Dog sitting...

[laundry_queen]

I'm dog sitting my parents' dog again. Love him like my own.

However.

He's teaching my puppy some bad, bad habits.

How is it they pick this stuff up? ugh! It'll take me months to undo the damage.

He's going home tomorrow. He's my buddy and I'll miss him but oddly looking forward to it this time (I dog sit him regularly but this is the first extended period since I got my own puppy.)

Is this common? Passing on bad habits between doggies?

[hollysmom]

1. cant your puppy be teaching your parents dog good traits? n/t

[sked14]

2. It seems to be,

we're watching our daughter's male boxer who loves to dig holes, now he's got our female Malamute starting to dig.
She never did this until the boxer came over.

[laundry_queen]

5. ugh!

that would be annoying. Our issue is barking. Over every.little.sound.

[orleans]

3. years ago we had a carin terrier

when she got older someone suggested we get a puppy to spark some new life into her. so we got a puppy.

well...my beloved terrier proceeded to teach the puppy "this is how you behave" and the puppy began sitting around doing nothing just like she was the old lady dog.

lol.

i looked out the back door and saw the terrier sitting by the back fence, like she'd been doing. and that puppy sat beside her--not playing, not exploring, just sitting and doing nothing!

so we had to get a puppy for the puppy!

that's when the terrier finally perked up--because the first puppy began acting her own age encouraged by the new puppy and so the terrier got a lot more youthful. it was great. and funny.

so, my guess is that dogs can absolutely learn from each other. good things and bad.

[laundry_queen]

6. That is funny.

My puppy absolutely didn't learn the part about not being a hyper puppy from my parents' dog, LOL.

[TorchTheWitch]

4. I think it is common

And not just bad habits but good one's too. It seems to me that the less dominant dog in the relationship picks up various habits from the more dominant one but not always. It almost always is the bad habits they want to pick up, too. So far though, between Yoshi and the puppy, Max, next door though Max seems to be inventing his own bad habits like excessive barking that Yoshi doesn't do, but maybe that's just because like the dog they used to have, Bubba, the neighbors never told them to shush.

Funny thing I noticed about Bubba passing away is that ever since then Yoshi has been doing one of Bubba's bad habits of howling at the volunteer fire whistle and car alarms and such that he never did before (unless a car alarm was really close by our yard sometimes he'd howl but not if Bubba was outside howling already). I can't help but wonder since Bubba isn't here anymore to do the howling that Yoshi is doing it in his place since Max doesn't howl at anything (he's a barker). Any time I hear Yoshi howling at the siren or a car alarm going off I dash outside and shush him, and he looks at me like "What?" as if he thinks he's supposed to be howling now that Bubba isn't here to do it. He won't do the howling if he knows I'm near the door or outside with him though - only when he knows I'm not right around... it's kind of like he seems torn between not doing it because he knows that I don't want him to and doing it for Bubba since Bubba isn't here to do it, and for some reason he thinks he needs to in Bubba's place. Weird.

Kind of fascinating how dogs pick up habits either good or bad from each other even only because one isn't there doing the bad habit anymore.

[laundry_queen]

7. That reminds me

I got a cockatiel for my birthday as a teen. I didn't take him when I moved out b/c we found out I was very allergic to feathers and he was irritating my asthma. My parents thought he was pretty lonely with me gone (he used to be in my room with me all the time) so they got him a mate. All of the songs he used to sing stopped, and his mate picked them up, seemingly overnight. My bird hardly sang after that. Fast forward 15 years later and his mate died. After my bird was done his mourning, he started to sing the songs he had previously stopped singing. It was kind of funny. It was like he was lending his voice to his mate for that time. So apparently, its not just dogs who pass on habits and other info.

My poor birdie passed away a few months ago at the ripe old age of 25. I miss his singing. Okay, maybe not the squawking though. He was the most gentle cockatiel ever. He was hand raised and had no idea HOW to bite. You didn't even need gloves to clip his wings.

Sorry...went off topic a bit there!

[TorchTheWitch]

8. I'm so sorry you lost your birdie

Especially after such a long time. I used to have a sweet little hand raised cockatiel, but she died at the age of 12 or 13 right when I moved into an apartment that backed right into a highway. As soon as we moved in she started looking sick, and I know they're sensitive to airborne chemicals and stuff like that. I think it was all the fumes and dirt and dust from the highway that got her sick. After all these years I still miss her and think about her sometimes.

She never knew how to bite either, and I never even thought about needing gloves to clip her wings. I would put her in the sink though so she couldn't try running away when I stretched her wing out to cut though because I was terrified of cutting anything more than feathers by accident. I used to take her in the shower with me... she loved that.

That's really strange with yours picking up the songs the other one sang after he was gone. My brother owned my birdie's brother (they came from the same... litter?) but his birdie was so different in personality. He was always so quiet and shy where she was always checking out new things and liked to do stuff other than just sitting on her perch making a poop tower like he did.

Cockatiels are such neat little birdies. I didn't realize when I got her how cool she'd be and that was a really nice surprise.

[laundry_queen]

9. LOL at poop tower

That was mine...quiet, making his poop tower, LOL.

Actually, when he had a mate he was a lot more outgoing. They raised a couple of baby birds together (my parents gave them away to relatives) and my bird was a good father - sat on the eggs more than his mate did. He had a hard time when she died.

When I was really little - like 5 or so - my parents had another cockatiel. They think he was captured from the wild. He was older and totally mean. He could draw blood through gloves. My dad was the only one who went near him. Once my younger brother stuck his face too close to the cage and the bird caught his lip and wouldn't let go. He rarely sang - just screeched and the cage door always had to be closed, because it would try to sneak out the front door if the cage was open and you went out the front door. Not exactly good for the bird at -30 in the winter. Yes, my dad once had to crawl on someone's snowy roof to retrieve the bird, LOL. And that was with wings clipped. Craziest bird ever, totally wild.

I think that's why my birdie was such a nice pleasant surprise after the crazy one.