PLEASE TELL US! Several people wrote in with sad stories of clear problems that trainers or vets never mentioned when the dog was younger. Many people wished that someone had said something to them sooner. The trick is how and when you say it (read on!) KINDNESS Oh please please please remember how fragile and vulnerable we are about our dogs. Expressing empathy and concern goes a long way toward having any comment you might make about someone’s dog be heard. OFFER SOLUTIONS I cringed reading comments about trainers who said things like “You need to get your dog under control!” and kept walking. Isn’t that, uh, what we trainers are for? Don’t people come to us to learn how to do that?

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Hmmm last weekend I was trimming the hedges in front of my house. I had Jellybean in a Gentle Leader and leash on a sit stay a few feet behind me in my front yard. She got several compliments from people walking, with or without dogs, down the street on how nicely she stayed and how calm she was.
Then the yellow lab towing the very small girl approached. I have worked with either in boarding, training, pet sitting or dog walking probably 200 labs. I have met ONE genuinely aggressive lab. It could be that this dog’s body language was thrown off by towing 70 lbs of child but he came at us with a very hard stare and what both Jellybean and I perceived as aggressive body language.
I wish that I had reiterated Jellybean’s stay cue, stepped in front of her and let the lab jump into me. Doing that might have prevented the dog from terrorizing Jellybean and I probably could have gotten control of him and given him back to the child. What happened instead was that I let Jellybean run from him into my neighbor’s yard knowing that she is very smart in a feral way and a LOT faster than any fat, out of shape lab. The child got pulled down, lost the leash, the dog bolted after Jellybean who lost him then ran around the house to come back to me. I put Jellybean in the house and went to make sure the child and lab were okay. She proceeded to walk around my front yard with that dog until he took a ginormous poop which she of course did not clean up.
I honestly wanted to follow the two of them home and give the parents a piece of my mind about allowing this child to attempt to walk this dog. She seemed to be somewhere between 8 and 11 but very small and slight. There is NO way she could physically control a 75 pound dog and since the dog obviously had not been taught to walk nicely it was going to take someone who could physically demand that from him to get him from point A to point B.
The potential horrible outcomes are almost too numerous to name: dog starts a fight with another dog and child is injured trying to break up the fight; dog drags child into street where one or both are hit by a car. Not to mention that the child could very easily just sprain/break a leg, ankle, wrist or arm being dragged to the point where she falls.
When I was done trimming my hedges a half an hour later and went inside I could hear her little voice pleading with the dog to stop on the street behind my house. I know that there are a number of not very friendly dogs AND people living on that street.