Don’t pull tails

One of my best friends passed away several years ago. We were best friends for over fourteen years. His name was Bear and he was my Labrador retriever. I got Bear when he was barely weaned and enjoyed his friendship until, (in dog years), he was an old man. He was a very smart dog and was superbly trained, not just to voice commands, but also to my whistle and hand signals.

At that point in my career I worked from my home and thus was fortunate enough to be able to spend enormous amounts of time with this dog and I got to got to know him exceedingly well and vice versa. It is uncanny to me how expressive he was; in that I could look at him and know what he was thinking. In the mornings I used to go out just as the sun was rising over the two acre pond in my back yard. I would stare out over the lake deep in thought, and he would sit with his ears partially raised intently staring over the lake in deep thought too. Occasionally he would twitch that wonderful nose of his as he smelled the morning fragrances drifting our way.

He was in every way a member of our family. When we grilled out, my wife cooked him exactly the same thing we were having, be it a hamburger or a filet. We spent enormous amounts of time together and had lots of fun.

I discovered early on that Bear did not like for me to touch his tail. I don’t know why, but this just made me want to pull it. I could tell this aggravated him to no end, as he would pull his ears back and partially open his mouth as if he wanted to bite me. One look at his eyes would tell me that he was annoyed at my childish prank. Bear would have never actually bitten me as he was a gentle soul, but he definitely did not want me pulling his tail. He would softly bite my hand making sure he did not bite down hard and he would circle around and round trying to keep his tail away from my hand and I would keep reaching for it just to aggravate him. I still do not know why I enjoyed antagonizing him so much, especially as he started getting some age on him. I know that sometimes he was just not in the mood to play and he would have liked to just bite me hard and thereby break me from pulling his tail and messing with him, but he never did it, probably more from fear that I would beat the fire out of him if he ever bit me, but also because I know that dog loved me with all of his heart. So he just endured those moments.

I was thinking about this the other day and kind of felt bad about it. As I thought about this, it reminded me of a passage in the Bible that tells us not to grieve or provoke our children to wrath. There is much in the Bible about how children should respect their parents and how to discipline them; however this passage is aimed towards teaching parents to respect their children too. We should never deliberately antagonize our kids, or grieve them to a point whereby it might cause them to possibly do something they otherwise would not do, or worse adversely affect their self-esteem. I think this applies to children that play sports. Fanatical parents screaming at their children when they make a mistake or do not try hard enough, (at least in their eyes) because the parents want them to be superstars of tee-ball of all things. For crying out loud, cut them some slack and let them enjoy their childhood. There will be plenty of time as adults when they can become over-achievers.

Ephesians 6:4
And you fathers, do not provoke
your children to wrath, but
bring them up in the training and
admonition of the Lord.