My little chihuahua is a very enthusiastic greeter. When one of us returns from being out he goes ballistic for about two minutes with barking, harmless biting, licking, jumping flipping, screeching etc.
If one of us happens to be asleep when the other returns he exhibits the exact same behavior but silently, no sounds. I don't think this is out of courtesy as he has done this since I first brought him home as a just weened 6 week old pup. Now he runs to his toy box and stuffs a teddy bear into his own mouth so he won't make noise.
I have tried to figure out what survival trait this stems from and all I can come up with is that he would not want to wake litter mates and have more competition for food. Any other theories? Anyone elses dog do this? If so breed?
Just pulling it out of my ass, but maybe his instincts are telling him “Don’t make a lot of noise when one of the pack is asleep and can’t protect me”.
My late dog nephew Buddy would stay over occasionally and bark silently while I was asleep. Dogs are pretty smart, they understand that they’ll wake someone up if they make noise.
Then you have Mackie, our 9yo Scottish Terrier, who, when met with stairs for the first time in a LONG time, took about 4 minutes to finally get down the first flight, whereupon seeing that she had another flight of about 15 stairs to go down, chuffed and ran back upstairs, whining the whole way.