Sad day today

[fred the great]

We have a Customer with a Golden Retriever which we have cared for since it was a puppy.

She occasionly goes to stay in Singapore where her husband is working and the dog stays with us. For some reason the dog had started to bite some people putting them into Hospital for two or three days and one person even requiring twenty stitches. That is a lot of stitches. Up to date the dog had attacked 12 people this year, her father, brother, the maid and other people that we don't know.

Understandably she was very concerned about these attacks and after a great deal of thought asked my wife to put him to sleep. My wife however doesn't stock the drug and would never put any animal to sleep unless it was the last resort. She therefore asked a friendly Vet of ours to do it as a favour. She agreed and the dog went to heaven today with all her Clinic Staff crying.

I have never seen a dog react like this before and suspect the animal had been totally spoilt by the lady Owner.

I think we can all learn a lesson here and that is to strongly discipline your dogs as they grow up and don't spoil them

Incidentally, we own two lovely golden retrievers and it was especially sad to have this experience.

[annie]

Difficult for me to comment not having seen the dog.  Sad yes.  It is possible that the owner was to blame but those injuries sound very severe and I am surprised so many people were allowed to be attacked/injured.  I also don't understand why the dog was not muzzled whilst the problem was rectified.

I know of one GR locally that had to be put to sleep.  It was not due to a lack of training. There was a problem with the whole litter and they all ended up being destroyed.

[Wowbagger]

Sometimes I think dogs just go nuts, a bit like some people do. There was a white alsatian in one of our local pubs util a few years ago. I'd seen this dog out on walks with the landlord, socialised with it and it seemed fine. Then one night I went into the pub and the sight of me sent the dog totally wild. I'm not normally frightened of dogs but I was bloody glad that this one was behind a stair gate.

A couple of weeks later I went back to the pub: no dog. Apparently in the interim it had run amok in the bar, biting lots of people. I suppose it's quite hard to communicate with a dog to find out exactly what's on its mind.

[fred the great]

I learned today that the dog had actually been given to another person recently who also had a puppy. Our problem dog had  attacked the new Owner and also killed the puppy.

Of course we live in a Buddhist Country where taking life isn't normally considered so I spent part of this morning discussing that human life is much higher than animal life and there was always the risk of it attacking a young child with horrible consequences.

Now we can just pray for it which I believe is the preferred  action to take.

The dog as a puppy had a few serious health problems which my wife had treated and the Owner had even changed it's name as she thought the original name was unlucky.   I understand that the dog knew most of the people whom it had attacked  so perhaps it was a case of an unstable mind combined with jealousy.             

I don't feel that using a muzzle and trying to retrain it would have succeeded. My neighbours before we opened the Clinic tried that approach with a Rottweiler and the animal became even more dangerous attempting to attack all it's neighbours from behind a locked gate even though they were stood on the other side of the road!.

[GruB]

On the face of the facts known, seems like the only option was the one you took.  Hard but necessary.

[cpjmathieson]

I know how upsetting it is to have a dog put down they become part of the family.However I agree with GruB.....putting it to sleep is the only option if it is attacking people....sad I know 

[Bledlow]

Sometimes I think dogs just go nuts, a bit like some people do.

My mothers last dog started behaving erratically, sometimes attacking people & other dogs without provocation. Progressed to bumping into things, falling over for no apparent reason & fighting invisible enemies. Brain tumour.

[Chris S]

Oh my. This brings back horrible memories.

We once had a lovely Gordon Setter called Watson. He was brilliant - a real character; daft as a brush of course, but a gentle, if rather boisterous giant.

When he was four years old, day before Christmas eve, without any provocation, he attacked my daughter as she walked past him. This wasn't a warning bite - he pinned her to the floor and bit right into her foot several times (thank god it was her foot, not her face).

So, Christmas Eve - feeling sick with it all, I had to take Watson for the one-way trip to the vet. I was in floods of tears as I left the surgery; with everyone in the waiting room staring at me. We could have sent him to a rescue place, but we would have always wondered whether he might do it again - or worse.

Our daughter is very wary of dogs now (she was about 13 at the time) and we will never own one again - even though I still love dogs (Mrs S definitely doesn't).

Sometimes dogs just go psycho.

[rae]

We sometimes forget that dogs are just animals - we assume that they are special, with human values and human reactions.   They aren't.

My uncle had an Alsatian many years ago.   As Alsatians go, it was a big one, it was his constant companion  for about 5 years.  It watched as he was hacked to death with a machete.   With hindsight, it would probably have been better if it hadn't been chained up at the time, and had died trying to save him.   Unsurprisingly, my Aunt clung to the dog, and brought it back to the UK, where it lived with her for a time in a two bed bungalow.   In reality, it was far too much dog for her, it was a big softy, but it was used to a space of several thousand acres, and she realised that a small garden wasn't really fair on it.   So it was put up for rehoming, and some suitable owners were found, they were fully apprised of the dog's history.   All was good for several months, until the owner's wife decided to pull a blanket over the sleeping dog one cold night.   God knows what the dog was thinking about, but it instantly woke in "you're killing my owner with a machete" mode, and went for her throat, big time.   Lots of blood and hospital.   The dog was completely nuts at that point, and was destroyed on the spot. 

The line between cuddly family pet and 8 stone predator can be very thin at times.