Weird things dogs have done

This is inspired by Pearl's post regarding cats.

One day my wife saw our Australian Shepherd heading  into the woods with his full supper dish in his mouth.  We decided to follow at a distance.  We came upon our dog and the neighbors Black Lab protecting and trying to raise a tiny kitten. Of course, we took the kitten home.  By my guess, the momma cat had been moving her kittens and was probably terrified of the two dogs.  I doubt if she understood the motives of the self appointed baby sitters.

That is a great story John!  I was about to relate a story about my black lab, but I just can’t match what you have.

Eric

Eric: you don't have to match it, tell us a story!! :D

Our dog was the best but he ate duck and chicken poop. Definitely weird.

Hi Eric,

Please share ....

My wife and I once operated a dog boarding kennel for a few years. Two regulars were a pair of male Brittany Spaniels, littermates, who shared a kennel. After their daily walk, they would sit facing each other, almost touching with heads straight up and muzzles crossed, doing a weird "woooowoooowooo" quiet almost-howl.

Hi Dc,

Was it a camp fire song at summer camp?

I was on a beach in Oregon, saw a truck pull up that was all cages with sled dogs in it. The guy told me they were training for the Iditarod. The beach sand had more friction than snow, he said it was great exercise for them. And they were excited! The whole truck was rocking as the dogs danced to get out. He hooked up the sled, fastened it to the truck, and laid out the lines. Then hooked the lead dog on first, and started hooking the dogs in place. The dogs on the line were leaping with excitement to run, the whole group was jumping in unison, like a wave. Except the lead dog, who was too cool for that. He sat there still and sang, I have never seen a dog move it's lips like that, Ow Wow Woo Woo Wo Ooooh Wooo! The line was jumping, the lead dog was singing, the sled was released from the truck and they took off like a shot. When I left an hour later they still weren't back.
Was way cool!

Reader beware! If you are squeamish, don't read on.

We had, at one point, three Great Danes. Two were young litter mates and one was an old (9+ years) female. One of the young ones liked the old girl's poo. A lot.

One day all three were in the yard and the old girl was hunching to poo when the young one ran up and grabbed a nugget right out of her butt before it hit the ground. We screeched and ran to stop her from getting the whole batch. Farm to Table is a good concept, but not in this instance. We checked everything in her diet and made sure she had excellent food. She only liked the old dogs poo, so it was probably due to undigested food in it. Yuck.

The absolute worst part of this was when she barfed up a "snack" of poo in the house. The smell of hot vomit with crap thrown in was something beyond any smell in the world. I have a very strong stomach, but cleaning that up almost had me barfing too.

Once our old girl passed on, the young one never ate poo again. And I still love dogs, even if they are poo-snackers sometimes. Just don't get too may kisses from them.

You read it. You can't unread it...

Our dog Dillon will be 11 this year and he is also a poo eater. His favourites are horse and goat poo😋  Some of the more memorable items that he has eaten include a fully laden chili plant - hot chilis at that. Memorable because I had to clean up the explosive after effects for a week; a dozen antihistamine tablets that were left on my bedside table - cue panicked visit to the vet; two fillet steaks that he stole off the kitchen bench, managing to get the clingwrap off somehow and taking a bite out of the polystyrene tray. My husband had unpacked the shopping onto the kitchen bench and must have turned his back as Dillon stole the steaks. Husband checked the car, called the supermarket to ask if it he'd left the steaks at the checkout and he even started to question whether he had even bought them in the first place. Months later, I found the polystyrene tray hidden behind a pile of firewood in our garden. One of our regular walks is around a wetland and there are feral goats, possum, wild duck carcasses and copious goat droppings along the paths. During one walk, he somehow managed to swallow an entire goat hoof which he promptly regurgitated the next day. I still have the photo but will spare your sensibilities 😉 I tried muzzling him when I took him on that walk but he was so miserable, I gave up and have to keep him on lead to try to stop him eating goat poo and/or rolling in well rotted dead animals. He is a Brittany, springer, lab cross - I blame the lab genes for his greediness but he is so affectionate and good natured it is impossible to get cross with him.

Robin Katz wrote:grabbed a nugget right out of her butt before it hit the ground.

This reminds me of a big all day family hike we went on years ago. We were taking a break and a bunch of us were standing in a circle talking when one of my cousins, three or four at the time, walked into the middle of the circle and squatted to poop. The circle started to break up with a collective, "Uuugghh!" There was a louder noise of disgust (and laughs, let's be honest) and everyone scattered when one of the dogs ran in for a hot snack.

My husband had a dog when he was young that would chase cars, but only occasionally. They eventually figured out she was only chasing the cars that had driven through manure from the neighbour's cows when she "caught" one of the cars when it pulled up to their house and started licking the manure out of the tire treads.

Veering from the poop theme...

One of my grandma's dogs once ate an entire goat, bones and all. At least, they assume that's what happened. They never found the goat, a carcass, or disturbed soil where something might have been buried. They did have a dog suddenly as big as a barrel.

My basset hound in many ways acts like a cat. One of his things is that he always wants to be on the highest point in the area. We used to shovel all the snow from the driveway onto one mound so he could sit on top of it. We walk in to our current property in the winter, so that doesn't happen anymore. When left alone at home, he would push the chairs into position and use them to hop up on the kitchen table. I never managed to catch him up there, but I heard him jumping down as I came home a few times and found his hair all over the table many times.

Another of his quirks was that he could lift himself up using only his neck. If he could jump up and get his chin over something (a basset's front legs don't have the reach their necks do) he could lift himself onto it.

He's too old now, but he used to sleep on the back of the couch or the armchair. The armchair was a bit tricky cause if he shifted his weight wrong he'd flip it over backwards. The couch was safer. One time, though, my dad was sitting on the couch and, the highest point now being my dad's head, the dog attempted to stand on it. My dad swatted him off and he slipped off the back of the couch. Luckily, the dog kept his chin on the couch and hauled himself back up. My dad felt bad about pushing him off, so they compromised and the dog went to sleep draped over my dad's shoulder.  

My cat basset and a degenerate poop eater/lab whose stories need not be told.

I was a massage therapist for a lot of years. I had a client who came to me crying, with her dog. The dog's sister had died of liver cancer a year ago, and she didn't cope well with it (a lot of really bad things going on in her life) and now this one was showing the same signs. Would I check him and see what I thought? If it was possibly liver cancer again, she'd rather hear it first from me, rather than the vet.

So I checked him, and asked "Does this dog eat out of the cat box?"  "Well, he WILL, but my son cleans it all the time.... Oh wait, he has a new girlfriend, how much you want to bet he hasn't cleaned it lately!" I told her "I feel nothing at the liver, I feel a lot in the intestines, give him a laxative, see what it does." He shit out a LOT of cat litter, and lived many more years.

Another dog massage story: I specialized in injuries, mostly car wrecks. A family who lived 13 miles out of town had 3 members of the family get hurt badly and the car totaled, so rather than make them figure out how to shuffle people into town for me to work on them, I'd take a massage table up to their house and do them all.

They had an English Mastiff named Zeus, big tough dog, had killed a pit bull that was attacking one of the family kids. He was getting older, and gimpy. I was taking a break between people one day, Zeus was laying by me, so I started massaging him. The first time I hit something that hurt he almost snapped at me, I changed what I was doing, he calmed back down. When I was done, he got up, stretched, looked surprised, and practically bounced into the kitchen! After that, sometimes when I got there he'd demand "ME FIRST!" and since he was bigger than me, he was first on those days! Otherwise he waited his turn, and never again complained that I was hurting him, he'd figured out it was worth it.

:D

As far as I know, I have the world's only Asian Carp Retriever.

I may have posted this several months ago, but I can't find it if I did.  One evening when the Coyotes were pretty active in the tree line around our property, our Border Collie was getting pretty worked up.  I was afraid he would charge them and get tore up, so I grabbed the carbine, stepped out on the porch, and told him I was there.  He looked over at me, and took off running down our driveway.  Maybe 10 to 15 minutes later he returned ..... with the Great Pyrenees from a couple of farms down.  I am pretty sure he told me, " We've got this."  So I went inside.

One morning I let the dogs out in our backyard. I then let the chickens out of their coop and went back inside to do something (insert chore of your choice here). When I went back to let the dogs I I saw my Shih Tszu riding on the back of one of the chooks! She held on for a good 20 yards! Alas, she went down before the 8 second bell! Chook and dog both unharmed in the making of this scene.

Cheers!

This was a story that happened many years ago. At that time I lived with my parents in the countryside and we had 4 dogs. When we moved there we had 1 dog with us, she was a house dog and we adopted her at a fair, where people were giving puppies away, trying to find someone to take care of them. Few months after we were living in the new house, I came back from school and found my mom with a tiny puppy, who was looking at me with his big eyes and this is how we got our 2nd dog. The other 2 dogs were rescued by my father, who found a tiny carton box in the middle of a street (where he was driving) with two little puppies.
They were not very special, except the first dog who loved to eat her own poop (we always needed to chase her after she did her things, that was no fun) and the second dog who at the beginning lived outside in a big cage, but always was able to escape. The cage was self made, and it had a tree inside of it, he was very intelligent and always managed to crawl (his back on the tree and going up with his paws). We called him "spider dog" after we saw his technique.
So yeah, that's all, not a super exciting story, but I wanted to share the story of my dogs. I like to remember them from time to time, because they all live in my heart.

I can't tell you he was our dog  ....clearly no one owned him.  But when we lived in MN we had some kind of wolf-husky mix, half grown  pup, come out of the woods and befriend us.  He would visit maybe 2 or 3 times a week.  He never sought food ...he provided his own.  As he grew up, he clearly saw us as friends.  Anyway, as I have posted elsewhere we had neighbor problems of all kinds.  One time when I was away, a very drunk and irate neighbor came over to speak to my wife.  It was never entirely clear what the problem was ... something about being arrested and spending several nights in jail, but he was yelling and waving his arms in the air.  The dog comes our of the woods and quietly sits down between my wife and the neighbor.  At some point, the neighbor realizes what is in front of him.  He becomes very quiet and slowly backs down our driveway. That was the last time either one of us saw that neighbor.

I used to own  a commercial janitorial service, we had a place we cleaned late at night in the industrial part of town. There were fenced lots at all these places, some with guard dogs. I loved the dog a few doors down, big German shepherd, who was a good barking guard dog... If anyone was around. It was often desolate out there. When there was nothing going on, he'd jump his 6 foot fence, and go to the cotton field across the street and chase rabbits. If you walked anywhere near his fence, he'd come running past you, leap over his fence, then bark at you, "Get away from my fence!" when you left, he'd go back to the rabbits. He was very good at his job, simply didn't feel it required 100% of his time to do it right.

When I was much younger, I stayed for a year at my oldest sister's  and brother in law's house.  My baby sitter was their retired, prison trained, guard dog.  Once a neighbor borrowed their pick up truck.   When he returned the truck, he tossed the keys to me.  The dog clearly understood that the keys were thrown at me, but he also knew it was not a real threat. He settled for a compromise. He trotted over to the neighbor and gave him a gentle nip on the backside.