Monday, November 24, 2014

There’s No Predicting Dogs

I like to think that we know Emma and Duke pretty well.  I’ve had Emma for eleven years, we spent a lot of time together when I took real estate pictures for work (she rode with me nearly everywhere I went), and I’m generally pretty tuned it to what’s going on with her.  We’ve had Duke for a little over a year now.  A lot of that time (about the first six months or so) was spent cuddling on the couch with him while he went through heart worm treatment and a leg amputation.  Again, I feel like we’re pretty tuned in to what’s going on with him.
Most of the time we’re very good at predicting how and Emma and Duke will react to situations, what they’ll like, what they won’t like, when to break out the thundershirts, etc.  But, every now and then, they like to surprise us.
We took Emma (it was about a month before Duke entered our lives) on vacation to the beach for the first time last year.  We didn’t expect Emma to go in the water.  She assures us every time it rains that she will most definitely melt if she gets wet.  She has no interest in streams or rivers whenever we take her hiking, and let’s not even talk about bath time. 
So we really didn’t expect Emma to go into the water.  At all.  But it turned out that she loved it.  She didn’t go in very deep, but she waded and had a great time running through the waves.  Surprise, surprise! 
When this year’s vacation finally rolled around last week, we just knew that Duke was going to love the ocean.  He frolics in the rain, and drags us into any stream or river he finds while hiking.  He’ll even just flop down into the water and lay there to cool off. 
We thought he’d love the ocean.  Once again, we were wrong.  Duke wanted no part of the ocean.  He didn’t like the waves coming at him.  He loved the sand, loved running on the beach, loved chasing birds and crabs, and unfortunately loved trying to eat any trash he found on the beach.  He just wasn’t having the water.  Surprise, surprise!  Again. 
I guess we can’t always predict dogs, no matter how well we may know them.  Has your dog, or any other fur kid, surprised you lately?

4 comments:

  1. They do have their own personalities!

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  2. I know Koda loved the snow when we were in Montana, but absolutely loathed the rain here, LOL. It is funny how the dogs have their personalities and can be unpredictable of what we think they would do. Koda continues to surprise me and he'll be 10 years old next Monday. That dog is way smarter than me :)

    Happy Thanksgiving!

    betty

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  3. I love that our cats do things every so often that surprise us. Just the other day, Gracie, our most couch potato-ish kitty, got "the zoomies." It was so funny to watch!

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  4. None of my dogs like water. In fact they run away from the hose and hide under the table when we go for a swim in our backyard pool. They're scared we're going to put them in the pool!

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