Daily News Mocks Dogs With Issues -- and Park Slope

There was a really interesting-sounding seminar last night at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society about Canine Fear and Anxiety. There's also a really stupid article in the New York Daily News about the panel discussion.

Here's a news flash: Dogs that are stressed out tend to have behavior problems. That's a no-brainer. But dealing with a dog that's stressed out, doing remedial training, and figuring out how to get your animal to calm the fuck down and relax? You're gonna need professional help. So if your dog freaks out whenever there's a storm, or spins in circles whenever another dog approaches, or barks its head off when people leave the room, this panel of three expert dog trainers who specialize in working with anxious pets was probably a pretty good investment of your time, especially considering that it was  completely free.

Of course, the New York Daily News--a paper that's really good for housetraining your schnauzer, but little else--had to take this panel discussion and treat it like some sort of flaky, twinkle-ding-dong, rainbows and unicorns convention. They declare that Park Slope is the "epicenter" of canine anxiety. They don't call the experts "dog trainers;" instead, they're "counselors" or "therapists," as though they're going to have your dog sitting on a couch talking about it's relationship with it's mother. (Spoiler alert: Mom was a bitch.)

Even though it's not that radical of an idea that you can calm a dog down by petting it, giving scratches and rubbing it's scruff, the News has to call this a "massage." And at the very end of the article, they note that a private session with a trainer can cost a couple of hundred bucks. Which can be a worthwhile investment if you need to work with your dog on correcting problematic behavior. The News calls this a "therapy session," though, which makes it sound like it's just self-indulgent.

So, if you live in the Slope and you've got a stressed-out dog, don't worry that the dicks at the New York Daily News think that you're a lunatic. If your dog is anxious or aggressive, please do the right thing and get him/her help.