We have a weird standard of "good" for dogs.
And I don't think we notice it much.

We talk a lot about what dogs should tolerate.
What they should just accept.
And what they should allow us to do.

They should just "behave" when we do it.

But we've created a standard for them we just wouldn't accept for ourselves.

The better behaved they are, the more we seem to expect them to just put up with.
The more they put up with, the more we see them as "good".

Somewhere along the way, a dog's ability to tolerate us became a measure of their behaviour rather than ours.

If our definition of a “good dog” is one who is expected to just absorb everything people ask of them, maybe it isn't the dog whose behaviour needs looking at.

Maybe we've confused tolerance with permission.