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Location: East Midlands, UK
Joined: Mar 2006
Posts: 8,775
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Originally Posted by
Taffsmum
On our small local park when people are taking their dogs out between 8 & 9 am a Eastern European woman is taking her children to school across the road.
She is absolutely terrified of dogs. While the regular dog walkers now put their dogs on leads when we see her she grabs hold of the children & makes a de-tour to get away from us a look of panic on her face. Its a shame that she is forcing the children to be as scared of dogs as she is.
It is indeed. Does she speak english? It might be a good idea to gently try and talk to her and introduce your dog/dogs to her children?
With our two very large, we experience a lot of this type of reaction, and we always try and gently introduce our dogs to people - both adult and child - who are terrified of dogs. In the case of adults, we managed to help an indian waitress working in a local hotel over her fear by getting her to help with Tai's party trick of being fed a tempting bowl of meaty scraps left over from Sunday lunch in the restaurant and making him sit and "trust" for it. She was intrigued by this, and would tell Tai to sit and trust and keep control of the situation. She would then pick up the bowl and stroke him and tell him he was a good boy. I won't say she was totally relaxed, but she had a very extreme fear to the point where she wouldn't come into the bar if Tai was in there. I held her hand to start with, and when she touched him and saw how soft and fluffy he was, she started to relax a bit. I opened his mouth, showed her all his teeth, and how I could safely put my hand into his mouth, and it worked wonders.
The same with children. We have many instances of children running away, or cringing in fear thinking are two our wolves. We spend a lot of time explaining to them the origins of all dogs, and how lovely wolves are, how frightened they are of humans and how badly they have been persecuted. I have never failed in getting children to pluck up the courage and stroke firstly just Tai, but now we know Ben is great with kids, Ben too.
With such soft fluffy dogs, it is a wonderful opportunity for doing some good publicity for the dog world, and one I try never to miss. I hate it when I see people, especially kids, flinching in fear from my boys, and my pet hate is parents that scoop their kids up, thus reinforcing their fear.