Vicious Pets Are Owned By Vicious Owners

WITH each week, we wish ourselves good tidings. Some of us usually pledge to desist from doing certain things and at the same time pray for grace to be able to start new and wonderful things in the coming week.

My advice to you, as a pet lover, is to encourage you to place into a crucible, all the wrong attitudes, actions and dispositions you had subjected your pets to in the outgone week, burn them and let the smoke of newness waft into your air of new resolutions.

This week, we shall be reminding ourselves of the evil that men do to their animals- some, literarily turning them into beasts. Sometimes, you begin to wonder whether it was even worth the while of certain people to own pets at all.

I really hate to write about this for the umpteenth time, but the issue of the reasons pets, especially dogs, are acquired cannot really be over flogged.

Or can it? I have tried several times to brush it aside, as a lot have been said by so many writers and dog enthusiasts, but everyday, new issues always come up to stir up controversies. Naturally, dogs are kept for several reasons.

However, I am of the opinion that whatever the reasons you acquired your dog for primarily, you must still have dominion over him/her. He/she must respect you as the owner and that should also transcend to your household, especially your children and wife.

A situation whereby it is only you that the dog respects, but dominates the others, is never good for a proper dog-human relationship in a household. A dog wants to dominate his/her environment and if you give him/her the chance, he/she will overdo it.

You see, I am not really worried about that because as humans, we are gifted to run our affairs and we can as well train our pets the way we want them.

But my fear now is how owners have lately been turning their dogs to be, and I must state that it is a trend that should be condemned. People now prefer their dogs to be very vicious and because of this, they give them all sorts of training and turning them into beasts.

The dogs are made to respect no one except their owners. They attack anything that moves and made to be haters of women and children. They have no recall competence (that is, can’t be stopped when attacking or doing anything negative).

They are simply dangerous dogs; unfit to live with humans and other pets. The question is: If you have such a beast, can you really rejoice that you have a pet? Definitely not! What you have is basically a gun that can be triggered at any time and like those on suicide mission, he can also attack you with attendant deleterious consequences.

Quite honestly, attacking you who trained him to become a beast will not really evoke any sympathy from me, because you wanted it.

But what about those innocent children of yours, those lovely neighbours and friends or haven’t you heard that dogs that have been known to bite and maul innocent people? Someone just gleefully told me last week that his dog bit off a chunk of a neighbour’s buttocks days ago and he had to spend about N250, 000 to treat the person involved. Another reported his dog chopping off the finger of his houseboy and he had no other word for the dog than praises.

Most recently was the dog in Igando area of Lagos State that purportedly gnashed on the head of a little boy resulting to treatments in India, the cost of which we do not know.

Ah! Must we harbour such dogs in our houses? Must we condone such misdemeanors? Sometimes, I do not really know what is wrong with some of our people.

A belief that a dog has to be uncontrollably vicious before he/she can be effective as a security tool beats me hollow.

To me, it is just a failure of the man- the owner, or should I appropriately say a failure of training or more succinctly put, a cast replica of the owner’s innate personality. It is often debatable, but it is mostly agreed that only vicious people allow their dogs to be vicious.

If you search me, I can’t really agree less, because a responsible, well-behaved man will never contemplate the idea of owning a very vicious dog. I know such people. He would rather do away with such a dog or device ingenious means of managing him/her.

It is very simple: vicious dogs are incapable of securing any home, because most often than not they do not respond to commands.

They only want to satisfy the aggressive stint in them. So, you see, a dog that has a potential of disobeying you in the face of trouble cannot be a helper. Why do you keep such dogs? Let it be your resolution this week to consign such dogs to where they truly belong.