I bring my 6 month old puppy Pixel to work and yesterday a coworker brought her 6 or 7 year old son. Normally I would not let a barely-trained 25lb mix of every rough-and-tumble dog breed in existence play with a small kid, but she said he'd be fine because they had two border collies at home, and he wanted to play with her. I'm no party pooper.
They ran up and down the hall for a bit with her bouncing up to bite at his ears while he squealed in delight. Mothers have threatened to sue me for less, so I admit I was on edge even though I knew she's been trained not to play too rough. Then she flopped on the ground and let him rub her belly for a while. He tried to push her back up to play some more but she would not.
Queue the hysterical scene of this boy alternately dragging and pushing a limp dog half his size through my office door. He closed the gate and left and she still didn't get up.
I could tell she was dumbfounded by the whole experience. Later when he came back to play again she mostly just sat there looking at him and looking at me as if to say "is this legal?"
When he left for the day she screamed like she was losing her best friend, which I've never seen her do before. He came back to give her one more pat and she got over it.
I'm really lucky she got to have such a good first experience with a little kid who knew how to behave around dogs, and I'm glad she seems to have a good temperament for it. My big old pyrenees/shepherd/cattle dog mix has to wear a muzzle around kids because he sees them as rowdy misbehaving livestock. Which, same, but you can't pinch them with your teeth regardless.
