Dog Community

What do you think? (a weird behaviour)

Posted : 2/7/2010 4:03:04 PM

We went on a looong walk today with Will, the dogs and the in laws. Will collected some pine cones, but these were slimy and filthy and wet. (Umm thanks for that gdad! Stick out tongue ) So his Nan had a great idea - show him a natty hidey hole in a tree and persuade him to hide them in there!

Which worked great, but then we couldn't get Max to leave the tree. I insisted that if we followed the trail, he WOULD come after us. (This never fails.) But today I was so wrong.... According to some other walkers, he STARTED To come after us... but then stopped and went back down the trail again. DH had to go back and look for him, and he found him by this tree. The only way he could get him to follow and leave the tree was to put the lead on, and keep it on, until the tree was pretty far behind us.

Maybe it is because I am a nerd, but I have been thinking about this today and trying to work out what was behind this weird behaviour.... What do you think?

Cita

Posted : 2/7/2010 4:52:00 PM

My personal uneducated opinion - because you were clearly "hiding" the goods in that spot in the tree, they must have been valuable. Like Rascal will only bury his best chews/toys in the yard. So maybe Max just wanted in on whatever the humans thought was valuable enough to hide? Because if humans eat things like steak on a regular basis, something hide-able MUST be good, right?

Or maybe he was just plain curious and thought it was a fun game!

Krissim Klaw

Posted : 2/7/2010 7:15:28 PM

Cita
Because if humans eat things like steak on a regular basis, something hide-able MUST be good, right?

I'm going to go with Cita's theory cause it seemed full of win.

Kirby doesn't understand why anyone would hide a valuable object. If the object has any value at all he believes you should constantly show it off when anyone walks by and make sure everyone knows its yours by purposely chewing on it right in front of their face. =p

corvus

Posted : 2/9/2010 5:01:25 AM

Here's something fun you could try. You could replicate it with an object of your own, like a bag. Make a fuss of popping it in a hidey place and walk away and see what Max does.

Chuffy

Posted : 2/9/2010 5:29:47 AM

This dog is too smart to show that much intelligence.... I bet if I were to set this up, he wouldn't repeat the behaviour. He'd look at me like "Pffft. I'm not a performing monkey, woman."

In 14 years, he has never done anything like that before! My MIL thought that HE thought we had left something behind, but that didn't seem to fit - he's never alerted me when I've left anything else behind over the years, worse luck! I think the idea that he decdied it must be something "valuable" in there is probably the best one. Sometimes I wish I could see inside his head!