My Brittany named Lou has a very useful albeit dangerous obsession. She is technically a bird dog but her real passion is pointing,stalking and killing bees. Also hornets, wasps, yellow jackets, mosquitoes and other flying stinging insects. She ignores flys though, apparently they must not present enough of a threat or a challenge.
She has a definite technique and is quite amazing to watch. She snaps at them while they are in the air and smacks them with her paw when they are on the ground. She rarely gets stung but even when she does, it doesn’t deter her from her mission. Once they are dead she leaves them alone. We used to try to discourage her from bee hunting but we have given up on trying to convert her. It is something she has to do I guess.
Apparently this is a learned behavior because my other Britanny Buck is not so lucky or clever. He points bees as well but he gets stung if he tries to catch them. He got stung yesterday and he pouted under an end table for an hour just laying there licking his paw and looking stupid. BTW Lou went and killed the bumble bee that got him. Just doing her job.
The late great springer spaniel Miss Emily Kimberly loved to snap at flies. She would get a really weird look on her face when she actually caught them. Maybe they tasted bad (I wouldn’t know!).
The bit about getting stung reminded me of Emily’s first kill. She had been rooting around in a pile of hay while Mr. S, his brother, and I stood by talking; suddenly she yiped, then pulled her head out of the hole she’d made, with a big old bloody rat in her teeth. It wasn’t quite dead, so Mr. S’s brother finished it off. But as we were petting and praising her (as if killing your own rat isn’t its own reward!) we realized that some of the blood on her nose was hers. The rat apparently had bitten her first, and her response was, “Bite me? BITE YOU!” And she had a bigger bite than the rat.
And of course she always loved chasing mousies and bunnies. In her last summer she had great fun dispatching a baby squirrel that our cats had treed. It squeaked delightfully. (I watched the whole thing and couldn’t decide whether to be disgusted or fascinated.)
Buck has a thing for bunnies although he gets yelled at for chasing them. He didn’t kill them he just liked to walk around with them in his mouth. Once last fall after he had been scolded for chasing the bunnies he came back with his head down. We could hear a baby bunny sceaming and were looking around for it. Finally my husband realized that the sound was comming from inside Buck’s mouth!!! He asked Buck, “do you have a bunny”? and the dog just turned his head away as if to say “I don’t hear you, besides what bunny? I don’t know anything about a bunny”
My hubby had to pry Buck’s mouth open and rescue this poor terrified still screaming creature from the back of Buck’s mouth. The bunny was perfectly intact although really slobbery (is that a word?) and scared half to death. We let him down and he just hopped off.
Too hilarious!! I love it – “What bunny?” Dogs are never good at poker face. Emily did that too once. All the other bunnies she ever encountered came to a bad end.
For a while our outside cats had quite a streak going. My home office windows face the front yard and driveway, and at least once a day a movement would catch my eye, and I’d see one of the cats tormenting some small critter for quite some time before finishing it off. I even put up a note by the front door so Mr. S would see it:
My oldest dog Grizzly likes to snatch bees and wasps out of the air. A couple of times I’ve seen him get one, and then an awful look would come over his face, like he just got a taste of something awful. Venom would be my guess. Stupid dog.
He’s old and creaky now, but he sure knows how to play it up when people are around. In the house, it’s like he’s on his last legs. Yet when he’s out in the yard and I’m secretly watching him from inside, he’ll spot a squirrel and haul ass after it, barking his crusty head off. OK, so it’s more like a fast hobble, but he manages to move pretty good when he wants to.
My dog, a poodle named Zack,
got stunged by a wasp once,
and does he ever forget that??
No.
As soon as he hears the sound of a wasp, a bee or a fly,
his tail goes down and he wants to go home.
If I have him loose it’s hard to get him to stop
from running home.
My poor dog is afraid for flyes.
My Golden Retriever Kona also went through a short – a very short - phase where he took to snapping at honeybees. It seemed okay because at thet age he was so uncoordinated it didn’t seem likely he’d ever catch one. Of coarse I came home one day I to find his muzzle swollen and puffed up like a cartoon Snoopy.
Now he contents himself by tormenting the squirrel population of the local park.
nod the naughty cornered a yellow jacket in the bathtub once. i came home and saw half a body in the tub. then i saw noddie’s nose. a bit bigger on one side and bright red. the stinger was still in her nostril. i got it out with a pair of tweezers, and dropped her by the vet’s the next day. she was only 1 pound size at the time. it took about a week for her nose to look normal. she still has a bit of a bump on her nose from it. it hasn’t stopped her from bug hunting though.
This reminded me of another close encounter – the day I turned around to see Zack the parakeet (who loved to bite things) perched on the edge of the aquarium, with about one inch beak-to-nose distance from a very curious guinea pig (who also loved to bite things). I grabbed Zack just in time. That would have been a bloody, noisy mess, I’m sure.
