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My dog is a people dog. She loves people. If she can hear someone, her tail wags and butt wiggles until she’s able to see that person. Sometimes her enthusiasm gets a bit out of control; she jumps, she barks, she rolls around, until she’s able to bask in that much-desired attention.
All of this is great, right? Definitely. However, Chihiro’s deep love of people – seriously, I know a lot of families with dogs and I go to the dog park and I’ve met few other dogs as desperate for human attention as Chihiro – seems to come at the expense of other dogs.
Chihiro has little to no desire to interact with other dogs. My first trips with her to the dog park when she was six months old resulted in me not going back for years. Nothing overly negative happened; Chihiro was just entirely overwhelmed by and unhappy with the attention she got from the much bigger dogs. I assumed she just needed to take baby steps first, and I should start by introducing her to individual dogs at friends’ homes.
At first Chihiro did really well. Then as she grew older and the puppy energy wore off, she became more cautious about meeting new dogs. The turning point finally came when she had a negative encounter with a friend’s aggressive puggle, and from then on she’s been different. She’s snippier with other dogs, even ones she’s already known and befriended. She’s not outright aggressive; she just has little to no interest in interacting with them.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Basically, Chihiro’s developed classic bully syndrome: if she’s feeling playful then she’ll attempt to initiate playtime, but only with dogs her size or smaller. She’s wary around larger dogs. When she first enters the dog park and all of the other dogs crowd around her she snaps a bit at them, just a “back off” gesture.
Later, when she’s ready to play, many of the other dogs aren’t interested. “We tried, and you were mean!” they seem to be saying. She might romp for a brief period with a dog her size, or join in if a large pack gets to running, but that’s about it. She spends most of her dog park time sniffing leaves in corners. We go because it’s good for her (and because I love it) but she doesn’t get much out of it.
Chihiro would rather attempt to play with cats. She whines incessantly at my sister-in-law’s house because none of the five cats living there are interested in playing with her. But when we dog-sat a friend’s basset hounds she kept an uncertain distance most of the time. She refused to join the cuddle pile I attempted to form, even though those placid bassets didn’t care what happened to or around them.
No, Chihiro just doesn’t care that much for other dogs. It’s a shame, because she gets lonely sometimes and tries to play with the cats. Cole just doesn’t always want to play with her, especially after we got Chrestomanci and he has another cat with which to play. I’d feel bad for her, except she turns up her nose at interactions with other canines.
I suppose if I had to choose between the two – a dog that loved people or a dog that loved other dogs – I’d pick the former. It’s certainly more convenient, given that we interact more with other people than other dogs. It’s just strange having a dog that cares more for the company of humans, and even other cats, than she does for her fellow canines.
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