A man’s dog is a good conversation starter. A woman’s dog is a liability.

A nice lady, bless her, asks, “Why don’t you meet women at the dog park?”

What a person who trains dogs thinks when they go to the dog park and sees a woman, especially with large breeds as they often have, is, “Should I even take the chance?”

People are often out of control of their dogs and women are almost invariably completely at the whim of their dogs and in a dangerous, submissive, and protected relationship with their insecure and dominant animals. It is just the byproduct of human nature as it tends to interact with animal nature. They tend to bring them to the dog park because it is fenced and they can’t let them out anywhere else because they have no ability to control them at all.

The only reason I go to a dog park is to put my dog in complicated and somewhat controlled situations with badly trained and excited dogs so I can train my dog how to react to that sort of unstable behavior. It is not an ideal situation to meet people in some cases and it is a place where one should be vigilant of their own dog and of other people and their dogs.

I just had this experience not moments ago: A woman had two very large Weimaraners as I pulled up to the city dog park and went in. I could see she had drove an SUV with a dented fender, also a bad sign, through the window noted she was a middle-aged woman. That was enough to elicit a visceral feeling of apprehension and engender a keen sense of caution. As she got out and walked up, the two admittedly gorgeous beasts were pulling such that she could barely hold them back from the gate. She lamented that she was having trouble, stating, "Mine are not trained like yours." She went into the opposite gate and enclosed area and her dogs were jumping at the fence and barking at the dogs in the section I was in.

She had obviously seen that as I walked up with my unleashed dog, he did not approach other dogs, waited to get out of the car until given permission, waited at the gate, similarly, waited after I opened to gate to proceed, waited again at the second gate, etc. These are all signs of a polite dog and mine is medium sized and a sort of timid dog by nature, so I don't want him suddenly confronted with two very overly excited and strong dogs with the wrong idea of their place in the hierarchy.

A dog trainer can in some cases control one dog, but dogs can have all kinds of trauma, baggage, bad behaviors, aggressive tendencies, unknown triggers etc., and are not so easily controlled, especially not because a woman will often prevent others from controlling her dogs because she has an ego about it. When there are multiple very large and very excited dogs and a woman who thinks they are her babies, and probably has them because she fears men, and a man and stranger tries to exert control, it does not generally turn out as well as it should in the ideal.

It is not as easy or straight forward as Cesar Milan makes it out to be, because he is a professional with decades of experience. He knows that you must control the environment and the stimulus to control a dog, especially powerful breeds. If I had 5-15 minutes with these dogs and could get their owner to go sit in her car at a distance so they could not see her, then yes, I could gain control them both. To do that safely, I would also put my dog away though as well and then introduce him slowly after the situation was more manageable. 

So, while there are many women have the skills and mindset to control dogs and resultingly have a healthy relationship with their dogs, one should be wary of these types of situations. My dog gets lots of attention and starts great conversations with women, but it is a lot smoother and safer when the human is the pack leader and the dogs know it.