Angel, our blue heeler/hound mix, will pull your hand back when you stop scratching her. She will put her paw on top of your hand and pull it towards her. It’s adorable.
My (now dead) Boston Terrier would howl to music, no matter how faint it was.
I am light sleeper, and my alarm is the local classic rock station. she slept on the bed with me but she would start howling immediately as soon as the alarm played which bugged the crap out of me.
It would force me to turn off the alarm and turn on the TV so I would have some company.
My (also deceased) bulldog would not eat in kitchen where she was fed. She grap a mouthful of dry food and drop into the living and eat with me. If I scolded her, she would leave the food there, if I let her be, she would eat every crumb. I learned not to scold her.
We had a spaniel mix that my step-father brought home from the pound. I named him after Max Headroom.
What? it was the 80’s.
At any rate, he was the most laid back dog I ever had. We used to have our TV trays in the living room so we could eat dinner while we watched, and he would go grab a bit of food from his bowl and bring it in the living room to eat with us.
That dog pretty much never barked, and if he ever did pipe up, you knew there was something to investigate.
If you read any description of a Boston Terrier, that’s exactly my dog, aside from the “good watch dog” thing. I mean, I think he’d see burglars, but then he’d probably help them carry stuff out of my house. Playing fetch, he’s happily taken the ball up to strangers. Inside the house, he will take the ball up to whoever he thinks is ignoring him the most, no matter how many people are playing with him – we all have to be playing.
Picture (careful, it’s large): http://www.glpics.com/courk/IMG_0223.JPG
The beloved mini poodle that was my childhood dog wasn’t really interested in them either, fwiw. She liked being petted, ears scritched, etc. But belly rubs? Nah.
Zara is a 2.5 year old Chocolate Lab. She has her quirks.
While I call her my “Stomach on 4 legs”, she won’t touch liver. I have never met a dog that won’t eat liver. But at Christmas I nicely cooked the liver & heart from the turkey just for her. I chopped it and added it to her dry chow. She wouldn’t touch it! I had to pick out the liver before she would eat her regular food. And even so, she left the couple of fragments of liver that I missed.
At some point as a bitey puppy she figured out that if she had something in her mouth she didn’t get yelped at and scolded/ ignored. So now when she is excited she will grab whatever is closest to hand (mouth?) and hold it while she is petted. So usually when we arrive home from work, this means a shoe or mitten is held in her mouth while she gets her scritches. And she very nicely drops it after the petting time is done. Of course as a former owner of chewers it always freaks me out when she picks up an expensive pair of shoes. But thankfully, as a retriever she has a very gentle mouth.
The whole when to bark or not is interesting … if left out in the backyard at night she will bark furiously at shadows (hence why she is rarely let out on her own after dark) She only does normal barking (eg at other dogs on the other side of the fence) in the day. But inside the house she DOES NOT bark. Given that the doorbell is not audible in some rooms of the main floor (eg can hear it in the kitchen, but not the family room) it would be really nice if she would bark at the door rather than just stand there wagging her tail at the person looking through the window in the door. (That has been me when I forgot my key, I can tell you how annoying it is as I beg her to bark to let the kids know I am here … )
And of course, she is one of those dogs that flat (un)stuffed animals were invented for. Since any stuffed animal quickly becomes an unstuffed animal in her presence.
The Kimber dog is a tad obsessed with hygiene. She demands tooth brushings and comes running when I fire up the Sonicare. She likes floss, it doesn’t have to be flavored and she’ll stare expectantly until you actually floss her. She regularly demands to be let into the shower. When she’s wet she insists on being dried off thoroughly and now loves the hair drier. I don’t think she actually likes toenail trims but she’ll hold out her paw for me.
Yesterday I took her snowshoeing and she got chest dreadlocks from all the snowballs. My dad started combing out the tangles and she looked positively exultant; he quit after 2 hours and she started to pout when he wouldn’t continue, we had to give her a bone to stop the dramatics.
Mackie (our Scottish Terrier) likes to lap at the water left from our showers.
Shelby, our basset hound, would always take the first mouthful of food away from the bowl to chew it. The rest of the food she would eat from the bowl. She also bit Mackie hard enough once to make Mackie yelp - Shelby had absolutely no use for Mackie’s existence (though she was close to our previous Scotty, Fergie.) Shelby also ignored our daughter as much as possible - never came when Sophia called her, etc.
For every single dog I’ve had in my house(s) through my life, from kid-onward, I always ended up the Alpha… even if the dog was my college roommates, I ended up being the Alpha.
Fergie would howl along with you. Shelby would try, but ended up barking. Mackie just looks put out.
Both Fergie and Shelby seemingly wanted to be more than dogs. Mackie is happy being a dog.
* sob *
Now I miss my Bostons. I had two, Tipzy and Hurshell, and both got old and died within the past year and a half. I was concerned that, if I got a new Boston, I’d project my feelings for them on to a new pup and that might not be fair (different personality perhaps), so I decided to go with a rescued something-else. I don’t regret my choice until I meet up with a Boston or see a pic like this, and then… ew, something in my eye. (Also, I could fill the internet with tales of weird stuff they did, but I’ll focus on NewDog.)
This is Harriet, my new girl. The rescue organization told me she was an American Bulldog-pointer mix. They also told me she’s a 40-pound dog. :rolleyes: More like 72.
Weird stuff she does:
• She’s a hoarder. She steals my shit and stashes it in her little contraband pile. She has two contraband piles. The one outside is near the fire pit. Currently she has a chime from a broken windchime she found, the grate from my little Hibachi grill, a broken crutch that I was using as a plant stake, a bit of copper pipe, several oyster shells, and some broken Pindo palm tree branches that she actually* tore off the damn tree*. :eek: Her indoor stash pile gets cleaned up every night, but she drags her blankie out of her crate, pulls it to a corner of the living room, and then starts stealing non-dog things to stash on top of it (my shoes, kitchen towels, pillows, anything fabric or stuffed, like a comforter, or plastic, like the remotes, my phone, or my CDs and DVDs, the veggie scrubber from the kitchen sink, whatever she can get her teef on). She’ll lay in the middle of her loot pile and gnaw on her most recent acquisition. She will also gather up all her toys and stash them there with my stuff.
•She chases the cat around. He kicks her butt and will grab her big blockhead with his paws and bite her as hard as he can right in the face. I swear, she just giggles and goes in for another nip, tail wagging furiously. That’s not weird, I suppose, but the cat is becoming her Bestie whenever I’m not around and me and Rick Santorum will always find it a little weird when dogs and cats lay down for a nap together. The only time she “talks” is when she’s bothering the kitty and she woo-woos at him constantly, talking shit, but saying nothing.
•She’s not much of a barker, although she is a very good guard dog and lets me know when someone is on the porch. I don’t have a doorbell and do not need one. She whines at the door instead of barking.
• I can’t get her to eat her breakfast from her bowl in the mornings. I have to stuff it inside her Kong toys, cap it with peanut butter or cream cheese (we’ve switched to fat free cream cheese 'cause she’s getting hefty) and drop those in her crate. She evidently likes the challenge. In the evening, she’ll straight up gobble her supper down from the bowl, but breakfast has to be a puzzle toy game.
• Recently, she developed the habit of opening kitchen drawers, stealing something from them, and then racing over to her stash pile to gnaw on it for a minute. I think it’s a game designed to get me to chase her. When I bought the house, the previous owners had three little kids, so they had those child safety latches on every damn drawer and cabinet door in the house. I found that to be a colossal pain in my ass and took 'em all off. This weekend, I picked up a few more and went back around and put 'em all back on. I was delighted when it worked! Five minutes out of her crate, Harriet was all over the bottom kitchen drawer and the child safety latch worked! Mwah ha ha ha ha. I looked at her and laughed and said, “Ha! Foiled are ya? Bwah ha ha ha!” Satisfied with my superior two-legged, big-brain thinky skills, I decided I’d put the safety latches on my stereo cabinet doors as well because she keeps stealing my CDs and trying to eat them. I crated her for ten minutes and put the latches on. She came out and immediately investigated the situation and was foiled again. I was all giddy with glee that I’d finally outsmarted my own damn dog. Until about an hour later when I was washing dishes and realized I could hear nothing coming from the general location of the stash pile. I went into the living room to check it out, and there she was… with the stereo cabinet door wide open, and the child safety latches in gnawed up pieces, in the stash pile. She was working on the doors when I got to her. :smack:
She is so much smarter than I am. 
I’m thinking of teaching her how to fold the laundry. She might as well earn her keep.
Patience the Labrador (now nearly two years old) still has occasions when the silicon chip inside her head gets switched to Overload, causing her to race in circles or madly back and forth, sometimes accompanied by panting, barking, lunging and other manifestations of craziness. This can happen due to odd sounds or as the result of disciplinary measures.
For instance, a couple nights ago I was watching a Law and Order SVU episode which ended with the customary logo of a wolf (with brief howl). I let out a howl of my own in solidarity, and Patience went nuts.
Oddly, last night she should have been provoked to do the same thing - I took her out for her final bathroom stop and we were greeted by the sounds of multiple coyote howlings not far away. It got her attention, but no looniness ensued.
My teacup German Shepard (all 165 lbs. of him - it’s a big purse I carry him around in :D) has learned many things. He can “moo”. He also enjoys books, football and stock cars.
Yes, I taught my dog how to “moo”. I do not remember why, I do not remember (other than gin) what could have possibly motivated me to teach my dog to go “moo.” But he moos. He moo’s when he wants a bone, he moo’s when he wants me to read to him (YES - I read to the dog! There’s nothing WRONG with that! We’re in the midst of reading Salem’s Lot right now - but we can’t read it tongiht because we’re watching the Daytona 500 (he loves NASCAR too)). And I will give him some ice cream shortly.
But anyway. My dog watches Football and NASCAR on TV, reads with me, and moos. So I think he’s pretty cool.
well my dog has a habit of sleeping at sofa arm I find it funny
So this is kind of old but… it isn’t worth a new thread.
My dog got out last week while I was at work. She celebrated her new-found freedom by … laying on the porch all day and waiting for me to come home. How many dogs do you know would be still be there once they got out?
Your dog must love you very much! My dog, if he got out, would have a plane tticket and a cab reaady to take him to O’Hare before the door slammed shut. 
Ha! My dog has severe separation anxiety; he is prescribed xanax daily for it. I don’t like to give it to him because reading here I know it’s addictive. I don’t want an addictive dog. And it doesn’t seem to work anyway.
So one day the neighbor’s dead tree fell through our fence. Perro got out and bloodied himself somehow (pawpad), but also, met the neighbors, whose phone message (we have a tag on the dog with our number) said “we saw your dog running around the neighborhood and tried to catch him but he slipped his collar, which we have, and now he is running laps around the neighborhood without his collar… (phone#etc).”
Thank God we found him three houses down, barking at the dogs behind their fence, and got him in the car.
And this isn’t even the beginning. He has destroyed three doors and is now working on the one we shielded with metal; he got really far this time (the doorknob is dented, the metal which was nailed down was pulled back, doornail tips showing) and is really limping now, although there is no blood, just some swelling which he’s had in that paw for months. He also clawed at a “doorway” which has no door; it’s from our bedroom to the closet, then through to the bathroom. Bloody claw marks on the wall. We are monitoring the situation. We can’t afford to go to a vet who will tell us “gee I don’t know” which is the answer we always get. We lost a previous dog of the same breed I think because none of the vets had ever seen one and didn’t realize the issue the last one had until it was too late. I don’t want to go again and have an “experienced” vet tell me “duh I don’t know” like every other vet we’ve ever had has done.
…uhm let’s see, my terrier is so lazy to bark, I mean she better say a yawn like sound than woof. I barely hear it from her, though apart from that she’s such a lovely and sweet dog.