Her name is Blondie, she takes me hiking all the time. She is so unlike any dog I was ever around. When we first got her I brought her home and she was settling in, she was only a few doors down the street from the original owners... that was in the Mojave Desert where lots of dogs have a little Coyote in their blood... so I'm sitting on the couch just vegging out, Blondie is over in a corner of the room sort of watching me... right at the point where I've forgotten she is there she makes a sudden run, leaps over the coffee table and hits me in the chest with all four paws, bounce off me and continues on down the hall... she was about 10 weeks old at the time... so I saw that maybe she likes to play, likes the athletic contest a little bit.. she's part Labrador and they are known for that, so I start this little fighting game with her.. that was three years ago and we still play that game about five times a day... I've frustrated her a zillion times and she has taken a lot of skin off my arms. She does that when she's losing... I just never bothered to train her to not jump up on people or to not think she's sort of my equal and it's working out well. We go for hikes in the mountains and I can take her off the leash and she doesn't chase bicycles or do anything but just observe all the other people, she is smart as can be really. I can ask her if she wants to go "see Charlie", that's the other dog, and if she doesn't want to quit hiking she will circle me once and continue on but if she's hot and thirsty she might come with me to go home... She learned to heel in about ten minutes, she watched me latch the gates very intently and she promptly unlatched them... even ones where she had to jump up five feet to do so... I just don't think there are that many dogs like Blondie but I've only had a half dozen in my lifetime.. I don't think that most owners know that dog's priority is first exercise and second affection.. they don't need much affection, just a kind word, a biscuit or a pat on the head is plenty...
had a dog once... used to humpsniff the crotch of every hore i brought home... you should have seen what I did when he brought smthg home.. i got even!
We have a german shepard that has a real passion for catching a frisbee. The only thing she'd rather do than play frisbee is to go hiking. The dog just goes absolutely nuts when she sees me putting on my boots. She gets so nervous that I'm might leave her behind. I can see the real disapointment in her face during the times when she doesn't get to go.
They have personalities that somewhat go with the breed. The fight game we play seems to have been educational for the dog, she learned spatial things from it I'm thinking. I think that you want to teach them that cooperation is good but not through punishment, that's pretty much what the fight game did, I always would end the game on as friendly a note as possible. Blondie is funny, I would try to show her my bleeding arm if she drew blood and she would not look at it like a little kid in complete denial that they did something Relatives of ours had a Wolf. I took him on a long walk in territory that I did not know once. On the way back I was thinking to go one way, he was telling me the other way so I went with his idea... he took us straight back to the trail head... they show their animals cooperation too, anything else just lowers the level of intelligence they are going to display...