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Showing posts with the label why dogs mark territory

12 Useful Tips for New Dog Owners to Avoid Common Raising Mistakes

12 Useful Tips for New Dog Owners to Avoid Common Raising Mistakes The first three hours are a blur. I remember the box was open and Biscuit stood in the doorway of our apartment and did not come in. I had read that dogs need a few days to decompress. That sounded reasonable at 2pm on a Saturday with a dog I'd never met. So I sat on the floor in the hallway and waited. He waited. We were both fairly certain we had misunderstood something about this. Three hours later he was on the couch, head on my foot, asleep. Nobody had told me what those three hours were actually for. That's the thing nobody tells you. Raising a dog well isn't a set of rules you memorize. It's about a hundred small decisions, most of which you make once, in the first weeks, and then live with for a decade. Get a few of them right and the next ten years get easier in ways you can't measure. Here are the twelve I'd give a friend on day one. Start With a Vet Visit Before You Start With a Traine...

Why do dogs urinate everywhere to mark their territory as soon as they go outside?

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...