Before you “not all men” me: of course, not all boomers…

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Putting fresh sheets on the couch actually requires zero dogs….

Boomers largely grew up with dogs. They were something you just had, much the same way you had kids and they were treated much alike: they were supposed to be quiet, well behaved and functioning, and the means to achieve that was violence. Becoming adults, many of them stopped having dogs but not children, but the children were still raised much the same. Maybe the belt was replaced by the bare hand, but violence was still very much the preferred method of “teaching” kids. Gen X and Millenials mostly put a stop to this, making grandparents catch up with the 21st century or cutting them off and protecting their children.

While not every popular trend in current child rearing is actually good, today’s parents are much more consciously thinking about how they want to raise their children. Many read books or go to parenting classes. While they may not always achieve it, they do want to raise their children without violence and trauma. And actually, much the same is happening with dog training. We don’t just expect dogs to function. We see them as creatures with both needs and also somelevel of understanding. We actively learn how to interpret their body language correctly. A wagging tail does not mean a happy dog. A wagging tail means an excited dog, but not whether he’s positively excited or actually upset. (With Socks you can tell a genuinly happy wag by the fact that he’ll also wag his entire butt. Which is extremely cute.)

If the boomers didn’t choose to keep dogs, there was no such pressure on them to catch up with the time. Or as my dad said: “We didn’t have doggy school back then and we didn’t need it. You kids these days.” Enter my father in law, who is like the poster boy for a certain kind of old white man. Not the virulently capital letters Racist or Misogynist, just the ordinary type. A guy who got through life by simply ignoring things he didn’t like, who got his family to not contradict him or have fights with him by being loud. A guy who never had his beliefs challenged. Back to the topic: a guy who thinks he knows how to handle dogs, even though he hasn’t kept dogs in 60 years.

Socks is still learning many things and one of them is to tolerate people in “his” space. He’s a rescue who has finally found his safe place, a rescue who, like almost all rescues, has an issue with big loud men, and a kokoni, who was bred over two millenia to protect the home. This means that when people enter our home who have not been added to his expanding list of trustworthy humans, he is often insecure. That means barking and keeping his distance, but it also means giving warning signs. Growling, showing teeth, snapping at the air. Which my father in law all takes to mean “please keep getting closer, especially reaching over me with your big hands and try to touch me, preferrably on my head”. And no matter what you say, he’ll keep doing it. The father in law, not the dog. The dog is much more teachable. This is the way biting happens, but of course it’s the dog who gets blamed then.