I thought you guys would appreciate this one.
We’ve had a bit of a mouse problem here for the last several months. Our house is pretty much spotless on food (everything is now in plastic tubs because the damn critters get into everything). We’ve plugged mouseholes as we find them, we’ve set traps and killed a number of the little beasts, but still they come back. We suspect one or both of our neighbors is less…rigorous…in their clean-up attempts.
Anyhow, the mouse problem is background. It has turned up a funny tendency of Hudson’s – once he hears or sees something somewhere, he continues to expect it to be there, whether he has reason to or not.
Three hours ago, there was a mouse under the far end of the loveseat. I heard it, and Hudson at least heard it – he may have also seen it. He has periodically stared at or sniffed that end of the loveseat, and continues to do so, even though there has been no further evidence of mouse. He’s just convinced that it must somehow still be there. He does this ALL the time, and he’ll end up staring at places where nothing has happened for hours, as if he’s willing the mouse to return.
For a smart dog, he’s a real dummy sometimes!
Maybe it still *smells* like mouse? Dunno.
This is behavior I’m more used to from cats….
If he was sniffing it a lot, I’d believe it could be smell, but he mostly sits and watches. Mice and other small critters elicit his prey drive enough to fascinate him, but so far not enough to make him actually try to catch one. He’s that way with birds, too. What he really wants is for one to hold still so he can inspect and sniff it to his heart’s content, I think. I suspect that even if the animal stayed still that long, he wouldn’t attack it – just sniff and stare and sniff some more (and startle back every time it moved much). The closest he has come so far is a trapped-but-not-killed mouse – it’s really hard to get him away from those so we can kill and dispose of them. He’s a very curious, very goofy dog.
Looking at Hudson “on the job” you’d never guess he’d get up to such silliness once at home.
I know! He’s so tremendously serious in harness, and always has been. There was an exercise in service dog training where we had to make the dogs (in harness) wag their tails without using treats, and I had such a hard time doing it! The idea was that you can’t train a dog if you can’t figure out what tone and actions the dog finds reinforcing, which is fair enough, but he was a tough customer. Even today, it’s hard to make him wag his tail in harness. The one thing that consistently gets him is when he thinks that I’m going to take his gear off, haha.
One of Sallie’s foibles are unidentified noises within 20 feet of the front door. (Adam say’s she thinks the ninjas are coming to get her mommy.) She will stare at it long after we’ve asked her to stop alerting. The she will periodically sniff it and make a low warning sound, huff and sit back down to stare at it again. We began allowing her to verify no one is there (she alerts the door because my hearing fluctuates) by opening the door for a look-see. What should be calming seems to actually freak her out more, as she then does a does a saftey check, groan in frustration and begins acting even more paranoid once inside… like looking at the ceiling, jumping at sounds and trying to “speak” to Adam about the situation. She’s worse than the secret service.
Oh, that’s great. Hudson doesn’t like noises just outside the front door when it’s open and dark out. He growled at the neighbor coming home two or three times during his first two summers here, which was shocking because in the two years I’ve had him, that’s the ONLY time he’s ever growled. Fortunately, the neighbor is a nice guy and if I ask him to go out and come back in again, he’ll do it so Hudson can see that it’s nothing scary or threatening. Fortunately, this year went by without any growling at the neighbor, so I’m hoping we’ve proved to him that it’s not necessary.