Kelly is about three and a half months old and we’ve had her for five weeks now. She’s a mutt, an Australian cattle dog & German shepherd mix. She’s a handful, chockablock full of puppy energy and joie de vivre, and cute as the dickens. The latter trait is all that keeps her alive some days since she’s prone to get into trouble and is going through some serious growing and housebreaking pains.
Jessie is a bit over six and a half years old, also a mutt, a yellow lab and German shepherd mix. We got her when my wife and I got married and at the time she was the “beta dog”, brought home as a puppy at which point she became the “little sister” to Lucky, a black lab we had at the time. When we got Kelly, we were hoping that Jessie would transition to being the “big sister” to her.That might not be happening.
Like most of us, Jessie isn’t happy with change, and Kelly wasn’t too thrilled with it either. Kelly cried all the way home when I picked her up, taken away from her family in the middle of a truly dark and stormy night. Jessie was stunned at first and patiently put up with this little ball of energy for the first week or so, but things have gotten more volatile since then. Once Kelly started stealing Jessie’s treats and food, the “alpha dog” wars started in earnest.
Now there’s an uneasy truce, with just a couple of skirmishes a day. Jessie’s a pretty mellow critter on the whole, but after enough harassment by the bouncing pouncing beast, she’ll snap and snarl and Kelly will go whimpering off to hide behind one of her protective humans. We’re debating whether or not it’s best to keep them from each others’ throats or if it would be best to just let them have it out and establish a solid pecking order and a proper pack mentality.
Into this uneasy mix came the cheap 99¢ fluorescent pink “flying disk” toy.
Jessie’s favorite thing in life is chasing the tennis ball. She’ll chase it until her legs fall off, or until you drop from exhaustion from throwing it. Kelly likes chewing on tennis balls (along with everything else in this part of the Solar System) but won’t chase them or bring them back. So the “ball game” has changed a bit with Kelly’s arrival since Jessie is suspicious and will only play with extreme caution when Kelly is out in the yard. You never know when Kelly’s going to snap and start stealing that ball just to ruin the game and upset the natural order of the universe.So at the pet store we pick up this cheap 99¢ fluorescent pink “flying disk” toy. It was nothing more than an impulse buy at the checkout counter. (Or so the gods would have us believe.) We get out in the back yard, give it a toss, and the bizarre mechanism behind the universe reveals a bit of itself.
Kelly chases the disk, only to get knocked off of it by Jessie. Kelly backs off, but Jessie can’t pick the disk up off of the grass. She paws at it for a while, gets nowhere, and finally gets distracted by the tennis ball being thrown. Then Kelly goes over to the flying disk which is still lying on the grass and picks it up just as neat as can be. Without any training or prompting at all, Kelly trots back to me carrying it in her mouth and drops it. Granted, she’s still so small that she can barely carry it without tripping over it, but back to me she comes, pleased as punch with her trick. She might as well be taunting Jessie with a sneering “Neener! Neener!”.
We’re surprised, laughing, borderline stunned. Kelly has shown every indication of being very, very bright, but this is totally unexpected. Where does this instinct to “fetch” come from in dogs? What evolutionary need did that behavior fulfill? Or did she learn this behavior just from observing Jessie bringing back the tennis ball? Can dogs extrapolate like that, put the pieces together, understand a goal (play) and the path (fetch + retrieve + drop) to accomplish it? I didn’t think so, but now I’m not so sure. And if she truly is bright enough to do that, why in the heck can’t she learn to stop biting or peeing in the house?
So I do the natural thing, and the flying disk gets thrown again. (Don’t you totally hate the fact that I don’t even know for sure if I have to refer to it as a “flying disk” instead of by its trade name, but in this litigious day and age I have to err on the side of caution since I don’t want to get a cease & desist order on my very first blot post? But that’s another blog.) Kelly trots off after it, picks it right up, brings it back to me and drops it, while Jessie watches, as stunned as we are.
Again the cheap 99¢ fluorescent pink flying disk toy gets thrown. Again it gets brought back. A fourth time I throw it. And this time Jessie bursts from her shocked stupor and attacks it.
Jessie still can’t find a way to pick it up, her jaw is too big to get under it or something, but she’s seen Kelly do it three times and she’ll die before she’ll give up on it. Jessie pushes the disk all across the yard until it gets bumped up on to the edge of the sidewalk, at which point she can get some leverage on it and get under the edge to pick it up.
Does she bring it back to me to match Kelly’s feat? Does she run off and hide with it? Nope, not enough karma points in the alpha dog competition for either of those choices. Growling to drive a cowering Kelly back under my lawn chair in fear, Jessie brings it over to about five feet in front of us on the grass, plops down in front of us and Kelly – and proceeds to shred the disk into tiny pieces. We’ll be finding bits of that fluorescent pink plastic in her poop for a week.
How much of all of this is our human perceptions and anthropomorphizing acting as a filter, assigning human thoughts and motives to totally non-human actions? And how much of the story actually comes from these domestic critters of ours really and truly acting the same way that we humans would act in a similar situation? I don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days and I was waiting for more data and additional observations.
Tonight we brought home a 99¢ fluorescent orange flying disk toy to replace the mutilated pink one. Jessie was inside at the time and Kelly had a good time playing with it for a few minutes, dutifully bringing it back every time I threw it for about five minutes. Then she took it over onto the grass, dropped it upside down with the concave side up, squatted, and filled it with puppy pee.
Sure enough, that strategy works. Jessie came out, saw the orange disk, went over to steal it, sniffed, and left it alone, wouldn’t touch it. (Of course, neither will I!)
There’s a lesson here, I’m just not sure what it is. But at least Kelly peed outside!
