Agreed. A firm tone, with a little extra volume behind it will stop any animal and get their attention. My dad had perfected that technique and used it on us when we were kids. He was a farmer and he used the same method on animals. I never saw it fail, and I also never saw him “yell” out of anger.
It creeps me out whenever an adult handles emotion so poorly that they resort to child-like screaming fits. Even if the person is alone and yelling at inanimate objects, there’s something a little nutty about someone who has so little control over their emotions that they have to resort to verbal aggression in order to feel powerful. It always strikes me as desperate. “Waaah, I’m too inept to handle this situation like an adult.”
One should assertively communicate with the animal, and if they react to the animal out of anger, they are not emotionally stable enough to be a caretaker of animals.
Agreed again. And yelling at an animal from across the room is a really poor training technique. If you yell at them and they ignore you, they learn that they don’t really have to do what you say when you don’t feel like getting up. Commands should only be given if they can be enforced, otherwise they are useless.
That’s pretty silly. Have you browsed or posted to any other threads? There’s about a million of 'em.
Don’t get all pouty over one thread- feel free to wander off and browse threads on other topics and in other forums. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
It’s not so much being “run off”, it’s a time management thing. It appears that there are too many people here that think with their emotions and these days I just don’t have much time for that sort of irritation.
Thank you - I agree, dogs are not stupid and any owner that cares enough to pay to have their dog in daycare is going to notice if FiFi suddenly doesn’t want to be there. And yes, I do think that the OP misinterpreted what she heard thru the door, if for no other reason than her post was full of apparent exaggeration and emotion. Which I don’t really care that much about, it was the piling on afterwards that made me post.
So, for you, what is the difference between a conversational voice level and a yell? If it isn’t a yell, what word do you use to define it? If I, uh, raise my voice to my dogs from inside the house, what level do they hear while playing in the backyard? What does your farmer father have to do with training dogs and raising them to be something other than monsters?
This whole thing is ridiculous - it’s like everyone has to prove how saintly they are and anyone who isn’t must be an abuser and/or immature. Since this sort of attitude is getting all too common in the US in the last few years, it is another one of the reasons why I don’t think the dog in the OP was being abused - too many people think that a raised voice is from " someone who has so little control over their emotions that they have to resort to verbal aggression in order to feel powerful. It always strikes me as desperate. “Waaah, I’m too inept to handle this situation like an adult.”
A command given from across the room cannot be enforced? Yelling a command at a distant dog isn’t a training technique, it is yelling a command to a distant dog. And if that dog doesn’t do what it is told, I can still go over there and deal with it. But, since my dogs are trained, generally that is unnecessary.
Your qualifications to speak as an expert on dog training are what now?
Yes - I orginally started the guest thing because I wanted to offer to go over to HB to see if the owner of the wallet in the wall was there. The only direct response I got to that was “God I’m tired of this thread”. I also posted a decent amount in the using turn signals thread, plus I read quite a bit of the board for, oh, 2-3 months before ever posting.
I am not getting “pouty” - as I said, that is simply a statement of fact, that my experience here over the last month+ has not made me want to continue to spend time here. The major reason being that I am not interested in dealing with the continued emotionalism, misinterpretation and exaggeration.
You should cross-stitch these words of wisdom onto a sampler and then look at them every time your young child plays “Drive mommy/daddy to the breaking point.” I predict great success.
A lot of people claim they never raise their voices with their pets or kids. I am confident that most of those people are remembering selectively…after all, it wouldn’t be very comforting to remember those times you snapped.
Okay, then I guess we won’t be seeing much of you. Judging an entire board with thousands of member by a couple of emotional threads is silly, but as we love to say around here, your mileage may vary…
There are plenty of serious debates, fact-based question-and-answer, pure entertainment and joke threads around here too. Your continued closed mind about the other 90% of the board seems to say that you have made your final judgment and nothing will dissuade you. Fair enough.
I have been out of town for the last few days and unable to post, but just as an update I heard back from the SPCA and they advised that in NYC I need to report the abuse elsewhere and gave me the appropriate number to call. Since it has been over a week I don’t think I will call them now in regards to that incident but I do now have my original email to the SPCA so the next time I hear or see her abusing her dog I can report it and show that this appears to be a regular occurance.
As far as the circumstances to when she picked up her dog by the collar: They were walking out of the building and there is a set of 4 stairs once you exit the door to our building. The dog stopped to sniff at the ground and she told him once to go down the stairs. He didn’t comply so she lifted him off the ground by his collar and dropped him on the ground on the other side of the stairs. He is a little dog, weighing less than 15 lbs, so there is no reason not to bend down and pick him up properly except assholishness.
FWIW, this has very little to do with the yelling. I have listened to her scream at that dog for the entire 11 months I have lived in this building and I never said a word to her or anyone else because she was just yelling. I didn’t do a thing until after I heard what I think was physical abuse, which I might not even have heard if I hadn’t stopped for a moment to see if she was screaming at the dog again or screaming because her kitchen was on fire or something. The accusation that I am just sensitive to yelling just doesn’t wash. Also, please get off of your Irish high-horse. My grandmother was born on the Emerald Isle and I am just as loud as they come, so I am a loud Irishwoman myself, though I have never gone so far as to say that I am loud because I am Irish and everyone should just accept that because I can’t help what is in my DNA. My cousin is Irish too and I have never heard him raise his voice, so YMMV.
I am sorry for the man who was falsely accused of abuse that lived with you for a year. I really am. But honestly the situations are different. Apparently the woman who accused him was just being a bitch and trying to make his life difficult. I, on the other hand, have a real reason to believe this dog and many other people’s pets may be in danger. I am not just reporting her to stir up trouble or make her life difficult.
And as far as people living in a “kinder, gentler America” that doesn’t let you so much as discipline your kids, I have a feeling there were at least a couple of people who had an inkling that this situation wasn’t a healthy place for kids but said nothing. This man had repeatedly been reported to the authorities for sexual abuse and nothing was done. They kept saying that students were making it up and for 15 years he abused teenage girls with no reprocussions. Here is a case of a teacher who is accused of choking a boy in her class for drinking from the water fountian and she hasn’t even been asked to take some time away from the classroom while they investigate. I wonder if one of those girls that was molested in that compound or the next child physically assaulted by this teacher would feel that it is okay that it happened because it is better than someone having to deal with being falsely accused of abuse.
I do understand your point that sometimes people are too quick to react and take too many things at face value but that pendulum swings both ways. Sometimes people over react and that can cause problems, sometimes devistating, for the innocent that are accused. Sometimes people under react and that can cause problems, equally devistating and sometimes resulting in death, for the innocent that actually are being abused. If her dog died or a dog in her care died because she was abusing it and I had known it was happening and did nothing about it I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night so I choose to err on the side of safety and I trust in the powers that be to do their very best to properly address the situation.
I define a “yell” as something that has obvious anger behind it. Volume has little to do with it. There are easily detectable levels of hostility in the voice of someone “yelling” vs. someone “commanding.”
It is hard to express the difference in text, but it is something people and animals can naturally detect. It’s about how you would prefer to be spoken to, the tone used in the military “left, right, left” or screaming banshee.
It was a dairy farm. Cows can be trained, and we also had dogs. The tone of any command given to any trained animal should be consistent with the traditional command technique used by most trainers.
If any of us ever yelled at any animals, we would be punished, because it was uncomfortable for the animal.
So, when the OP described “yelling,” I assumed that meant something other than “gave the dog a command.” Basically, if the person doing the yelling was doing so angrily, then she was in the wrong.
We live in a society that accepts verbal abuse too much. I find it odd that you are so adamantly on the defensive about the accusation, just because it is an accusation.
I have a family member who yells at his children in front of all the other relatives at family gatherings. He had a fist-hole in the wall of his apartment when we helped them move. He has a violent temper. He punches walls, that is not a stable person. But the worst thing anyone has done was defend his behavior and actually verbally attack anyone who has said anything about it. Some people have a strange need to defend that kind of destructive behavior.
I’m not a saint and made no claim to be. Think of me as the worst person in the world if you must. But even I recognize that there is an anger epidemic in much of the world. I hope it gets talked about more, so that something can be done about it. Having to interact with angry people will ruin my month, and I wish the yellers of the world were more aware of the torment which they inflict.
My qualifications are none of your business, but when someone tries to yell commands from a distance, its usually because they don’t feel like getting up. If you will get up to enforce it, then that’s fine. But I still maintain that yelling is not conducive to training, which you did not comment on.
And it looks like another Pit thread where people are essentially talking across one another, each with their own private definitions of the terms involved, and not taking into account anyone else’s possible definition of the same word. Now we have more info re the dog. What the lady did to the dog wasn’t nice. Perhaps it’s something to watch out for in future so as to report it.
It took 2 pages of bile and crap to get to this? I don’t wonder that curlcoat won’t stick around. I think she should–and me thinking that is not an endorsement of her opinions here. It’s also not a condemnation of her opinions, either. I’m impressed that she paid up just to be heard. Has she been heard? That’s another thread…
Another example of why I don’t see my continued presence here. I said quite clearly that I had lurked this board for months before creating the guest account, so I have seen a decent sampling of that 90%. And, I am apparently not the only one since there is a pit thread where the OP is wondering why everyone seems so pissy.
I’m not sure why you care if someone you think is closed minded stays or goes anyway.
I have snipped most of this post because I am getting really tired of all this over-reaction. Which was the reason I first posted to this thread, so I guess I should just give up…
Yes, YMMV, but I am almost pure Irish, my whole family was/is loud and I grew up being told that was one of the things that Irish folk do. It’s nice that your relatives were lace curtain - apparently mine weren’t. FTR, I also didn’t say anything about “everyone should just accept that because I can’t help what is in my DNA”.
No, I think you are wanting to report her because you think you know better how to take care of a dog than she does, or than any of the people that she does doggy day care for. You don’t want to have someone near you that don’t do as you think should be done, so you are going to get whatever authorites to remove that irritant to your life. You have zero proof of any actual abuse, but you are still hoping to be able to sic the authorities on her.
There have always been folks that have abused animals and other people and gotten away with it. It is only in the last 5-6 years that so many innocents have had their lives turned upside down by nosy parkers turning them in for things they didn’t do.
Your trust is in the wrong place then. And, you do not in any way (based on what you have written here) know that there is any abuse going on, particularly WRT the day care dogs. There are so many ways you could find out about this situation other than going straight to legal and probably financial trouble for your neighbor, but apparently you are more interested in causing trouble for her than actual concern for the dog(s).
Shrug - not my problem, I live on the opposite coast. But I am really tired of people trying to tell us all how we are supposed to be living, and each year their requirements get narrower.
Hmm, we have definition differences then. I looked up “yell” on dictionary.com and the first definition is what I was intending - “1. to cry out or speak with a strong, loud, clear sound; shout: He always yells when he is angry.”, except that the example they used included the word angry. So, I looked up shout - “1. to call or cry out loudly and vigorously.” which is closer to what I mean. So, I guess I don’t yell at the dogs, I shout at them.
However, regarding “commanding” - a command in dog training language is a word(s) that a dog knows it is supposed to respond with a particular action. A command may be whispered, yelled, shouted, screamed…etc.
For a dairy cow, I can see enforcing that rule since dairy cows can be easily upset. But, cows are not dogs and there is certainly nothing wrong with making a dog uncomfortable when they do wrong. Were you not made uncomfortable/punished if you broke a rule? Same principle applies.
Actually, she said screaming, which was one of many emtional terms in that post that I rather think were exaggerations. I just cannot picture any rational person going about screaming - “1. to utter a loud, sharp, piercing cry. 2. to emit a shrill, piercing sound” - all the time for any reason.
Yes, and no. If I am angry with a dog, I will let them know by the tone of my voice that I am angry/very upset/extremely disappointed because dogs do need to understand levels of corrections. Just as you would be much firmer with a child for serious things than for minor stuff. However, I should never react to a dog out of anger.
Your are living in a completely different world than I am! Even way back when I was taking my two baby brothers to the grocery store, and one wore one of those harnesses because he was hyper active, just about every trip some old biddy would be all over me about how abusive it was to have him on a leash. That was over 30 years ago and things have only gotten worse - now we cannot swat a kid on the butt, we cannot have competitions because some kids would lose and thereby have their psyches ruined, you can’t train a dog using anything but a buckle collar and treats, etc.
I don’t know much about that sort of thing, but family dynamics seem to be a much different thing, even when it comes to things like abuse.
Well, I suppose one of the reasons why there is so much anger in the world these days could be because folks keep trying to tell others how to live. You are so sensitive to anger that having an interaction with anger would ruin your month (!!), so you think that “the yellers of the world” (which at some point, is essentially everyone) should tip toe around you? And apparently you project your sensitivity onto others and onto pets and don’t realize that not everyone is so seriously affected by anger and yelling as you are. Perhaps some of that world anger comes from being expected to act inhumanly sweetness and light all the time.
Your qualifications have everything to do with whether you have any background to be making statements of fact on dog training.
Now, since Charger has made me change my word from yell to shout, does that make you feel any better? If not, please explain to me how I am to, uh, transmit commands to a distant dog without, uh, raising my voice? Some of my training is done with the dog up to 100 yards away…
<G> I paid up because I don’t like to leave things hanging. Have I been heard? Not by the majority I don’t think. Too many experts on things they know little or nothing about, thinking with their emotions rather than their brains.
Maybe if you didn’t insult everyone on the board with your sweeping generalizations people would be more willing to listen. And maybe if you didn’t respond in detail to every single thing that could possibly be a criticism you would not seem so defensive, which is a good way not to be heard. I happen to agree with many of your points but it’s hard to read them when you post one after another after another defending yourself so heartily.