How should you take care of them? According to one book I’m reading, you need to give them lots of exercise and they need to eat good food. You need to buy a good leash and collar. No, I’m not referring to a childcare book–I’m talking about a book on dog care: The Complete Dog Care Manual [1], by Bruce Fogel, president of ASPCA.
To use a dog book to raise a child, you’ve got to pick and choose the advice, of course. You don’t put your children on leashes or toss them bones (except when they misbehave!). It is interesting, though, that dog-raising books are full of good ideas that also apply to raising children. And it’s especially interesting to compare the way we are supposed to raise dogs with the way many people actually raise children.
My family has a dog (“Holly”) and two human children, aged 6 and 8. I am thus an expert on this topic.
My dog-training book stresses that taking care of a dog requires a lot of work. We need to invest a lot of time in order to have a healthy animal. The dog book places a premium on early training? “Your dog relies on you to train it from an early age to be trusting, even-tempered and sociable…” (page 48). Compare this advice with the way many people actually raise children, ignoring them for long stretches and often abandoning them to the commercial wasteland of television.
Feeding is critically important, according to my dog book. Dogs need
[A] nutritious, well-balanced diet [which produces] a strong boned well-muscled healthy coated canine. Dog owners should avoid giving their dogs excessive treats or feeding them more often than they should eat, even if a bag. This combination of facts explains why obesity is a rampant among dog owners.
(Page 51) Compare this advice to the donuts, sugary cereal, and bags and bags of salty oily over-processed snacks that so many people feed their children. Just walk down the aisles of a grocery store to see the extent of this harmful practice. According to the experts, we shouldn’t feed such garbage to dogs, but many of us actually feed such foods to children.
There is a lot of information on training in Fogel’s book. The author emphasizes that animals need to be trained well when young in order to be sociable as adults. Otherwise, all kinds of bad behaviors arise. The same thing goes for children, too, but this advice is far too often ignored [2].
If this comparison between dogs and humans appears unseemly, keep in mind that humans are animals. [3] “Human animals” I call them (instead of “human beings”), whenever I want to have some fun with fundamentalists. There’s no defense to my characterization, of course, since we human animals eat, poop, breathe and procreate very much like other animals, very much like dogs.
What about exercise? “If a dog is denied mental and physical activity, its energy may be released in destructive and unacceptable behavior.” (Page 42). To get real exercise, does a dog need to be driven across town every weekend to participate in organized sports? No. Does a dog need to join an expensive health club? Absolutely not. To get exercise, all dogs need are brisk walks combined with a few very simple toys. We excel at breaking these rules for human children, however.
How should one discipline a dog? It is important that the dog understand exactly what it is that it has done wrong. Telling a dog that it is “bad” generally is useless. (Page 76). There is nothing in my dog book that suggests that one should yell at a dog or physically mistreat a dog. Well, children are not dogs, of course, so many people treat them worse than dogs, [4] resulting in the need for a massive governmental intervention system. [5]
There’s also a chapter on breeding. “With a worldwide surplus of unwanted dogs, it is irresponsible to breed dogs without first arranging for good homes for the litter.” In short, we are urged to make conscious decisions about a community’s carrying capacity for additional animals, and to plan if and when to have more. But this sound advice applies only to dogs, not to children. When it comes to humans, many of us refuse to make careful decisions on whether to procreate [6] and many human animals advocate the use of unreliable information. [7]
Incidentally, whereas people need a license to have a dog, none is required for having a child. It is just assumed that people know how to take care of children, despite the fact that my dog book was published under the assumption that many people don’t even know how to take care of dogs.
There is nothing in my comprehensive dog book about trying to make one’s dog believe in invisible beings that don’t live on earth. Nothing about terrifying one’s dog that it will go to hell if it is “bad.” Nothing about keeping a dog alive even though if it is in a permanent vegetative state.
But I digress. In sum, my dog book teaches me that it would be barbaric to let a dog sit around eating bad food, and not exercising, watching TV, while failing to interact with it. Pretty basic advice that many human adults are failing to follow.
I’m not really advocating using a dog book to raise a child. For those who want child-raising advice, though, the huge number of titles is disorienting. When my children were very young, I consulted about a dozen such child care books, all of them written by “experts.” To my dismay, most of these child care books were purely anecdotal, lacking any scientific basis for much of what they suggested.
To my amusement, many child care books can be classified into extremist-Democrat versus extremist-Republican approaches. The former tell you that you should never say “no” to your child, lest you do permanent psychological damage. The latter take the tack that you should constantly show your child who is boss, teaching obedience above all else, encouraging you to raise your child just like . . . a dog.
I’ve gotta go. Time to walk the dog!
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