Internet Email Lists and Web Boards

I belong to a few of these. Belg-L (for Belgian Breeds,) Tibetan Terrier Topica List (need to update so I can get on with my new email) SitStay for Belgians, AKC Obedience and the Agile List for agility. There are other boards I'll visit every so often, such as SchH boards to see what people have to say but I'm not a contributor.

There is a funny joke about "How many people on a web board does it take to change a light bulb?" And the answer is something like "One person to state the obvious, one person to contradict him, another person to take the door off the hinges instead of changing the bulb, someone else to call everyone bad names" and so on. I think a lot of the problems in these type of places come from people not reading posts critically, or maybe, just not reading them period. They scan the email, see something they don't like, fire off a heated reply and the original poster comes back and points out, "But I didn't even say snow is black, I said the sky looks extra black on snowy nights."

I don't spend a whole lot of time contributing to the lists. Mostly I am there to learn. But every so often I'll share an accomplishment or a funny story. More rarely will I reply to something someone else posted. Today I did.

On the obedience list people were commenting how they feel heads up heeling (where the dog is trained to look at your face while heeling,) which they were calling the "head crank," leads to injuries. I'll share my thoughts on that in a second post. I shared my thoughts on the email list, also stating that while everyone has their own prefered method of heeling, I wanted to address the idea that the heads up style causes injuries. Which I then went on to write about. Other contributors also felt the heads up style is not natural and since the regs say obedience should be natural, that was another mark against heads up. I also responded that nothing about AKC obedience is natural, so it is silly to complain about one style of heeling, without addressing all the other unnatural aspects of AKC obedience.

Which brings be back to my idea of the problems with contributing to email lists. One of the posters wrote back to say I'm entitled to my opinions as long as I recognize that she is entitled to her opinions and don't deny her the right to her own opinion and that her opinion is she doesn't like heads up heeling and that she wasn't "complaining" it was unnatural, she just said she didn't like it. Well, a different poster had that very complaint and when did I ever say someone was wrong for not liking it or that no one else was allowed to have a different opinion? But since I am a rational and non-argumentative person, I am not posting another email defending myself. It wouldn't accomplish anything and would probably just turn into he said, she said. But I know other people would and then the email list would be clogged up with an argument that started because she didn't read the other emails in the thread and because she thinks my difference of opinion somehow denies her the right to her own opinion.

Email lists and message boards are great tools for eduction. People who come to them looking for help (Q:"My dog keeps vomiting yellow bile, what should I do? " A: "Probiotics! And change foods also.") usually are at least pointed in the right direction. But people who already have set opinions are not going to be swayed. If the person is just repeating an idea they heard from someone else ("Heads up heeling causes neck injuries in dogs.") then perhaps a well-worded rebuttal to that may cause them to think for themselves. But the old arguments of show vs. working lines in Belgians and other arguments that are rehashed over and over never change anyone's mind. But I suppose reading all those emails is a way to pass the time if you are separated from your dogs by 2,000 miles.