Animal Behaviour: Canine Dominance Play, Murphy Gets Promoted
We’ve got another dog rescue operation happening. An emaciated, parasite-ridden Husky mix, or maybe not-so-mixed, showed up out in the street a couple of days ago.
So we took her in “temporarily”, got rid of the thousands of ticks covering her body, scanned her for a chip (no chip), got her a rabies shot and now we are, I am afraid, falling in love with her. We’ve got an ad in the local paper and notices up, but nobody has claimed her. I think she was abandoned. I call her Molly.
She was evidently tied or chained up with very restricted movement, has a bad collar burn, but not really abused. She’s not hand-shy or afraid of people, which is a miracle in itself, but she was clearly neglected. We don’t know just how sick she might be yet (internal parasites and heartworms are likely) or even if she’s had puppy vaccinations, but she seems cheerful and active enough. Her appetite is much improved this morning and she is walking much better and can actually gallop now … at first she couldn’t quite break into a run, probably because of the long duration tied out on a chain.
Here in this video we see the second day of pack-joining behaviour and the continuing establishment of the dominance order, without violence. It looks deadly, and it could become so with neurotic dogs, but as you can see it is all in fun for these pups. Murphy has been the puppy on the bottom of the ladder ever since he arrived here, and now he’s finally got someone to dominate, so he gets a promotion. He is really a happy dog now.
Watch carefully and you will see a lot of dominance and submissive behaviours as well as pack-bonding, cooperative hunting, monitoring of oestrus state, and even things like teasing and possessiveness. And respect.
If only people would behave more like dogs, perhaps we could all learn to get along, and to settle our differences with play instead of warfare.
I’m not sure I could really get used to the sniffing-butt part, though.
