Nowadays, people all try to anthropomorphize their pets.
Nowadays, people all try to anthropomorphize their pets.
What does anthropomorphize mean? To attribute human characteristics or behavior to an animal.
When we do this, we are diminishing our dogs innateness. Oftentimes we forget that dogs are predators. They were bred to hunt, and chase things. And the more we push our human behaviours and ideas into them, the less our dogs feel like dogs.
When we treat our dogs like kids and let them sleep in bed with us, hug them and kiss them all the time, dress them up because it looks oh so cute and let them into every single part of our life, we start to see primal behaviours that we have suppressed come out. These primal behaviours can be as simple as your dog looking extremely uncomfortable, licking their lips, pressing their ears all the way back or constantly whale eyeing us but can also stretch as far as growling, snapping, even biting.
It is important to create balance with our dogs. To let them be dogs sometimes. So we can let our dogs sit on the couch with us, but when we say so, added structure goes a long way. We can give our dogs a gentle kiss, but we have to be aware of their stress signals.
We should incorporate mental stimulation and natural activities our dogs love to do! These include obedience training, swimming, running, destroying objects, agility etc. and along with these activities we can throw in a little witches hat or reindeer ears.
So these upcoming holidays ask yourself, have you let your dog be a dog? Or have you been treating your dog like a human?
