What does it mean to be friendly?
A reflection on expectations for pet dogs
“Is your dog friendly?”
Yes. No. Maybe? It depends on what you mean by friendly.
Are you referring to, as Oxford Languages denotes, “kind and pleasant”? Are you imagining a frenetic puppy trying to jump up in your lap, a creature ready to shower every stranger with unbridled love? Do you simply mean “not actively aggressive”?
Is this your way of asking if you can touch my dog? (Because her personality is far from the only factor determining whether or not I’ll say yes to an interaction.) Are you actually interested in the nuance of her sociability?
To properly answer your question I need to know what connotations you have with the word—because friendly means different things to different people. And sometimes our pets suffer as a result.
Sometimes we expect our dogs to be friendly to a fault
In parts of the pet ownership world, I feel like “friendly” has become synonymous with “always indiscriminately social” or “happy with any intensity of approach and type of touching” or “never has a bad day”. People ask if a dog is friendly as if it’s a binary yes-or-no question, irrespective of the current context.
But I don’t even know any humans who match that criteria.
We all change slightly in different situations depending on what else is going on: whether we’re well rested, whether we’re in physical pain, whether we’ve already said hello to a dozen people before coming across your path… the variables defy quantification.
Yes, we should strive towards stable dogs who can handle social interactions—but no, we shouldn’t expect our pets to be robots
While I’m all for 1) breeding dogs who are well suited to our modern human environment and 2) building resilience and frustration tolerance, I think expecting our pets to be 100 percent tolerant, on a completely consistent basis, is unreasonable.
It reminds me a little of how women were viewed in society not that long ago. Work hard however we ask, be affectionate when we want you to, never complain about how you’re treated or the situations you’re put in… and if you fail to be “friendly” enough? We’ll jump to the other extreme and say you’re cold, or rude, or antisocial.
But the world is not built of black-or-white distinctions.
“Friendly” doesn’t mean “always loves everyone and everything”
I can be a friendly person and still have preferences about how I want to interact with those around me. I can be a friendly person and still set boundaries. I can be a friendly person and still have an occasional bad day.
Not to mention that I don’t even have to be a super “outwardly friendly” person (like greeting strangers willy nilly on the street) to still be valid and socially acceptable in public. Maybe I’m a waver, not a hugger! That doesn’t make me mean.
I’ve come to think of it the same way with my dog.
Our personality traits are flexible—not one or the other
In the right environment? My dog is very friendly and eager to affiliate with people. In other situations? She’s aloof, or nervous, or even actively standoffish. (Like, if you tap on our van’s window and we have no idea who you are? I’m standoffish then too.)
It would be remiss to try to distill Scout’s personality down into one single term. She’s not “friendly” all the time or “not friendly” across the board. She’s a complex social creature with a huge range of responses, not unlike me—and not unlike you 😉
