Head Collar/muzzle comments....

Loui was wearing a harness until fairly recently when we went to a head collar for certain parts of walks....hopefully we wont need it much longer but anyway.....

This guy says 'oh, I'm glad you have that thing muzzled but I hope my dogs not daft enough to go near it' and calls his dog but in a friendly kinda way

I just smiled and carried on (thinking if you cant tell the difference I may well just be wasting time before getting to work, so wont bother..)

but maybe if this happens again I should explain...?

ps, think I just found it strange and wasnt sure what to say as he hasn't been aggressive to him

Why bother?

kinda what I thought at the time but now thinking perhaps I shouldn't allow the ignorance to continue? but if people think like that as grown ups then.....would it make a difference anyway? Suppose you dont know till you try. I think owning a dobe you sort of get fed up explaining maybe....

I would have explained it to him and opened my dog's mouth to show him the teeth lol
I love them, so much easier to control the dog. I always preferred harnesses before as my dog doesn't pull as much on vest harnesses but i tried her on a head collar and i can control her a lot more.
Thing i like most is she can be child aggressive (i always use the headcollar and/or muzzle when there's kids around) but parents always avoid if she has the head collar on so i relax much more.

I'd explain if i was you as i'm shocked how many dog owners have no idea about the tools we have to prevent pulling. That's one thing which always shocks me on it's me or the dog. I saw one earlier and the dog pulled so badly only one family member could walk it.

see this quite a lot, it bothers me because they just assume shes bad when shes on her gentle leader, when she isnt to dogs what so ever (maybe apart from that one deerhound from an earlier thread ).

i did tell one man that assumed it was a muzzle that she could still bite his dog if she wanted to but she was too well behaved for that.

(p.s she wears it due to her intolerance of cats, we're working on it, my goodness we did not know how many people had cats round here, but 4 years of being able to chase them has been quite hard to overide so far)

I used to get those kinda comments all the time when my dog wore one when he was younger. It drove me mad! But on the positive side it made me teach him to walk properly so I didnt need it

Sometimes I correct them, sometes I can't be bothered. However there was a little girl practically climbing the walls in fear as we passed and her silly mother feeding her fear by screaming that he was muzzled so I put them straight. I also had a man with a chihauhau who was seriously aggressing at Cain from his arms, who made comments about aggressive dogs and muzzles so I put him right to (considering HIS was the snapping snarling dog!) i like to say "oh, its not a muzzle, he could bite you if he wanted too...look!" and srick my fingers in his mouth but half the time I just ignore the comments.

I walk Harley on a head collar as he's a big lad and can be reactive towards other dogs on lead sometimes and i'm only ickle. A lot of people made comments like 'why is ur dog muzzled' etc etc. I just ignored them mostly. One time in PAH I couldn't hold my tounge. A father pulled his daughter away from being too close to Harley saying 'keep away that dogs got a muzzle on' I turned to him and said 'actually it's a headcollar, he could still bite u if he wanted, OK?!'

Poeple can be ignorant sometimes!

I'm not sure I understand the comments about people being more scared of the muzzled dogs.....I get it a BIT but really the one who is not muzzled could still bite you, not the muzzled one? (unless they think it will fail and its a maneater and OMG and...)