Initial Observations

Charley and Lina

Charley has started licking Lina’s face. That usually shows submissiveness. It was Lina who licked Cientos’s face. On the other hand, Charley puts Lina down roughly if she gets close to a toy he’s playing with. She snarls back, freezes, then, once Charley turns away, she does her wiggle butt dance. He wags his tail and rubs up against me for pets. It’s like Lina is being submissive to Charley & Charley is being submissive to me. I would expect Charley, being male, to be dominant over Lina, second to me, the alpha pack leader, but the licking Lina’s face doesn’t seem to fit.

When we come home after leaving the pooches in the garage, with access to the yard, they’re both outside. Before, we’d come home and find Lina and Cientos curled up in the garage cubby seemingly exactly where we left them. I suspect Charley goes out to explore and Lina follows, or it could be Lina entices him out (she is quite a temptress). This makes me think Charley has enough confidence in his new surroundings to be curious.

On the one hand, Charley seems to have beautiful manners. No getting in to the trash, jumping up on counters. He will fetch a toy endlessly, intensely running after it and bringing it back to me. He doesn’t try to steal the toy or make me chase him to get it. He seems to really enjoy chasing it down and bringing it back to me.

Yet, when I try to use fetching a toy as a reward for doing something he doesn’t particularly like to do or seems to have a bad association with, like responding to the COME or DOWN command, he acts confused.

Similarly, food treats seem like more of a distraction to him, at least at this point, than a reward. (Of course, Carol Benjamin writes, in Mother Knows Best, that food treats are always a distraction….)

I guess at this point, I’m just not sure what to make of Charley.