Behaviour Archives - Page 11 of 13

Category: Behaviour Page 11 of 13

So our dog growled a little…

On May 7, 2013

Donna and Doudou met for the first time last week before the National Geographic Free Pet Shop event. We wanted to make sure they are comfortable with each other before we attempt to drive both dogs to East Coast Park.

picture taken by our cousin’s boyfriend

It never really registered in our minds how small a mongrel Donna is until we saw her beside Doudou, who is still a puppy! Donna is already 4 years old. Donna appears stockier in the chest, while Doudou appears more streamlined. She is a pretty dog.

The meeting went well. The two dogs sniffed but did not take to each other like a house on fire. They were happy doing their own things but we walked together with no trouble. So we thought driving together should be fine. In fact, given that they were neutral and not overly interested in each other, we thought that the drive should be relatively peaceful.

But on the day itself, Donna growled a little at Doudou when they got on the back seat next to her. I reactively grabbed her so that she doesn’t do anything physically threatening to the other dog and she dropped the growling pretty fast although our cousin said she growled a second time. The rest of the trip went pretty smooth. The two dogs didn’t interact as Doudou had her head on our cousin’s lap the whole way. Donna sniffed Doudou a few times but that was it. Donna was restive but that is normal for her on a drive even without a second dog. I petted Donna a lot more than usual in the car since I wasn’t sure what prompted her to growl in the first place.

Once off the car, both dogs did get opportunities to mix in the same space but there was no further growling and interaction between the two dogs was minimal even when they were in the same space.

Two things straight off my mind,

if we were to drive another dog the next time, I would put the two humans in the back seat in between the dogs so that they are not sitting side by side.
it bugged me that our normally quiet if at times fearful dog continues to be labelled as the dog that does not get along well with other female dogs (it’s a preconception people involved in the shelter have during her shelter days). Would it not have been the way we went about getting both dogs in the car that triggered the incident rather than blame it on the dog? Given that’s the case, what would have been the best way to have managed that introduction? Perhaps we should have alighted the car with Donna first. Perhaps we should have walked the two dogs before getting them on the car. Would that have helped?

My crazy dog likes to eat grass

By weliveinaflat

On May 5, 2013

In Behaviour

So she developed a split second interest in mynahs today. For a while she was heading towards them, then she got distracted by the grass. So what’s new.

*Phone rings.*

Mr P: I’m coming back now, where are you?

*Dog starts to pluck nonchalantly at the grass.*

me: I’m walking the dog… She’s eating grass.

Mr P: Quick stop her!

me: *looks at my one hand holding the leash and the other hand holding the phone* I can’t. We’re surrounded by grass.

Mr P: *Sigh* That’s why you should stick to the path. Pull the leash.

me: But I don’t want to hurt her neck… I’m sticking my thumb in her mouth… She’s going to chew it off any minute now.

Hare-brained. I know.

So anyway why does Donna eat grass? I stumbled on this video which tries to explain why dogs eat grass.

So I guess, Donna is either bored or she just enjoys eating grass on occasion. I’m not sure if the grass in the park is safe, so I’d rather she goes home and eat carrots or something.

Donna’s tips for rainy days

By weliveinaflat

On May 2, 2013

In Behaviour

The sky is falling!

Tip 1/ Take cover.

Tip 2/ Take cover under the human i.e. find a human shield!

Tip 3/ Go to higher ground.

Tip 4/ Go to your safe place.

You have been warned. Good luck!

These set of photos is from earlier. There are some days she does better, some days she does worse.

Tamchiak, kiasu and kaypo is our dog

By weliveinaflat

On May 1, 2013

In Behaviour

kid at the vet: is she a doberman?
me: no, she’s just a mongrel

Maybe, I’m habitually self-effacing and sometimes I discount my dog too much… I was thinking I need to remove “just” from my answer. Anyway, the last time I introduced my dog as a rescued dog, my friend thought the dog goes around rescuing things haha~ so I’ll just stick to “she’s a mongrel.”

But I love the idea of describing the dog’s personality. Morgan from Temporary Home, Permanent Love‘s new post on rescued mutts tries to introduce particular dogs not by breed but by their personality and character traits. And since Donna is a mongrel, I thought I’ll writing about Donna in her format.

Donna: 50% exuberant, 50% tamchiakgui, 30% kiasu, 30% kaypoh, 20% potential disaster, 20% suspicious, 10% loving and 100% patient buddy for dog idiots.

*tamchiakgui = greedy ghost, used to describe someone with a love of food
* kiasu = afraid to lose out
* kaypoh = busybody, tries be in the know or have a paw in everything

Donna struck us as quintessentially Singaporean in her kiasu and kaypoh ways.

How kiasu is Donna?
She likes to get a head start when we play fetch. She won’t sit and wait for you to throw the toy. No, she must already run for the toy when you haven’t even thrown it. If she were in a race, she’ll be the athlete that gets disqualified for false starts.

And when it comes to being kaypoh, Donna is quite the busybody. She is “big brother”. She must needs keep an eye on everything. Mr P in the room and me in the living room? No problem she will be right smack at a point where she can see me and the bedroom door for when he comes out. Donna supervises me doing chores. She tries to inspect our food. And now and then, she’ll try to suss out unsuspecting strangers too, some not too happy about her sniffing them :/

I had briefly thought about teaching her “don’t kaypoh” every time she make to sniff some stranger but I haven’t really done it. So yes, she is essentially still a monolingual dog.

Napping and surveillance. Not mutually exclusive.

And food, what dog doesn’t love food? Stalk the kitchen? Yes. Sport the saddest soulful eyes for as long as it takes? Yes. Yes. Yes. I always thought saliva dripping out of the mouths of cartoon characters and visibly plopping on the floor was nothing more than overly-dramatic caricature. Doesn’t happen in real life. My dog showed me how wrong I was. :P

I’m not too sure how tamchiakgui came into popular use. Perhaps our ancestors think all ghosts are greedy, hence all the food offerings on top of the paper burning during Chingming. Now that I think about it, people do append the word gui (ghost) to the back of the adjective so kaypohgui works as well. Maybe our ancestors just had a fixation with ghosts in general, haha~

Anyway just so you know, 50% exuberant, 50% tamchiakgui, 30% kiasu, 30% kaypoh, 20% potential disaster, 20% suspicious, 10% loving and 100% patient buddy for dog idiots, may not all sound like all awesomely amazing traits but to us they can be pretty adorable at times and if that’s who our dog is, that’s who our dog is.

But that makes the introduction kind of wordy because a dog is not just a dog is she? So I’ll keep to “She is a local mongrel” for now.

Tamchiakgui, kiasu and kaypoh are words in the Teochew and Hokkien dialects. Use them with English with a sprinkle of Malay here and a smatter of Chinese there in Singapore and it becomes Singlish. Short, clipped sentences will do. We prefer efficiency in our language unless we’re writing it.

Doggy over-exuberance is adorable, yes?

By weliveinaflat

On April 30, 2013

In Behaviour

Donna loves walks.

Most days, she is able to sit calmly so we can put the leash on her.

Some days, she is fidgety and can barely contain herself.

And then there are some other days when she is so happy, its almost as if she will explode with joy. She zooms here and there. She stops to wrestle with her toy. Then she zooms back and loops around you before she sits. She sits for a bit but when her collar comes close to her head, she shifts forward in her eagerness until the collar is at the back of her head rather than around her neck. And then she is off on her feet looping around again.

You give up and walk away since there is no putting the collar on her in that state. Then she suddenly discovers newly grown ears to hear with and goes to her bed as you tell her to.

See me! See me all nice and calm now.

We are not fooled Donna, not when your little flicking tip of the tail is giving you away!

But yes, let’s go! You see the ex-rug flying from under her feet as she bursts off like a runner doing the 100m dash at the gunshot. My, my…

Yup, we spent the first couple of months trying to instill some level of discipline and calmness in the dog. Starting from the basic sitting still so that the collar and leash goes on to not rushing out the door when the door swings open. But she’s not a robot so there are days she does these random spurts of high-energy doggy antics which can be amusing in small doses.

You know how we use keywords when it comes to dog training. “Let’s go” is one of them I repeat frequently with Donna. So frequently that I start to use it even when I don’t mean her, for example when Mr P and I are going out together without the dog. Now we have to resort to speaking in Chinese when we don’t mean to include her. Hmmmm…..

Who says there is calm before the storm, who?

By weliveinaflat

On April 27, 2013

In Behaviour

The problem with living on a high floor with an unobstructed view is that it can get really windy sometimes. And today the wind was huffing and puffing and blowing things down.

Donna doesn’t like the howling wind, so when it gets windy before a storm, I start to close all the balcony doors, the door to the yard, the windows, etc, as many openings as we can so that the howling is minimised.

But today the wind was so fantastically strong and buffeting against the pane that we had to go on the balcony to see it for ourselves, besides pulling the pots inside where they are less exposed to the strong wind. We could see blinds hurling around violently, other people righting their potted plants and plastic bags adrift in the middle of the sky. And then when we turned back we see this nervous grinning mug.

She dealt well with the wind and rain today. Good job Donna!

Toilet training and voice-sensitive dogs

By weliveinaflat

On April 22, 2013

In Behaviour

When we were first introduced to Donna, we were told that she was toilet trained. Really? She certainly had a good time on the kitchen rug rather than the newspapers in the toilet. We slowly worked on getting her on the newspapers and for a while, we thought she got it until she went back to the kitchen rug again. It was a minor episode, a small blip in middle of the regular blops when she did use the newspaper. But perhaps because she largely did it outside, the newspaper training was maybe not as reinforced as we would like it to be. Result? There is always a potential of an accident somewhere else in the house.

So rather than solely rely on our, erm, not so perfect training the humans decided they needed to train themselves to (1) stop having rugs and (2) get use to the inconvenience of the child gate blocking entry to the kitchen. Ah yes, a sad day for human autonomy. The dog trained us instead :P

Picture above: One of Donna’s favourite things to do at home is to flop in front of the child-gate in hopes of a treat or two from the kitchen.

When is Donna likely to do it inside? Well, there was a bit of the time when she was still adjusting to living inside a house where people come and make noise outside the door and ring the doorbell. She would rush to the door and then rush to the toilet to pee on the newspapers in excitement. Thankfully, people coming to the door is a phenomenon that is growing passe by the second. She doesn’t get so excited that she needed to pee anymore.

But close to dawn this morning there was a pretty big thunder storm and I predicted to Mr P that he would find pee and poop when he went out to check on her. Surprisingly, the newspapers were clean. She didn’t do it?

Pictured above left: Donna’s private toilet, including her personal shower cubicle complete with bath stuff.
Pictured above right: The scene of the crime!! Now cleaned up.

She did, but by the front door of the house. On the floor where her water bowl usually sits on a rug, was now a few tiny islands of shit on a lake of yellow pee. :( Somehow she had managed to push the water bowl and the cheap rug to the side but the rug that had survived all the other rugs we got rid of, finally succumbed to the deluge. My best guess is that by instinct the dog went to pee and poop there because of the presence of the rug when it got too excited, perhaps because it was closer in proximity to her bed than the newspapers in the toilet. I also wonder if perhaps the thunderstorm made the toilet drafty and the newspapers flap around so that she was hesitant to go on the newspapers. I have no real way of verifying though.

Picture: Donna fidgeting joyfully in front of the rug before it met its accidental demise.

I think I’ve grumbled on this blog more than once that clean up is a pain. It is also something that I’ve a lot of practice and try to do it robotic-ally now. Dump the crap in a plastic bag, soak the pee with kitchen towel, wipe dry and spray the area liberally with a solution of white vinegar. Wait. Wipe dry. I look at the yellow stains in the grout and hope that there is not too much work ahead still.

But hey, instead of reinforcing that negative attitude, it occurred to me that it was lucky we kept all the room doors closed. It would have been worse had Donna taken it into her head to go into one of the rooms and eliminated on the useless omg-you-can’t-get-it-wet-or-it-will-pop laminate wood flooring that the flat came with.

As for Donna, she was the usual carefree, omg-I-am-so-happy-to-see-you dog until we discovered her treasure by the front door. Then she went into her guilty and deferential pose. Not that we would do anything to her. I had read before that dogs can’t connect punishment to their misdeed if it was after the fact. But there was a point in time where we were both very sick and the dog kept peeing where she should not and one just couldn’t help feeling very helpless and upset that I blew a fuse and screamed at her. She went into the down position, tummy flat on the floor, looking away from me and went very still for a really long time. And no, the undesired peeing behaviour did not go away. So what I ended up with was one very scared dog who continued doing things that made me mad after the scolding. It had the potential to downward spiral into a negative cycle which wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

So after that experience which showed that Donna was voice-sensitive, I never screamed at her again. I do ignore her, more to keep my own emotions in check so that we can maintain a relative calm in the house. Not all dogs react the same to raised voices, it was interesting for me to learn that from the crazydoglady that Willy talks back when they raise their voice at him.

Have you ever raise your voice at your dog? And how did it respond?

Belly Up: The suffering of my dog’s dog

By weliveinaflat

On April 20, 2013

In Behaviour

She doesn’t do this with her smaller soft toys, but with her big ones, Donna is a head banger. Maybe it has a massaging effect on her face, that’s why she likes to swing her toy violently and smack her own head with it. I realised that her collar is too loose for her when one day, after a bout of high energy head shaking and intense clinking and clanging, she managed to shake her collar off entirely onto the floor.

Guess who wins in my dog and my dog’s dog wrestling match.

Loser gets a hole on the back and dark stains for effort. Time to patch it up and toss it in the washer.

And yes, you have seen the underbelly of my dog.

Where did the dog go?

By weliveinaflat

On April 19, 2013

In Behaviour

Most mornings when we open the bedroom door, Donna will be found right by the door on her bed or sometimes plastered along the width of the door itself snorting for us to wake up. But this morning there was no Donna in sight. It’s amazing how one’s heart can stop when no dog rushes to greet you good morning as expected. Did she manage to somehow murder herself in the living room overnight?

Nope, the stupid dog only got herself trapped in the kitchen behind the childgate. Talk about relief!