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London Dog Forum > LDF Features > Debbie Connolly Bites Back > Keyboard Experts - The Perils of Facebook
Keyboard Experts - The Perils of Facebook
I get lots of messages on Facebook from my friends and colleagues. They start with “OMG just read this……” and end with a sad smiley face. Every time it is a horror story of an unbelievably strange question and even more unbelievable answers. Some people seem to live their lives online, telling everyone else how to train their dog, buy a dog, stop dogs biting, treating health and illness issues and are all experts on Dangerous Dogs. Except they’re not.
It would be funny, and sometimes is, if it wasn’t so dangerous. There many pages selling badly bred dogs and cats, back yard breeders get pages of free advertising. Don’t bother asking whether the parents are health tested or the puppies vaccinated, you’ll get abuse, serious abuse in some cases.
The many rescue pages are populated, like some forums are, with people endlessly posting “come on, someone must have a home for this dog?” They don’t want it of course, they just want someone else to take it. Inevitably when this is pointed out to them, their response is the same “I’d love to but OH (other half) said no more dogs/I have cats/I work”. Now that’s fine, if only some of them wouldn’t just keep pestering with the same posts over and over, as if everyone who could help is simply not bothering.
The level of confidence seems in proportion with how wrong the advice is too. “I’ve got a Pitbull, can the Police take it”? “No mate, as long as it doesn’t bite anyone, just muzzle it”. Yes, the Police can, and muzzling it doesn’t make it legal, but this sort of post is all over Facebook.
An advert this week (which seemed to disappear when people disagreed) said that some Lurcher puppies weren’t vaccinated as “Lurchers are hardy and don’t need it”. So wrong, and this in an area where there had been a recent bad outbreak of Parvo!
A friend of mine goes on a lot of these pages and tries to give advice, especially where someone is giving away a bull breed for free. She warns them about dog fighters getting dogs for bait this way. You’d think people would say “thanks” for the warning…… instead she gets abuse!
The ones that worry me the most are the ones where a dog has bitten and the owner asks for advice. This seems to bring every keyboard dog trainer out for miles around. They all jump in with endless “tips”, some of which are dangerous and most are inappropriate as none of them are trainers and they have never seen the dog. In fact, the more serious the problem, the more people respond. Very rarely does anyone suggest seeing a behaviourist, apart from my friend, who then gets more abuse!
Someone pasted recently to ask if her 3 year old bitch would get cancer if she was spayed now. What? I couldn’t even work out the logic behind that one. However, the range of replies was amazing. Some said yes, they’d heard it was true (I swear whatever you post, even “I heard my dog will turn blue if I use a blue lead”, someone will say yes, it’s true), some said “OMG, I was going to get mine spayed, I won’t do it now” and a few did say it would be fine.
One woman posted (and there are many like it) that her 2 year old child had been bitten by a puppy she got so she’d sold the dog. She went on to describe the child had pulled it around by its ears, hit it with toys, sat on it and generally been horrible. She faced a lot of abuse and yet many people posted “you must be gutted hun, so sorry”. Same lady gets a kitten, which was suggested by several people.
This kitten was then in the washer and down the loo within a few days and she again complained that it had bitten and scratched her kid! The advice? “You’re so unlucky, maybe get an older cat or dog that can take it”. I despair.
There was an argument on another page about stray dogs. Someone found one at about 7pm and wasn’t sure what to do with it. Lots of people said “take it to nearest rescue” and lots more “just drop it down the police station hun”. One of my assistants quite rightly told them that none of this was right, the Police stopped having responsibility for strays 2 years ago and that dogs have to go to the designated stray kennels, you can’t just drop them off somewhere. The politest responses were “mind your own business” I can’t repeat a lot of them.
I wish this sort of page didn’t exists on Facebook or any other place. Please, get your advice from professionals, not from keyboard experts.
For further information on 'what to do if you find a stray dog' click
http://safepetsuk.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/dog-lost-find-my-lost-dog/
| Debbie Connolly Bites Back |
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