You say "well trained dogs are not a problem", but consider the process by which dogs become trained. You don’t just spend a week or 6 months working on it and then magically have a trained dog you can take anywhere. It’s a constant process, and months of training can be undone in a second. Training has to be constantly reinforced and can be undone in a second.
Take training your dog to behave around cyclists, for instance. If you’re dog is motion- or sound-sensitive, has chasing or herding or guarding instincts, or just hasn’t seen a lycra-boy with a funny shaped head before, then the owner has to desensitize the dog, gradually teaching him that the bike is ok and not something to be scared of. The more the dog underestands and believes that, the better he will become around cyclists.
All this desensitizing has to be done under controlled conditions, obviously. When the owner is confident of the dog’s response, he might begin introducing it to real-life situations, ideally in a controllable fashion. Perhaps get a group of friends to ride past, each stopping to give the dog a treat or friendly pet, to reassure the animal that cyclists are ok. Again, this has to repeated until the dog stops reacting. This stage, too, can take minutes, days, weeks, months or years, depending on the animal.
So, you now have a dog who seems to be ok to take into the great outdoors, supposing all his other behaviours allow that, like the basic drop and recall you’ve been going on about.
If he now is now let off lead, sees a cyclist he hasn’t seen before and suddenly takes fright – perhaps it’s a different shape bicycle, or a singlespeed that sweeps up silently from behind – it’s a critical time. If the cyclist ignores him, doesn’t make eye contact, and carries on, everything will be ok in the vast majority of cases. Whereas, if the cyclist gets all hung up on his rights, stares at the dog and/or its owner and generally gives off an aggressive vibe, the dog will get even more scared. And fear can show itself as aggression.
In that instant, all the training is undone, and it’s back to square one for the dog, the owner and the cyclist. Dog and owner have to start training all over again, the cyclist has his own worst fears confirmed.
Do you see the cycle I’m trying to break? If you can bring yourself to believe that not every scared dog you see is a rabid man-eater, you will be happier, the dog will be happier, and everyone will be able to go about their lives with more ease.
But that’s just background and something dog owners will be familiar with. We’re used to the idea that non-dog-owners don’t know, and don’t need to to know, about dog training.
My point, as I’ve already said, is that by showing inappropriate aggression to dogs you are actually making everyone’s lives harder, not just the dog owners. You’re actually helping to create an aggressive dog, you’re not ‘teaching it a lesson’. You’re doing a disservice to the cycling community by making one more dog believe that cyclists are nasty, painful things to be scared of, which increases the chances of aggression being shown at the next encounter.
I can see the weakness of my argument. I’m appealing to you for consideration, whereas you believe you shouldn’t need to be considerate, because it’s not your dog and, what’s more, you don’t even like dogs. Why should you?
I can’t answer that.
