I’ve owned three dogs before. My latest victim is a maltese, about a year old, who is quite normal in all other aspects (he drools, eats shoes, defecates liberally) but seems abnormally sensitive to the sound of sneezing. Whenever anyone sneezes in range of his hearing, he’ll drop whatever he’s doing, jump a few steps back and then start to bark vehemently in the direction of the sneeze.
So I ask you Dopers - what the hell?
I think it’s just a personality quirk some dogs have. Our late Gordon Setter got freaked out by my mother’s sneezes (and nobody else’s) in the latter part of her life. I always figured that had something to do with my mother’s sneezes being higher-pitched and probably louder than everyone else’s in the house. It is kind of a violent noise.
What I really want to know is, why was that dog so freaked out by the smell of insects? Whenever I took her on a walk and she stopped to sniff, say, a cicada, she would absolutely recoil in disgust.