I originally wrote this for our Dog Week last summer, but our attempt to get that theme week going didn’t really work out. However, I think there’s something to this, so now that I found this in the drafts, I thought I’d flesh it out a bit and publish it. So, here goes…
I encountered this situation in Hyde Park last year. I was walking through it when I saw two women. One of them had two unleashed dogs running around playfully. The other had one unleashed dog following her intently at a set distance to her. Of course, the other two dogs tried to get this dog to participate in their games, being social animals, and the dog did, for a second, before its owner said sternly something in the lines of “Princess, that’s not like you”, and the dog returned to its spot meekly.