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generally preferring balls or stick
Lucky bastard, Nori has zero interest in stuff like that! Ada looks lovely and sounds like most Staff's i know that have had good owners from pup years. There's lots to be said about owners making things worse in these situations but we're still learning to trust her to work it out!
jono84-
I'm a bit bored of the balls tbh - it's good for getting her to jump over things, but I preferred when she was more up for playing with other dogs.
Am aware that I'll get blamed if anything does kick off. But she just seems to have an ability to get on with most dogs, which I put down to really socialising her well when young (and letting her get firmly put in line by larger dogs). She generally gets on really well with whippets, but unless I know them I won't let her play now, because I had too many of the owners panic when they see all the face/neck biting, even though it's obviously just play if you're actually paying attention.
The closest she's come to a proper fight was another staffy stole her ball and it got a bit angry as neither of them wanted to back down, but even that didn't actually escalate to anything serious (but looked pretty terrifying).
I ocasionally walk her best friend as well, who's a greyhound/saluki/whippet type thing and it's amazing how many more people come up to talk to me. Dog politics are weird.
Am just mentioning this as an excuse to post my best dog picture ever.
ad441
That makes more sense.
I guess there are also so many variables. In the last 6 months, Ada's gone from wanting to play with any dog she encountered, to really only being interested in playing with dogs she's already friends with + generally preferring balls or sticks. With the exception of bully type dogs who she's usually happy to have a wrestle with still.
I still tend to think most of the time it's best to let dogs sort out stuff amongst themselves as long as no one's getting picked on too badly. Seems like with bigger groups there's often some initial snapping and snarling and then they just figure out their place in things and they'll then peacefully co-exist. Annoys me when people panic and pick up their dogs the moment there's any tension as that just seems to be guaranteed to create a reactive dog in the future.
Though obviously it's easy to say all this when I have a relatively indestructible type of dog. I'll still pull her out of any interaction I'm not happy with.