An interesting thing happened to me on my way to work this past summer. I was driving on a back road and I could see a couple of people and a dog walking down the road in my direction. The dog wasn't on a leash and it broke away from its people and started jogging toward me. It seemed that the people tried to call the dog back, but it was more interested in my car than whatever they were saying.
As the dog came closer, I slowed down so as not to run into it if it made an unexpected movement. It stopped right in the middle of the dirt road, so I also stopped, rolled down my window and told it that my car was much bigger than it and it could get hurt if it stayed there. At this point, the people accompanying the dog were probably no more than 30 yards away so I just sat and waited for them to come retrieve it. I wasn't having the greatest morning, was already late to work, and really didn't want to hit a dog, even at a very slow speed, to make my day even more stressful. I was feeling pretty good about how responsible and patient I was being despite their obvious delinquency as dog owners in not keeping their animal out of my path as I waited for the woman to reach her dog.
Imagine, then, my surprise when the woman (who looked a lot like a shorter version of Katherine Hepburn) approached my rolled down window and kindly but firmly said to me, "You need to learn something." She went on to tell me that when this dog, or any dog, was in the road, I needed to keep on driving. According to her, the dog had been encouraged in this bad habit by people like me who stopped to talk to him or even feed him treats when he was in the way of their cars and that's why he kept getting in the way. I was just reinforcing bad behavior by stopping my car. She seemed set to lecture all day (I found out later she was probably a retired teacher) so I did my best to draw the one-sided conversation to a quick conclusion by acting interested in what she had to say and then taking the first opportunity I got to thank her for the information and wish her a good day.
As I got to work and set up for the day, my mind kept returning to this incident. I could see the point in what the woman was saying but couldn't help but feel rather annoyed at the way she let her dog do whatever it wanted, then chastised me, a person who didn't know this particular dog and had been inconvenienced on my way to work by its actions, for my 'enabling' behavior! I couldn't quite decide whether to laugh it off or give her a piece of my mind if I ever ran into them again.
And then I realized what about the experience kept me mulling it over and what my attitude about it would gel into. I thought to myself: is it harder to train unwanted behavior out of one animal that you have contact with every day, feed, groom, take care of it it gets hurt or sick, and, presumably, inspire affection and a desire to please you in, or to undertake to train a wanted behavior into hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of previously unknown drivers you will encounter when you are walking said animal on the back roads of a small community over its lifetime? It absolutely boggled my mind to imagine the amount of determination and confidence that could cause a person to prefer to undertake the latter task! And I decided that that woman is the best definition of an overachiever I've run into in a long time.
