DOGS

Which breed is First Dog?

Biased but I always suggest a whippet - mine is currently sitting next to me on the sofa, and because I’m eating toast, there’s a paw resting on my lap to remind me to tithe. They are great dogs but terrible land shark puppies who will need redirection to toys all the time, but they are sociable and whenever you meet another sighthound on walks, keen to play with a fellow member of the pointy Borg.

Two dogs end up being less important to each other than two cats IME.

I think this depends on the individuals. For two well-adjusted dogs, this is usually true. They like to have dog buddies, but they NEED you. otoh, we have had dogs through here who couldn't have coped with being the only dog in the house, and who definitely needed a more confident dog to take cues from at all times. Our dog Cody would freak out if you separated him from Milo for any length of time, for example.

For us, the optimal number of dogs proves to be three. Manageable, and when one dies, nobody is left on their own. Plus you sidestep that whole "I could never get another dog" thing you get when one dog dies and leaves you with an empty house. Note: we are a small-dog house.

xp idk, i’ve heard some tales of whippets being awfully naughty (from you!)

i know there's a lot of confusion on this issue, a lot of misunderstanding, propaganda, fake news, astroturfing by Big Dog, and so on. the failing dog industry has stooped to ever more outrageous lies in its desperate attempt to cling to relevance in a world where more and more people are coming to realize that dogs just don't make good pets, and i can't blame anyone who is still in thrall to this illusion. but if you look in your heart, H.P, i know you'll find the truth. (which is that you need more cats + fewer dogs) (i am not Bear btw) (but you should listen to Bear)

Cats look really ridiculous and inept when they are running. Not that it isn't amusing and even quite charming watching them doing this in short bursts. The bottom line is though, they are absolutely useless as hiking buddies and their only trick is killing anything that is smaller than them - which served them well in the early agricultural era. I want a happy clown in my house not a serial killer who leaves mouse intestines on the doorstep!

dogs smell bad and are needy

lol my dog has never come into my bedroom demanding food in the middle of the night or sat on my head or jumped onto a bookshelf and knocked off a plant or all the other incredibly annoying things that cats do so idk what you're talking about

The naughtiness is part of the Whippet’s charm. They do seem to grow out of it eventually, though.

Whatever puppy you get, you’ll be aware that they meet the world mouth-first for the most part, and gleefully select wrong things to chew on when they are teething. Aside from training, your One Job is to keep the wrong things from getting into their mouths. I persisted with Widget, so now he only has to be told the word TOY and he’ll go get the first one he sees, then bring it to me.

Widget is also an expert hoverer. He will stand just outside arm’s length and STARE when your attention is required.

Cats are assholes.

Two dogs is great but it's a lot of work and makes things like going away more difficult than with just one. That's the only downside ime.

Xps first is a swiss shepherd and we would he looking at getting the same. Peach took me through the ringer in her puppy years so I know what I'm getting myself into there. There's a few bad habits I'd like to train out of her before we potentially get another that could pick them up. I've let her get away with some subpar recall because she's too loyal and smart to ever let herself get too fat away from us (she'll never leave eyesight or earshot). She comes when called, but slightly on her terms, making sure she's sniffed the tree to the full extent first unless I start walking more than 20m away.

I'd take more cats too cat! Still working towards purchasing that big property out in the hinterlands with 6 dogs and 12 cats able to roam freely. I'll report back in a couple decades.

Yeah the going away part is tough. There is the potential of moving cities in the new future too. I think it was just peach's smile that hypnotised me to the idea this morning. Effect has slightly worn off now. We'll definitely end up getting two, just have to wait to see whether we move or not, maybe a next year thing

fyi the ipcc's latest report lists dog farts among the developed world's top 3 sources of atmospheric methane, with each dog fart the equivalent of burning a brazil's worth of the amazon rainforest. i sure wouldn't want something like that on my conscience!

unrelatedly, cats happen to be at the forefront of research in physics & biology, which may appear to the layperson like randomly knocking things off shelves or wanton mouse murder but is in fact part of a much larger secret project which ultimately will benefit all life on earth and will probably make some naysayers feel very silly once all has been revealed

were you aware that ethicists have determined that dogs have no honor? it's true, look it up

an informal survey found that 100% of dogs have wondered what your flesh would taste like

A personal survey finds my cats tasting my flesh most days (it's fine though, mostly consensual)

they are checking your blood glucose levels why because they ♥️ you

cats are fine but dogs are the best

cat was finally bored hissing at the dogs and you had to poke it again

there is speculation that the whole "dog" gimmick is nothing more than a long con perpetrated by wolves to bend humanity to their will. now, i don't claim to be a wolf scientist but any reasonable person must admit that this is almost certainly correct.

says the descendant of lions

getting a dog is never the answer, because dogs smell bad and are needy

you need more cats + fewer dogs

In 2011, I went to visit a friend who lived in this old falling-down house in the downtown core. He was looking for a new roommate in this enormous house. Walking into the place smelled like walking directly into a cat's asshole. We had a terse conversation, sitting in the living room. My friend was battling alcoholism and I think he was hungover. The house smelled like it should be condemned. A previous co-tenant had not been fastidious about cleaning up after his cat(s). The cat urine had seeped into the extremely porous floorboards. There was still litter remnants here and there. The cat waste had sunk so deeply into the floorboards that the basement beneath reeked of cat piss.

My friend was a good, old friend, somebody I cared about. I decided to move in with him. Some friends and I, we tore up the floorboards and replaced them. We had to do all kinds of treatment. We installed a buttress beneath the piss area to support everything. We cleaned out the basement and there were rotting rats down there, lots of cat shit. We treated the basement to make it bearable and I set up a rehearsal space. My roommate didn't lift a finger to help, but I didn't mind, I was determined to make things better for him.

Six months into 2012 the place had mostly lost its malodorousness. There was a cat-hangover but it was mostly gone. Smelled fresh and clean. My friend started exercising and got healthy. I moved out in 2013 and my friend cried when I left. He ended up meeting a dude and they're married now and live in the suburbs.

I will never forget that cat smell. It was the rankest most horrible thing I've ever smelled. I'll never forget how much effort was required to exorcise a departed cat from the house, this disgusting shitty stinky ghost cat. Cats: no.

count on dog people to turn their dog thread into an anti-cat thread

(nb i understand this was instigated by a certain specific cat, also i am joking)

and lmao at all those loser dogs with zero votes

I have a friend whose house seems oddly similar to the one you are describing fgti, except he is still an
alcoholic and will most likely die there :-(

A lot of double Vizsla owners near me in SE London. No other pairs of dogs really, just double Vizslas.

I assume they get the second when they realise the first one is nuts and has actual infinite energy.

That is the quality of all dogs no?

My dog just burped in my face after hand feeding her 1 buttered popcorn for every handful I took. This is living ladies and gentlemen

Now she's scratching my arm for more when it's all gone. They never stop once they get the taste

Yeah, mine love popcorn as well. They love most things, tbh, although little princeling soft boy Bruno will screech and run away if you throw bits of vegetable for him to catch in his mouth. You must gently hand him the offerings and he will choose whether or not to accept them.

it was wonderfully kind of you to help your friend like that, fgti

however. if it's a battle of whose excrement smells worse i don't think anyone comes out of that ring looking like a winner! had the building's previous tenant been similarly neglectful of a dog's leavings, or birds or reptiles or their own, the place still would have stank most rankly!

i concede that the feline ammonia pee packs a wallop, but when i said dogs smell i mean their whole unfortunate bodies, from the moist cloud of fug perpetually emanating from panting drooling mouths, to the doggy reek of their fur (wet dog is its own entire category of malodorousness), to their yeasty frito feet, to their anal glands, have you ever had to help a dog to express its anal glands? it is a smell that will stay with you always. that smell will follow you to the grave, to your reincarnation, perhaps to the end of the universe, and the only known antidote is the lovely sweet dusty smell at the scruff of a kitty's neck, mmmmm

when I used to do public housing re-wires I would end up working in a few stinking cat houses per month as described by flamboyant g. When you first enter a property like this you start off choking on the foul air and thinking how the fuck am I going to get through today, then by midday you'd be almost completely acclimatised to the stench. In one of them I needed to get underneath a boiler and there were hundreds of carrier bags on the floor, a heap of them and it was a box room so I waded through on my knees and felt my leg was wet. So it turned out one of cats had been shitting on the carrier bags and my leg had found a nice fresh wet one. I stormed out and said I'm not spending another minute in this shithole. The tenant complained about me calling his stinking cat house a shithole and I got told off by the site manager over it.

Mmmmmmmmm frito feet

Lmao at this whole rant about cats being bad smelling due to like a 0.00001% type event when normal healthy dogs have a baseline hideous smell that’s a constant.

count on dog people to turn their dog thread into an anti-cat thread

this revive has been populated by sense-of-humour-havers gyac....

seriously

I can’t recall ever entering a dog-owner’s house and thinking “wow, it stinks in here”. Cat owners, on the other hand, even the most fastidious of them can’t hide the fact that “you let that thing piss and shit in a box in the corner and I can smell it from the front door”

Cat paws >>>> dog paws, however

I don't know if I've ever smelled a cat's paw so can't comment but agree on litter boxes 100 - they're so rank. Also, it was a cat that started this whole thing not the dog people!

I will say I was in Tunisia last week where saw more cats than I ever have in my life which was pretty unsettling on several levels (there were thousands) but I did spot some exceptionally small very adorable kittens who momentarily stole my heart.

My family had a dog and you absolutely do have a house that smells of dog, you just don’t notice it cos you get used to it. If you’ve gone a while without owning a dog, as I do, you notice that immediately when you go to someone’s house.

depends on the dog tbh

I like dog smell! It reminds me of dogs.

my previous dog used to roll in cowshit and horseshit was an equisite snack to him, thankfully this is not really a thing with my present dog. For all his annoying peccadillos he isn't a stinker.

Yeah my house might smell like my dog but that’s ok, my dog smells great, it reminds me of my dog, and she rules

Cat owners houses don’t smell like cats, they smell like cat piss and shit and the smell does not remind me of their lovely pets, it reminds me of allergies, property damage, depression, sanctimony, negligent parents, the KKK, that short story by Joan Didion that ends with a five year old on drugs, the uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re having a conversation with somebody who is talking gregarious but has a manic dangerous look in their eyes, soiled mattresses and couches left curbside, and disgraced politicians

^ ^ ^

How normal

I like dog smell! It reminds me of dogs.

― Selune Gomez (Leee), Saturday, 10 February 2024 01:59 (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

So damn otm it hurts.
Re:cat smell. Outside cats, problem solved

Also I have many signatories how can attest that Peach doesn't stink, besides the occasional frito smell

But like for real, some dogs reek, some don't. No cats reek, but what they expel does so you know, let em do it outside if it's a possibility to your living environment