Pets, Children, and Followers of God

After this day's work I get home and eat dinner and feed the dog and then...

Chase her all over the neighborhood because she ran...

She is a good dog. Problem is she is a dog. There is no reasoning with her. There is no way to get through to her that I don't want her to run away. She is selfish and willful. Much like a child 5 yrs old or younger. Training is important, conditioning is key, expectations are crucial. Above all is heart. Not the heart attitude of the one being trained but the one who is doing the training.

I am learning this lesson with "my" dog. I emphasize "my" because I have hitherto fore not owned the dog that was my wife's. I did not like the dog, very much as she did not like me for marrying her "pet". My wife thought that she had trained her dog sufficiently. I simply present the evidence that Lady, the dog, would not recognize my authority as the head of the house, or in dog terms "the top dog" (authority).

Everything she does is for her own benefit (selfishness). She only obeys when she has been conditioned to a specific response in a specific situation (id est She automatically sits when she is about to receive a treat; you cannot even get her to do anything else except possibly to lay down but that is the extent of her obedience.)

There being an unresolved issue, my strategy has been to be mean to her. This wasn't intentional. It was just the dominant dog, me, trying to show her who was in charge. It wasn't working. I decided to change my plan of attack since I didn't like being mean. I started being nice to her by giving her treats and even giving her some of my scraps from the table which she thoroughly loves. So on the basis of our tenuous friendship I would attempt to show her that she needed to listen to me. It hasn't started working yet. I need more tools: as in books on training. I don't know enough to accomplish my goal. When I attempted my training session with her she soon lost interest in obeying commands. But as soon as we were ready to go back in the house she readily sat down when I told her to do so. This action disproves the notion that she didn't understand what I wanted her to do when I said, "Sit" (willfulness).

Overall this has been a learning experience for me. I know that young children are very similar in mentality to this example that we have been observing. I have seen these authority issues, selfishness issues, and willfulness issues ( exempli gratia in my own childhood growing up). I also know that as children get older and their intellectual faculties develop it can become easier to work with a child through reasoning. Again training is important (this shows what is acceptable behavior), conditioning is key (this establishes acceptable behavior as the status quo), expectations are crucial (this shows the why behind the acceptable behavior). And again above all is heart (the attitude of the one administering the training is the premier character trait that will be passed on to the child in this whole experience).

To end with a thought provoking question: Do these negative qualities reflect the nature of your relationship to God: authority issues, selfishness, and willfulness?

Coram Deo.