My terrier mutts, Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl, formerly the Little Girls before they got a taste for blood, have nailed another squirrel and a rabbit in our back yard. They don’t eat them; they just kill them and drop them in a hole Diggy Dog has been, well, digging. (I don’t think he knew he was digging a cache. He just likes to dig and there isn’t an Aztec god who’s a complete wimp that likes to dig.)
What happened with the squirrel is that they cornered it, then Quetzi flushed it and Huitzi killed it, biting through its heart so she got a mouth, chest, and stomach full of blood, which she threw up later from all of the excitement. With the rabbit, wife said they jumped from their blind and double-teamed it.
“Blind? What blind,” I asked.
“Diggy dug them one on the yard side of the juniper bush like the one he dug on the other side so he could spy on the neighbors. He keeps dry leaves out of them so they don’t make any noise. I think he’s hoping for bison to come by, but when the neighbors were all drinking and doing some home improvements he and Grand Bulldog sat in it and watched them for hours, like it was a comedy show.”
“Dogs make and use blinds?”
“They do.”
So, the question is: Do dogs make and use blinds? Never heard of it myself, though other animals do. OTOH, I already knew dogs like slapstick humor.
You ask a very legitimate question, but I find myself somewhat distracted by your choice for the names of your dogs. Why Aztec? Do you use their entire multi-syllabic names when you call them?
Hrrr… I see in review that they are named Huitzi and Quetzi.
Nice… very nice.
One of my closest friend has a delightful canine named ‘Bella’.
That is short for ‘Canni-Bella’. First litter didn’t go so well for all involved.
Sometimes, we forget that they aren’t really humans.
Maybe it’s an instinct to build a den and it just so happens it makes an excellent blind. That’s all I got.
Dogs (like their ancestral wolves) generally are pursuit hunters, not ambush predators like cats. It sounds like they have just adopted a concealed resting place, that fortuitously enables them to get the jump on prey. I don’t think this is typical behavior.
I have hunted with dogs most of my life. The only dogs I have seen working from blinds are mostly small breeds like terriers and my chihuahua. They seem to have more of an ambush style than some of the larger dogs. When my girlfriend puts food out for the squirrels my dog will lay very still crouched behind natural cover for an ambush, I have never witnessed him or any other dog modify a natural blind but I do believe they probably do in some cases. They may have learned it by accident. I put myself on ther believer side.
I think Foghorn Leghorn put it best:
“Mutts, Ah say, mutts is nuts.”
Sounds like you need another little dog to double-team the tree rats. My Cockers used this method: The old one would dodder along absent-mindedly, then when she had a squirrel’s attention she would show great interest in something she found, smelling it and digging at it. Rodents are too curious for their own good (coyotes use this trick on prairie dogs) and would climb out of a tree to see what was so interesting. Then the other dog would nail it and they would play tug of war with the carcass until it tore in two. I think they ate them completely because I’d find chunks of squirrel tail fur in their stool.