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Showing posts with the label CutePets

8 Easy Ways to Train Your Puppy to Be Obedient in Short Time

8 Easy Ways to Train Your Puppy to Be Obedient in Short Time My neighbor's kid has a dog that sits at the kitchen door and waits every single time. Doesn't beg, doesn't whine, doesn't lean on your leg. Just sits, with a tennis ball at his feet, until somebody opens the door. I asked her how long that took. She said it started with him being a bad dog. I got the story later over a beer, and the short version is that it took about eight months of the boring kind of work, not the showy kind. Nobody filmed any of it. Nobody posted a thirty-second video of the dog going from wild to perfect. It was just a kid in a garage with a bag of treats and a dog who did not care about the bag of treats. That story has been sitting in my head for a month, because it's the honest version of a title like this one, and the honest version is more useful than the promise. Before we get into it, I should say what "short time" actually means here, because I think it gets misunder...
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Why Do Dogs Always Sniff Each Other's Butts?

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 Why Do Dogs Always Sniff Each Other's Butts? Here's how it started. A few days ago I was out walking my Labrador when we ran smack into a Golden Retriever coming the other way. I braced for a barking contest. Instead, the two dogs circled each other once, and then — very naturally, very matter-of-factly — each one buried its nose in the other's rear end. I just stood there, holding the leash, watching these two dogs go face-first into each other's backsides, and I genuinely did not know what to do with myself. And then I started wondering: why, though? You've definitely seen this before. You probably never thought much of it — dogs just do that, right? No big deal. But think about it for a second. When humans meet, we shake hands, hug, make eye contact, exchange pleasantries. When dogs meet, their first instinct is to go straight for the most "private" part of each other's anatomy. If you actually sit with that for a moment, there's a lot ...
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Why do dogs like to tilt their heads when looking at their owners?

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 What Is Your Dog Actually Thinking When It Tilts Its Head? I was scrolling through videos a couple nights ago and stopped dead on one I must have replayed six times. A golden retriever. Its owner talking to it. And then, mid-sentence, the dog slowly tilts its head to one side — maybe 45 degrees — ears drooping, eyes locked right on the camera. That one little move broke the comments section. "I'm dead." "Someone send help." "I'm literally going to the shelter tomorrow." I watched that video around 11 PM. Then I fell down a rabbit hole of research papers and didn't come up for air until past 2 AM. So what is actually going on when a dog does that? Most people's gut answer is: "It doesn't understand what I'm saying, so it's trying to figure it out." That's half right. And half wrong. The real story is both weirder and more interesting than that. Here's something most people don't know — dogs can he...
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