@christianman02 There is more to it than that too. Pandemic puppies are making it seem worse as well. Many of those dogs were under socialized and not given the appropriate opportunities to learn to be a healthy, well-balanced dog in this world. So you have dogs that may have had some level of a genetic predisposition for developing some form of reactivity being given very little opportunity to work against it because the world was shut down and everything was weird. We’re 3 years out from that and so we’re really starting to hit the point reactive dogs are seemingly becoming more common because of the lack of appropriate environment to expose and socialize dogs during critical life periods.
There is also that fact that historically speaking, reactive dogs were viewed as bad dogs and once they started biting people? You put them down for being a bad dog. The concept of BE is newer in the sense that BE now is usually something approximating a last resort because it isn’t possible to provide the dog a safe, peaceful, quality of life despite doing the work to try and help them. Up until the last 15 to 20 years, you were just putting down a bad, broken dog that was dangerous. That feeds directly into how dogs were trained and the idea of behavior modification to address some of these reactivity issues and help these dogs just wasn’t a widespread thing. If you were taking your dog to training and it ended up being a “bad dog,” euthanasia was on the table. When I worked in the vet field 15 to 20 years ago, we saw far more dogs being brought in for euthanasia because they bit people and were “dangerous” than I did 10 years ago. It really started to drop off. People are doing more work now with harder dogs and recognizing the dog is not a bad dog, but rather their dog needs help to address their challenges leading to undesirable and potentially dangerous behaviors.
And yes, how dogs are being bred is becoming increasingly problematic, and the kinds of breeds people are gravitating toward. Ethical breeding exists, but finding those breeders can be incredibly hard and many savvy BYB know how to seem ethical making it more complicated (a good starting point is asking a breeder why they were compelled to breed this litter since ethical breeders will give you a run down on how each of the parents is potentially contributing to creating offspring that better the breed per the breed standard with evidence of why essentially while BYB tend to focus on other qualities). People are also picking breeds they really shouldn’t. Someone who has never owned a dog before and has a sedentary lifestyle has no business getting a maligator. A chaotic family with a lot young of children should really reconsider if that teacup chihuahua or yorkie is a good fit for them. Rescues also need to stop using coded words in their dog descriptions and be frank in their behavior histories so dogs end up in the right homes prepared to help them from the start.
It’s a complicated situation, but I’m personally hoping it is a passing phase and we as humans do better for our dog companions going forward.
