Cute Dog Guide

  Why Does My Dog Look Me Dead in the Eyes While Destroying My Favourite Slipper? It started with a flip-flop. Not just any flip-flop. My favourite one. The left one specifically, from a pair I'd had for three summers, broken in to exactly the right degree of comfortable. Gone in forty minutes while I was on a Zoom call. I came downstairs to find Biscuit sitting in the middle of the living room, surrounded by foam debris, looking extremely pleased with himself. I wasn't even angry. I was just... confused. He has toys. Good toys. A rope, a squeaky hedgehog, two different rubber balls. They were right there, untouched, three feet away from the crime scene. Why the flip-flop? I've been thinking about this question for longer than I'd like to admit. And the answer, as usual with dogs, turns out to be way more layered than "he's just being naughty." Here's the first thing that reframed everything for me. Chewing, for a dog, isn't destructive be...

Why Does My Dog Need to Pee on Absolutely Everything the Second We Step Outside? My dog Biscuit and I have a ritual every morning. I open the front door, full of optimistic energy, ready for a brisk 20-minute walk. And then... we stop.  Three seconds in.  At the same lamppost. Every. Single. Day. He sniffs it like it contains the secrets of the universe. Then he pees on it. Then he sniffs it again, as if checking his own work. Then we walk four more steps to the next patch of grass, and the whole performance starts over. By the time we've made it to the end of the street — maybe 80 metres — he's already peed five times. I've counted. I used to just laugh it off. Dogs are weird, right? But one afternoon I got genuinely curious. Like, actually curious, not just "haha funny dog" curious. What is going on in his head? What is he actually doing? Turns out, the answer is way more interesting than I expected. So here's the thing that blew my mind first. Dogs...