Truly Amazing!
Recently seeing a nine week old Rottweiler puppy searching a living room for and indicating the presence of bomb material, seeing a group of pet owners attending a ‘nose work’ class I was assisting, and attending a few seminars and workshops lately on working dogs got me thinking…
Pet dogs, cancer detection dogs, assistance dogs, police dogs, pets as therapy dogs and these are just a few roles that dogs fulfill in society today!
The New Scientist Magazine (UK) wrote some time ago, “Dogs do as well as state-of-the-art screening tests at sniffing out people with lung or breast cancer. The research raises the possibility that trained dogs could detect cancers even earlier and might some day supplement or even replace mammograms and CT scans in the laboratory.”
Just amazing! Then I think about our pet dogs, and I don’t for a second think that they are any less gifted or capable. Pet dogs already give so much too so many people. When I first started training I had an elderly lady phone me because her dog was growling at the vet during examinations. During our training session I learnt that the lady had recently had to cope with the death of her husband and she had just completed a course of treatment for cancer. The dog had saved her from leading what she felt would have been an otherwise lonely life. Because of her pet she would go for walks where she met a few other owners whom she got to know well, taking the dog to the vets or the trainers got her out doing things she would not be doing otherwise and I personally feel that is just as amazing as the other roles dogs play in society.
However, do we always fully appreciate how amazing these animals really are? Yes, we may provide our pets with cure fluffy teddy bears, posh diamante collars, or even the best possible diet out there but is that really enough? What I suppose I am getting at is the question; do our pets get enough mental stimulation? Because caring for animals mentally is just as important as their physical health. I said above that our pets are not any less gifted or able than cancer detection or Pets as Therapy dogs, so is it not our responsibility to allow our dogs to express these behaviours in one way or another?
We expect dogs to live in human societies without too many problems, but can we actually be doing more to help our pet dogs not develop those ‘problems’?
I think the answer is definitely yes! But please do not think for a second that I am suggesting that we all start training our dogs to become detection dogs or therapy dogs. I feel that implementing a few changes to our pet’s daily routine is all that is takes.
In my next post I will discuss ways to implement a few basic changes and also look at why these changes maybe of great benefit to our beloved dogs.
