Once more onto the soapbox, dear friends:
I had a friend who had 40 sled dogs. And oh boy, did they ever LOVE pulling those sleds! You could see it in how eager they were to get in harness. They leaped, they wriggled, they screamed to get into harness and start pulling.
I took my own two dogs out for hikes – off leash – in true wilds twice a day, in the woods, along mountain trails, along creeks, and on remote dirt roads.
One summer I started taking one of his sled dogs, my favorite, with us. At first, Walter was afraid of everything on the walks. He shied away from a creek barely a foot wide, and finally crossed it by jumping over it about four feet in the air. He didn’t even know it was water – it was several days before I could get him to drink from the creek. When he finally dipped his muzzle into it, then put a foot into it, he splashed and ran in it like it was the most exciting thing he’d ever seen.
He didn’t know how to run, at first. He ran with both hind legs thrusting together, as if he was still in harness. It took two weeks before he started to use his back legs separately and run like a normal dog.
He was a little uncertain about me coming by to pick him up when we first started, but after a week, he was as excited to see me drive up as he was about pulling a sled.
And then things changed and I had to stop.
My friend, who was a businessman, later told me he considered having Walter put to sleep, or giving him away.
Because Walter didn’t like pulling a sled anymore. The way he acted, moping around and only reluctantly getting into harness, if it was a human doing it, you’d call it depression.
Can you guess what went on in his head? I can. He loved pulling a sled … until he learned that there was something about a hundred times better: freedom to run on his own.
I’m not picking on sled dog owners. ALL dog owners share some of the guilt.
The objection I’m trying to express here is that so many dogs have no life of their own. Their owners allow them not one minute of freedom (and I don’t mean running around inside a fenced yard). The dog’s entire life is centered on the owner’s needs, the owner’s will. How many times have I seen people taking their dogs for a bathroom walk, and then snatching at their leashes every time the dog tries to sniff at an interesting smell? These owners can’t let even this meager five minutes outdoors be the dog’s time. They seem to begrudge the poor little guys even the time it takes to shit: “Hurry up! Hurry up!”
Lacking anything to contrast their lives against, OF COURSE dogs who live like this are happy. Because it’s in their nature, first of all, to be happy in human company, but also, I’m convinced – and mainly – because they have no choice. They don’t know any different.
To me, who has seen what dogs can be like, what they become, when they get to run off leash in the wildlands a couple of times a day, dogs who get to be DOGS, everything lesser seems like a cheat. Not just to the dogs, but also to the humans doing it to them. The people never get to know what sort of friend they could have.
Dogs who get free time to be dogs, running and snorting at will and often, are smarter, more relaxed, more confident, more mature, than leash and yard dogs. They bark less, they have fewer “bad” habits like chewing and digging, and they live significantly longer and healthier lives. My German shepherd, whose pedigreed sire died at the age of FOUR – and whose littermates lived to be 8 or 9 – lived 12.5 years. My big mutt Tito lived to be 16.5. And they were both wonderful, likable, easy-going dogs.
These are my opinions, of course, but I also think they happen to be true.
It seems to me that all of this is ESPECIALLY true of those dogs bred down to the tiny, crippled, brainless breeds. Because even if they’re off the leash, out in the wilderness, they’re incapable of enjoying it to anything near the degree Ranger and Tito did. They can’t run, can’t jump a ditch, can’t splash around in a creek, sometimes can’t even recognize danger. Ranger and Tito enjoyed hiking in the snow for hours. A Chihuahua in the same setting would begin to suffer severely in about 5 minutes, might die of hypothermia in an hour.
The leash is built into their genes – they’re doomed to be house and yard and lap and PURSE dogs for their entire lives, because they can’t survive away from human protection for more than a few minutes. They can’t have any lives of their own because they’ve been made sick, twisted, by human breeders.
In my opinion, this is not something people who call themselves animal lovers should do to the critters they profess to love. It’s incredibly cruel to the dogs, but it’s also dehumanizing to the people.