Hijack
skankweirdall
This sounds like you don’t have confidence in your dog. I hope you can afford to work with a professional trainer. A dog who isn’t trusted to behave with guests in the home… well, that’s a red flag to me.
Sorry, but it does fall into the category of keeping dogs safe.
We are working with a well respected trainer, but as most any trainer will tell you it’s not a good idea to have dogs with strong herding instincts around small children anyway, especially strange ones. It’s not that I don’t trust her so much as I don’t want to take any chances. I’m sure that many dogs her size and larger are capable of inflicting severe damage on other living creatures. I’ve just never seen it up close like that before, and I must say it disturbed me a little. So no, I really don’t want to take the chance of something happening.
j.c., actually, it sounds to me like skank is following standard measures for a potentially dangerous dog. I don’t know about other jurisdictions, and obviously I can’t speak with certainty to this particular case, but I do know that when a dog behaves in an aggressive manner, our local animal control will often apply restrictive measures that the dog’s owner must observe if they don’t want the dog to be destroyed. Generally, restrictive measures include not walking the dog without a leash and muzzle, having a fence of a certain height and strength, and so forth; these sound similar to what skank is doing.
Whether or not his (her?) dog ownership is ethical is a matter I’m not going to get into: I don’t think I have enough information to pass judgement. But I’d hazard a guess that he’s doing as much as he can to keep both the dog and neighbors both safe and alive.
Daniel