Everyday I go for a walk up into the mountains across the street from where I live. It’s mostly on old logging roads and trails. The whole area is heavily forested and there is lots of wildlife like rabbits, deer, elk, bears, cougars, weasels and tons of birds.
My German Shepherd, Hannah, always goes with me. Occasionally we’ll be walking along and she’ll stop, put her head up and sniff around, trying to home in on whatever she smells. Often her nose hits the ground and she’s off tracking and the bunny or whatever gets chased off (she’s mostly always on-leash so she can’t actually get it).
But once in a while after the sniffing-in-the-air thing, her ears go down, her hair goes up and she’s outta there, pulling me with all her strength. I’ll be saying to her “what? WHAT??? I don’t see anything, there’s nothing there!”. And I’ll stop and stare into the woods trying to see what she sees. This just happened again yesterday.
I’m being dragged away but I manage to stop so I can look, and look and look and I can’t see a damned thing but she’s acting like the devil himself is standing over there. Just as I’m about to turn away I see the bear that had been standing up, looking at us, drop to all fours and walk away. He was about 50 feet away.
To her, it must look like neon signs and flashing arrows saying “BEAR HERE!!!” and there’s the half blind, half deaf, slow-witted human going “what?? WHAT?? there’s nothing there!”. Poor dog .
I was hiking with my family in the remote Sierras a while back, we lost the trail about 3 hours hike from base camp (itself 2 days from the trail head). We’d been following cairns across a tilted sheet of granite about a half mile square, and unfortunately if you stepped off the trail the cairns immediately looked exactly like all the other piles of rocks which littered the area. It was my turn to get altitude sickness that day, and I was really nauseated, weak, and dizzy. While the others searched fruitlessly I leaned in the shadow of a boulder and tried not to puke.Our Aussie happily ran after the searchers, ran back to me, sniffed around.
Finally I said to her hopelessly, “Oh Bonnie, I wish we could just go home.” She looked at me brightly, ran to where the trail back invisibly entered the forest, and stood there waiting. Exactly saying, “Well, if I’d known what the heck you were looking for, dimwit.”
Since I’m not sure that Skald will be sending out flying monkeys to deal with things like this, I’ve dispatched Fez-wearing bears to have a chat with you about this post.
They’re traveling by unicycle, so there may be a slight delay before arrival. Please be patient.
I’ve only been the host of a dog once in my life. Our dog was Pamplemousse, who, as her name implies, was “a yellow dog”. Not yet full-grown, a biggish otherwise-nondescript pup. My wife and I were house-sitting for a few months in a village in Bolivia. On Christmas, we decided to do a Christmas bird count, and split up in order to maximize area covered and species found. I got back home and she wasn’t back yet, but I knew Papllemousse had gone with her. So I asked Pamplemusse “Where’s Mommy”. The dog ran out the door, and looked back at me, so I followed. About a half mile down a mountain trail, I met her, straggling back home. She had fallen where a cliff gave way, and knocked herself out, for an unknown duration, and recovered and started to head for home. Pamplemousse had come to get me and lead me back to her.
Earlier, only a couple of days after we had taken up residence, I went for a walk down by the river, with Pamplemousse along. I was trying to make a circle walk and I knew I must be near home, but I didn’t know how to get there, save for retracing my steps, so I said “Pamplemousse, lets go home”. Pamplemousse then was still a Hispanophone dog, but understood what I was asking, and led me through the woods, with no trail, a couple hundred meters to our house. The dog had never been to that place before we were, she came the same timw we did, as were ware watching over the construction of the house which had never been occupied.
Our dog is smart in her way, but her senses aren’t great, never have been by dog standards and she’s getting older now. I sometimes see wildlife before she does. But if she saw a bear she’d be pulling full strength toward it. She believes she is the apex predator of planet earth. And pound for pound, when she was young anyway, you couldn’t entirely dismiss her argument. But I wouldn’t count on her for wisdom about when to retreat.
No your dog is very intelligent you’re the one that stupid ! I have a mini poodle mix I think part terrier we had coyotes and foxes in our yard and once a coyotes came right up my dog and started sniffing his butt! I yelled and the coyote ran off, so when my dog poke his nose up in the air and pull his tail between his legs and
want to go back inside I listen to him! Your is dog is trying to save your damn ass
and you really should be listening to your dog body language . I am hard of hearing and didn’t even hear the coyote come right up to us, I was waiting for my dog to pee and when I looked down there was my dog with a coyote sniffing his little butt! If I had been looking down at my dog the whole time I would notice his body language and went back into inside.
Well, we can pretend that’s it but I’m pretty sure that if she was off-leash when there was danger, she’d wish me luck and meet me back at home!
Yeah sometimes when I’m not sure where the path is, I have to remind myself to just follow Hannah because she always, always knows where it is. One time we were walking and came to a fork and she wanted to go down the narrow path and I was sure we needed to go down the heavily used wide trail so we did. After a few minutes I realized that nope, she had been right so back we went and took the path she wanted.
I was outside with my dog one night and he got all excited about a sense so I let him sniff around. I was thinking it was a rabbit and my dog walked me right up to a skunk that was going after the trash bags ! The skunk had very little white on it back so I didn’t see it right away . :eek: I don’t do this anymore at night , if my dog get too excited about a smell I use my flashlight to see what out there.
The OP referenced the perception of a dog that must think a human is stupid (his exact words). It hardly seems out of line to continue that thought and make jocular reference that a human might actually be, as implied, relatively stupid.
Read it wrong. Dogs LOVE danger, especially large, herding breeds. They can handle wolves and smaller (their lower canines jut out to disembowel wolves) but they expect you to join in the fun. Bring a .44mag or a .30-06, minimum, for bears, but they aren’t looking for trouble. A dusting of 000 shot on their hindquarters, and a solid bite by Man’s Best Friend, should send them packing. The three of our species have been playing this game for millenia, and only some humans don’t know how it plays out.
Leopards are the ones to watch out for, but we have few of them in Illinois.
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