manly outdoor man she’ll take an instant liking to you. She doesn’t care for other dogs though, especially other females.
Uh, yeah, if I would beat the crap out of YOU for doing what your dog did, I got no problem with my dog whipping up on your dog for doing it.
Maybe it has to be with their distrust of strangers, but I’ve heard and have personal experience of chow chows being racist against people not of the same race as their owner.
My personal experience was of a dog that belonged to the mother of a black friend of mine. That dog did not like white people, and would snarl and bark at me and other white friends of the owner. I’ve heard of people training their dogs to be distrustful of certain races, but chow chows seem to pick it up naturally.
Regarding the “coiled bamboo in the stomache” thing:
I’ve never heard that anyone used this on domesticated dogs. I’ve read somewhere that this was used as a substitute for poison – coiled sharpened bamboo was placed in food that the prey wiould eat. In the syom,ache, it uncoiled and pierced the syomach, eventually killing the beast. Without looking into it further, I find it hard to credit – the probability of swallowing a large bamboo “spring” unmasticated seems small.
the same device showed up in the TV movie Judge Dee and the Haunted Monastary, one of my favorite TV movies, made by Nicholas Meyer before he turned to Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. One character commits suicide by ingesting soup filled with such coiled bamboo shoots. In this case, you have the cooperation of the victim, so it seems more plausible. It’s not in the Robert H. Van Gulik book the film is based onm, though. In that, the characterdoesn’t commit suicide at all, but is simply pushed off a staircase.
I am not a fan of chow chows either. I have gotten more chow chows snapping at me than pitbulls and rottwielers.
I don’t mind akitas though.
I I certainly could have read about it somewhere else too, and mixed my stories.
But dogs, especially hungry ones, don’t masticate their food. Not really. And the device could easily be small. But I do have some doubt about the tale, mostly because of what I see as possible racial undertones. Also, it simply doesn’t make sense. A simple, and undetectable, snip would be more effective I think.
But who knows, eh?
Wow, me too! I was a vet tech many years ago and handled all kinds of dogs - disoriented, in pain, scared, etc. I was never bitten by a dog. Usually dogs give you a warning of some kind. The ONLY time I was ever bitten by a dog was when I was standing in the living room of a friend’s house and her chow walked quietly up behind me and bit right through my hand. A neighbor of mine had a friendly, gentle chow. But the one that bit me - that was one mentally ill dog. Of course my friend loved the hell out of that dog and had all kinds of excuses for this “unexpected” event.
It’s interesting to read here that others have had the same experience with chows.
Seems like a crazy story to me.
First of all, wouldn’t it be easier to just have a local vet neuter the dogs before shipping them. And you can be sneaky about it – instead of the normal removal of the male dog’s testicals, do the equivalent of a vasectomy on the dog. A dog that arrives healthy & well, but just mysteriously fails to produce any pups will cause a lot less talk.
(As I recall, the first pair of panda bears obtained from China in the 1970s for the Washington DC National Zoo failed to reproduce for several years, and eventually a careful vet exam showed the Chinese government had had them ‘fixed’ before shipping them to the USA.)
Secondly, there would almost certainly be evidence left from the ‘bamboo stake in stomach’ method. Generally, buyers pay only for live delivery. When the dog died in transit, there would be a fight about payment, and either the buyer or the shipping company would certainly have an autopsy done. This would quickly reveal the bamboo stake, and recriminations would soon follow. The seller would likely not get paid the remaining amount, and probably would be widely attacked in the dog-importing community – enough to kill off any future sales.
Finally, people who spend their lives breeding dogs generally do so because they like dogs. They’re not likely to do something like this, which would cause a dog they raised from a pup to die slowly and in pain while in transit on a ship, with no vet available to help them. Not any dog breeder that I’ve ever met, no matter what country they’re from!
Yes, there is. Get a different dog!
I’m sure minority folks, especially those who have been attacked by chows in the past, will be happy to oblige.
I shouldn’t be so insensitive. God knows, I’ve had pets that offended almost everybody in the world but me. But I still get annoyed when I run into pet owners who are in complete denial about the obnoxiousness of their animals. That being said, I had a crazy Australian shepherd who was a bad racist. She would growl at black people, Chinese people and anybody else who wasn’t white or Hispanic. If we met someone on the sidewalk who was black - and especially if that person were afraid of dogs anyway - she went nuts and there wasn’t any way to stop it. Even after she became friends with one black guy, all other black people were suspect to her. I just had to try to keep her away from them, which was no fun.
Not racially based canine bias, but -
When I was in college I had a wonderful big yellow mutt.
Made friends with everyone - welcome in homes, stores, etc.
One day he was with me (unleashed - as always) when I was picking up my check at the liquor store where I worked, and I was astonished to see Bowser take off like a shot at the door, snarling like a crazed beast. He trapped the mailman behind the glass door.
(A sharp, “Bowser, don’t be an idiot” was enough to bring him back to his senses.)
Never saw him act like that on any other occasion.
The best I could guess was that every day this guy in a blue uniform snuck up to our house, and messed around near the door.
Brave, loyal, ever-vigilant Bowser (right!) would spring into action, and succeed in driving the would-be invader away, day after day.
Until the fateful day when he encountered his foe outside of the home, while unrestrained. I’m guessing it was the uniform.
I still miss that dumb dog.
I guess everyone here has it pretty right about the chow dog. When I was growing up we had chows. They are pretty cat like to be honest. Our chow hated black people and hispanic people. Tolerated everyone in the family but was pretty much bonded to my mother. The dog wasn’t just huge or anything, but she (her name was “Muffin”) knocked down a 250lb man that walked on our porch one day trying to sell us something.
Something that I haven’t seen mentioned was how chows bark. All the chows we ever had didn’t really bark, they did this strange ‘stare you down and make these grunt-coughing noises’ thing. We had a big huge black male chow named Duke also. He was pretty big, and was very mean until he attacked my grandfather. Grandad grabbed a 2x4 out of the back of his truck and knocked Duke out with it. Ever since then, he had the demeanor of a lab. His vet thought that he was brain damaged, but he was a good dog after that.
I will tell you something though. When you grow up in a really bad part of town and they know you have chows, you house is the only one that doesn’t get broken into on the street.