General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Dog owners please enter . Am I wrong about what happened today?? [View all]Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)You never know - some people have dogs who will attack other dogs. They may keep them on a leash even in the woods for that reason, and it would have been quite natural for your dogs to trot up to say hello.
The intensity of her reaction would make me think that she had some such fear.
Note: I like dogs. But dogs have their own ways, and we have to respect that.
It's not just your dogs - it's the other dogs. It only takes one to have a problem in that situation and the problem can escalate very rapidly.
If you love your dogs, you have to take another terrified owner seriously. Even if you have voice control, her anxiety means there was some sort of problem.
I had a big old Golden Retriever. Very nice dog, and not aggressive even compared to your average Golden Retriever. They are not an aggressive breed, nor prone to anxiety. But he was an alpha, and if another dog challenged him on his own territory, he would rip the dog up if he had to in order to maintain his dominance.
I've never had a dog (after training) over which I didn't have voice control, and I always trained them so they didn't have to be on a leash either on my own property or anywhere else. But I still would have cleared the area given the woman's anxiety. A dog with an anxious owner is always a potential threat, because her dog would react to her anxiety. Also many breeds would start looking around for the source of her anxiety, so your dogs might have run toward her to find out what was going on because she was freaking out.
I find leash laws somewhat stupid, because the truth is many people can't control a large aggressive dog physically, leash or no leash. So if you don't know what your dog is going to do and you don't have voice control, the leash may be of little use. But it does kind of mark out physical territories and help owners with dogs who may have a problem evade that problem.
Also, she might have been walking her dog off the normal dog trail because she thought her dog couldn't handle so many other dogs.