Don't be too quick to judge a dog's behavior — sometimes they sense things we can't

President Biden’s German Shepherd Commander was an appallingly vile animal. A junkyard dog inhabiting the nation’s most prestigious address who took hunks out of Secret Service employees like they were ham hocks, Commander finally had to be deposed to the home of a family friend.

“The Secret Service,” wrote The Washington Post, “struggled to keep its agents safe from Commander.” All told, the agents racked up more bites than Bill Dance. In one case a White House tour was halted 20 minutes to give custodians time to clean the blood off the floor.

The Bidens came to understand that Commander was a very bad dog and had to go. “Despite additional dog training, leashing, working with veterinarians, and consulting with animal behaviorists, the White House environment simply proved too much for Commander,” said a spokeswoman for First Lady Jill Biden.

Commander was sent away to live with family friends, and is no longer terrorizing the guys in black suits, so case closed, time to move on.

Except …

Dogs know things, understand what I’m saying? I don’t know how they know, but they know.

I’ve  had many dogs over the years, and as a general thing they love everybody they meet. But every so often there would be that one person who came to the house that the dog would growl or bark or demonstrate against, and finally it had to be put in another room among profuse apologies and embarrassment and protestations that “he’s usually not like that” which, in retrospect, probably didn’t make the visitor feel any better.

If you’re a dog owner you don’t hold it against the person; it could be nothing. I had a Jack Russell terrier once that would go nuts at about every fourth guy who would walk down the street. Everyone else was OK. No clue.

Until one day we figured out that he didn’t like guys in hats. Women in hats were fine. But if, say, a repairman came to the house wearing a hat, Jake would go nuts until the fellow was bare-headed — and then the animal would shut up. I don’t know why; you’d have to ask the dog. But it made sense to him.

With others, however, it would turn out that there was a good reason for the dogs’ agitation — some deceitfulness or other character flaw that the dog could sense even though I couldn’t.

So if my dog doesn't like someone, it doesn’t automatically prejudice me against that person. It’s just a piece of information that you put in the filing cabinet you keep in the back of your head in case something else comes up. “Yeah, the guy seemed OK to me, Freda, not the sort that would be stuffing dismembered corpses in his crawl space. But you know, my dog never liked him …”

So I’m not saying the Secret Service are bad people. But they do seem to end up in a lot more  stuff than, say, your average sheriff’s department.

They failed to investigate what turned out to be gunshots directed at the White House in 2011; a dozen agents were sent home from Columbia a year later for cavorting with hookers; in 2014, three agents were sent home from the Netherlands after being found passed out drunk in a hotel hallway in Amsterdam; during an the investigation into a suspicious package at the White House, two senior agents drove through security barrier after drinking at a party for the agency's retiring spokesman and appeared to have run over the suspicious package itself; two agents were sent home from South Korea after getting rip-roaring drunk and picking a fight with a cab driver. And of course they seemed thick into Jan. 6, and have retirees who get on the radio spouting nonsense.

All I’m saying is that maybe Commander is a bad doggie and then again maybe he ain’t …

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Maybe Commander isn't such a bad dog after all