08/29/2026
There are evenings when I am reminded just how difficult it is for human beings to truly see another species without first forcing that species through the filter of our own expectations. Tonight is one of those evenings. Perhaps I am more emotional than usual. Perhaps the glass of w**e beside me has softened the little internal editor that normally tells me to wait until morning. But I have spent most of today writing about dogs, thinking about dogs, teaching about dogs, and yet I find myself sitting here tonight still unable to let go of a sadness that has followed me for many years in this profession. It is the sadness of watching a truly remarkable animal stand beside a human being who is somehow unable to recognize what is actually there because they remain emotionally attached to an imaginary version of the dog they thought they were going to have.
I have lived with dogs for so long that I no longer know how to separate my understanding of life from my understanding of them. They have been beside me through different chapters of my life, through periods of enormous beauty and periods I would rather forget, and over the years they have taught me far more about observation, patience, loyalty, conflict, regulation and relationship than most of the textbooks I have ever read. I have watched dogs recover from human mistakes that would have destroyed many human relationships. I have watched them adapt to environments that make very little biological sense to them. I have watched working animals suppress instincts that generations of selective breeding deliberately placed inside them because suddenly those same instincts became inconvenient in somebody’s living room. I have watched dogs tolerate chaotic households, inconsistent boundaries, emotional volatility, children who did not understand their limits, humans who changed expectations from one day to the next, and still they continued attempting to find a way to coexist with us. The longer I study them, the less impressed I become with what we teach dogs and the more impressed I become with everything dogs somehow learn about us.
That is perhaps why I become so deeply frustrated when somebody has listened to me lecture for years and still looks at their own dog through the lens of disappointment. There are moments when I am standing beside an animal and I see something genuinely extraordinary. I see a nervous system shaped by genetics, ancestry, experience and environment. I see discernment, resilience, intensity, sensitivity, humor, stubbornness, caution, curiosity and enormous biological honesty. I see a dog responding exactly as that individual dog has learned to respond to the world around him. Then I listen to the human describe what is wrong with him, and slowly I realize that they are not describing dysfunction at all. They are describing difference. They are describing the distance between the dog they actually own and the dog they imagined they were going to own. Sometimes they are comparing that animal with another dog they knew years ago. Sometimes they are comparing him with another line within the breed. Sometimes with a show-line representation that carries entirely different genetic and behavioral characteristics. Sometimes with a polished image they have assembled from social media, photographs, memory and wishful thinking. Whatever the source of the fantasy, the result is the same: the living animal standing in front of them becomes judged against a creature that has never existed.
I find that profoundly sad because there is a subtle cruelty in asking another living being to spend its life competing with an imaginary version of itself. Human beings understand this perfectly when it happens to us. We know how painful it is to live beside somebody who loves us conditionally through comparison, somebody who may never openly say that we are inadequate but communicates it constantly through disappointment. You are good, but you should be softer. You are strong, but I wish your strength looked different. You are intelligent, but not in the way I expected. You are loyal, but not expressive enough. You are affectionate, but not affectionate enough. You are confident, but your confidence is inconvenient. You are cautious, but I wanted social. You are serious, but I wanted easy. Over time all of these judgments collapse into the same message: I care about you, but I would prefer you if you were somebody else. Dogs may not understand that sentence linguistically, but they absolutely live inside its emotional consequences. They experience it through pressure, frustration, corrections, disappointment, tension, management and the constant attempt to reshape characteristics that were never moral failures in the first place.
What troubles me most is that many of these dogs are magnificent animals. They are not failed dogs. They are not defective representatives of their breed. They are simply individuals. There seems to be a growing difficulty within modern dog ownership to accept that individuality because we have turned dogs into lifestyle products. We choose breeds from photographs, websites, romantic descriptions and videos, and then we become surprised when genetics arrives attached to the animal. We want the appearance of a working dog without the intensity. We want the intelligence without the independence. We want the protective nature without suspicion. We want sensitivity until that sensitivity means the dog notices our own instability. We want drive until drive interferes with our schedule. We want confidence until the dog develops opinions. We want companionship, but increasingly we define companionship as behavioral compliance with the life we had already designed before the animal entered it. Somewhere along the way we forgot that dogs are not manufactured personalities. They are living biological organisms carrying thousands of years of evolutionary history and generations of selective breeding, and that history does not disappear simply because it would be more convenient for us if it did.
Perhaps what frustrates me personally is that I have spent so much of my professional life trying to teach people to look deeper than behavior. Behavior is important, of course. Dangerous behavior must be addressed. Dogs need guidance. Boundaries matter. Structure matters. Training matters. But behavior is the visible expression of an enormously complex organism, and if we stop at the behavior we often misunderstand the animal completely. I want people to ask what preceded it, what nervous system produced it, what genetics shaped the tendency, what developmental experiences contributed to it, what emotional state is present, what the dog is attempting to accomplish and how the human relationship influences the entire equation. I have lectured about this for years because I genuinely believe that once we become curious instead of judgmental, something begins to change. Unfortunately, knowledge does not automatically create humility. Somebody can learn terminology, attend lectures, understand the theory intellectually and still return home and continue looking at the dog through the same old expectation. That is the part that makes me question whether I have explained any of this well enough.
The older I become, the more difficult it is for me to watch people waste the short lives of these animals wishing for something else. Dogs simply do not live long enough for that. We receive perhaps ten years, twelve years, thirteen if we are fortunate, and for much of that time we behave as though there will always be another season, another walk, another morning, another chance to appreciate the animal properly. Then one day the muzzle is grey. The movement is slower. The dog who once annoyed us by following us everywhere suddenly struggles to stand, and all of those things we were trying so desperately to change become painfully irrelevant. Anyone who has truly loved and lost dogs eventually learns this lesson. Near the end you do not wish the dog had been more convenient. You do not wish the heel position had been cleaner. You do not care that he was too intense, too serious, too suspicious, too energetic, too independent or not sufficiently similar to the dog you remembered from twenty years earlier. You would give almost anything simply to have the imperfect animal back exactly as he was.
That knowledge has changed the way I look at dogs. It does not mean that I romanticize them. Dogs can be extraordinarily difficult. They can be dangerous. They can be predatory, possessive, impulsive, socially selective, territorial, reactive and occasionally exhausting. I do not believe that every behavior should be accepted simply because it is natural, nor do I believe that love somehow eliminates responsibility. Quite the opposite. To love an animal properly requires enough clarity to understand both what that animal is and what the human world requires of it. We owe dogs guidance because we have asked them to live inside our society, but guidance should never become an attempt to erase the animal underneath it. There is a meaningful difference between helping a dog function successfully in the human world and continually punishing him for failing to become the dog we invented in our imagination.
Maybe that is what I have been trying to teach all these years. Not obedience. Not control. Not techniques. Perhaps underneath all of it I have simply been trying to teach people how to see. To look at the animal in front of them long enough that the expectations become quieter and curiosity becomes louder. To stop asking why this dog cannot become another dog and begin asking who this dog actually is. What motivates him? What worries him? What brings him alive? What does he find meaningful? What inherited characteristics are moving beneath the behavior? What has he learned from the people around him? What does he need from the relationship? Those questions are infinitely more interesting to me than whether an animal perfectly fulfills some predetermined template of what a German Shepherd, Malinois, Labrador, Rottweiler or any other breed is supposedly meant to be.
When we begin from that place, something beautiful happens. Acceptance stops meaning resignation and becomes accuracy. We can still train. We can still change behavior. We can still create boundaries and expectations, but now we are doing it with the animal rather than against the animal. The dog no longer needs to audition every day for the role of somebody else. We can finally meet the individual that has been standing beside us all along. There is tremendous dignity in that, and I believe dogs deserve that dignity from us after everything this species has done to accommodate human beings.
When I look at the history of the dog, I am still amazed that this relationship exists at all. Here is another species that entered our camps, walked beside our ancestors, guarded settlements, hunted with us, protected livestock, followed us into war, migrated with us across continents and eventually found itself sleeping on our couches while we complain that it barked when somebody approached the front door. Through every transformation of human civilization, dogs adapted again. They learned our gestures, our routines, our emotional states and even the direction of our gaze with an ability that still fascinates science. They became extraordinarily skilled at reading us, and yet we remain remarkably poor at returning the favor. We expect them to understand our world almost immediately while often making very little effort to understand theirs.
So perhaps my frustration tonight is not really anger at dog owners. Perhaps it is grief over how easily human expectation can obscure something beautiful. There are dogs walking beside people right now who will someday be desperately missed, and yet tonight those same people are frustrated because the animal is not enough like another dog. One day they may look back and finally understand that there was never anything wrong with the dog standing beside them. The mistake was believing that love required the animal to become the fantasy.
I wish we could learn that sooner.
Because the dog standing in front of you is not a rehearsal. This is the dog. This is the life you have together. This nervous system, this temperament, this history, these strengths, these quirks and these imperfections are the animal who came into your world. You may never receive precisely this combination again. There is something deeply humbling in understanding that another living creature, entirely separate from us and possessing a mind of its own, has agreed to share a portion of its brief existence beside us.
Maybe we should spend a little less of that time asking dogs to become something else and a little more of it becoming worthy of knowing who they already are.
Bart De Gols
