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I’ve noticed an increasing amount of nervous puppy owners recently. Odie will bound over and play with a puppy, who is clearly have lots of fun in the way dogs do. The owner will be wringing their hands and murmuring about how they’re playing a bit rough and I’ll have to call Odie away, much to his and the puppy’s disappointment. 🤷♂️
I think there’s a lot of people who anthropomorphosise dogs a bit too much - they’re animals and they play like animals!
AlexD-
On the other side of this, we've let Crumpet
off the lead for the first time this week and she definitely gets a bit carried away sometimes. She doesn't seem to understand that she's 20kg+ and still growing. It's quite nerve wracking seeing her hurtling towards some ancient pug who clearly doesn't want to play and hoping that she stops before she flattens it. I don't think she would ever intentionally hurt another dog but we have had to put her on the lead a couple of times when she's not got the message from a less playful/older/smaller dog.
She got a taste of her own medicine earlier when a much bigger dog, about her age, was trying to play but was too unco-ordinated and gangly to control it's limbs properly, resulting in Crumpet getting knocked over into a massive patch of mud. She didn't seem to mind but it's not hard to imagine a dog picking up an injury like that! -
I have two small dogs. I also very much agree that dogs are dogs, and like to fuck about, and 99% of the time its totally harmless....... but both my dogs have been injured by other larger dogs being over zealous with them - obviously not intentionally, but it happens easily..... if you own a large dog you should be aware small dogs are considerably more fragile than big ones.
Rudy is now sometimes quite aggressive towards large dogs in general, and especialy black labs when they come near him, which is 100% down to a massivley over enthusiastic labrodor totally knocking the shit out of him a few years ago. Thge labrador was not being aggressive in any way, but injured Rudy pretty badly as its owner just stood there watching and saying 'ahhhh he's only being friendly'.
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Conversely, I've got a dachshund who can't stand puppies and their wacky energy but who is always approached because he's small and cute so owners assume he'll be friendly to their puppy.
I think a lot of people just aren't very well educated on the body language of dogs.
ltc
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amac090
So much this, our local ball chucking spot had nine (!) puppies going full on berzerko with each other the other day. It was kinda fun watching the owners, half were sipping their coffees, other half trying to control the situation.