Looking after your Dog

 A Dog's Life

 A Dog's Life

Dogs are sensitive to the subtlest changes around them. Using the sophisticated senses of the born predator they observe us much more keenly than we observe them and the pick up body-languages sinnds that we not even realize we are sending, for their part they use their voice communicate articulately in a variety of ways, howling to call other member of the pack, growling in anger barking for joy or winning for attention. 

Dogs have all the skills of their wild ancestors. Although not as fragile as cats, they are still good jumpers. They are far better swimmers – for many there is not great pleasure that a plunge into water. Dogs’ senses are also more sophisticated than ours in many ways. They hear better than we do an ability evolved to help them near the rustling of a rodent on the move which now enable them to home is on an opening fridge. Their ability to detect, locate and identify scents is so defined that it is virtually beyond our. 

Curiously, just as we use perfume, dogs cover themselves in strong and will roll on anything worth a pungent odour including decomposing material. 

Being scavengers as well as predators dogs eat a wide variety of foods paying little attention to whether they are fresh or not. They chew sticks and bones, and some bury what they regard as excess food, to be dug up when times are hard because they are pack animals, they are competitive feeders. The dominant dog eats first and all dogs wolf down their food to prevent other pack members from eating it even if you and your family are the other pack members. 

This same sociability means that dogs willingly sleep together. The sleeping positions that they assume vary with breed, age, environmental temperature and the security that an individual feels. As well as grooming by licking, scratching, and chewing themselves, or by rolling in grass or even dust, some dogs will also groom each other.