He’s a big 80lb golden retriever. The cat in question is 8lbs soaking wet.
I have to rescue Sparky daily from the stairs, because he doesn’t want to come up all the way in case Tornado (the cat) is hiding at the top waiting to eat him. Before we got Tornado, it was Kaia who intimidated him. She liked to sit by his water so that he couldn’t get to it, or trap him in his crate (we always left the door open, and he went in there to sleep) by sleeping on top with one paw hanging down into the doorway.
I think it’s the breed. My golden boy is the sweetest guy you’d ever want to meet–smart, affectionate, talented :)–but he is also the biggest baby when something startling happens. Many’s the time I’ve found him squeezed under my desk after my other dog has heard a noise and gone off to bark at it. I’ve seen him paralyzed with fear upon having spotted a squirrel or rabbit in the yard. It’s just his way.
Same situation in my house. We have three (over 70 lbs each) dogs. What is guaranteed to stop all of them in their tracks? My little black female cat Abby. Two of the dogs eat downstairs, and Abby’s favorite trick is to block the way at dinner time. Sometimes she waits until they are done, and when they try to come up the stairs she sits in the middle of the stairs - and they mill around all confused until I pick her up and move her.
Abby likes to sleep in the middle of the floor, and the dogs will make a wide path around her if they need to get by her. It is really funny, but I feel sorry for them sometimes. Abby is really bossy.
Crease (a Cardigan Welsh corgi) is weird. She’s afraid of everything new but puts on a really good show of being a watch dog.
When she was a tiny puppy, everything new or out-of-place was scary and bark-at-able.
We put up the Christmas tree.
ROOROOROOROOROO!!!
:::mohawk appears down the center of her back::
I tell her soothingly, “It’s okay Crease. Come over here and smell it.” She slowly creeps up on it, inch by inch… When she figures out it isn’t alive, everything’s fine, bouncy bouncy waggy waggy.
I hang my coat over the half-wall at the top of the stairs; it is visible from our living room below.
ROOROOROOROOROO!!!
:::mohawk appears down the center of her back::
I tell her soothingly, “It’s okay Crease. Come over here and smell it.” She slowly creeps up on it, inch by inch… When she figures out it isn’t alive, everything’s fine, bouncy bouncy waggy waggy.
Other bark-at-able stuff included a car parked in a strange place on our circle, trash blowing by in the wind, a plastic butler we have who holds our keys…
She repeated this behavior, ad nauseum, 'til she was about two years old. She’s still incredibly barky, but at normal stuff. Other dogs, squirrels, etc.
My dog is scared of the lamanant flooring in my house.He will whine if you tug him onto it… he pretty much stays in the same 5 feet that is carpeted the whole time he’s inside.
If puppies experience “trauma” it can lead too weird-ass phobias.
I knew someone whose dog was afraid of raw potatoes. She was peeling potatoes one day and her puppy got under foot. She tripped on the little, wee doggy and dropped the potato. It bounced off his nose. Ouch!
He is now terrified of raw potatoes. Cooked – no problem. Raw – …scaaaaarrry!
Crease used to avoid storm drains like the plague. We’d be walking down the street, everything’s fine, when suddenly she would STOP. She wouldl not MOVE. She’d be looking down the street at something… But I couldn’t tell what. Nothing moving… Oh. Right. The storm drain a half-mile away that I can’t believe she actually sees!!!
It took months of picking her up, taking her to the storm drain, making her sit next to it and giving her treats for her to stop being afraid of them. Now she goes and sits by them, like “Look, I found the storm drain. I’m not afraid. Okay, where’s my treat?”
My cat hisses at the air registers, but only when the AC/heat is turned off. I’m not sure if he’s saying “nyah nyah nyah, can’t scare me now” or if he likes the sound of his own hiss echoing back at him. (All of our registers are on the floor, and he’ll sit right over it and hiss for hours.) I used to think there was something crawling around in there, but my dad checked it out and said it was ok.
I had a deaf cat who liked to yowl into the air registers when we slept in on the weekend and he wanted out of his room (he was naughty at night, so he was put to bed in his own room). We had no idea how he knew that we could hear him quite clearly thoughout the house when he did this – the sound carried through the vents and it was almost like he was in the room with you. We gueesed that perhaps there was a reverb or echo effect that allowed him to hear his own voice better. (He was born with membranes that blocked his ear canal like natural earplugs.)
The cat I have now will “sing” like crazy if he finds a “sweet spot” that has good reverb/echo.
My Kirby is a Chow/Golden Retriever cross, and while he’s not exactly wimpy in terms of being scared of anything, he will let other dogs walk all over him. He likes it, too. He’d be submissive to the cats, too, but they were scarred by the last two dogs I had, so they don’t spend much time downstairs where Kirby lives. I keep trying to tell the cats that he’s completely harmless, and if they’d just come downstairs, they’d all get along fine. He looks up when he sees them, but doesn’t chase them, or even get up.
