I’m going to sound like an absolute hypocrite as someone who posts 99.9% off-leash dog photos (including off-leash terrier photos), but I really wish Dog Internet (mostly Dog Instagram™️) as a whole would move away from being off-leash as an achievement for dogs, a goal, a milestone, etc. because I really don’t think the average pet owner is knowledgeable/equipped/responsible enough for it to be as popular a concept as it is.
No amount of training disclaimers in the captions or fun graphic info posts makes a dent in the prevalence of dogs ~living their best lives~ off leash in nature (
usually somewhere they shouldn’t be off leash in the first place) on the social media feed. And as much as you would love to think that common sense would prevale and someone will look at an image and go ‘wouldn’t that be nice, better train it then!’, well… the bar is subterranean when it comes to minimum standards of dog training in the pet world.People think I’m a hard-ass for my standard pre-release-the-hounds environment checks. Stuff like ‘are there cows?’ ‘is there wildlife?’ ‘how close is the road?’ ‘are there vehicles about?’ ‘how dense is the scrub?’. And that I’m too strict for always wanting to know where the dogs are, and recalling them when they get out of a certain range. All of which I consider standard prerequisites to letting any of my high-prey-drive working breed dogs loose to sniff around. This goes double for the terriers. The idea that people just… let their dogs loose? is completely wild to me.