“Good.” - the cat.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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When we got the puppy I had intentionally left the cat's claws untrimmed for a little over a month leading up and a few after. it certainly wasn't the only way we trained the dog to be respectful of the cat, but it definitely helped! These days we've progressed to more advanced socialization; cuddling on either side of me in exchange for treats. sometimes on a pretty good day I can get them to sit on the same side with a few inches in between, and on a very good day the cat accidentally rubs her face on the dog's paw while aiming for my hand (the look of surprised disgust is hilarious). The biggest rule that really helped was teaching the dog that if the cat is close by the dog should be belly up. Helps the cat feel safer and makes it less likely the dog will chase.
fwiw when we got a puppy, the vet instructed us to do just this with our cat who had already been with us for a few years. Worked like a charm.
I had two dogs and two cats and they were all about the same size.
The only way the dogs would win was when they would team up against against a lone cat.
The one hot goth girl in HS... and the rest of us hotdogs
Dogs form a pile to the right.
Racist dogs
I grew up in redneck country and this was legitimately a problem occasionally. In particular you'd have people / families who consciously knew racism = bad, America fought against the Nazis for a reason, etc, but had a lot of subconscious biases particularly in ways that just prevented them from regularly intermingling with other races.
So they'd go decades just having their insular little neighborhood block parties and family reunions and such that never had a black or other non-white person and just never consciously consider the implications of that. Then one day their kid would bring home a new friend, someone new would move into the neighborhood, or even just a black guy would come to install the new fiber optic internet cables or whatever and suddenly they find out that their sweet beloved family pet hates black people.
and there were definitely some families out there for whom this was more of a feature than a bug, but there were also a lot of people that were suddenly confronted with the realization that subconscious and systemic biases are a thing by the surreal yet glaring realization that they somehow raised a racist dog.
That is very very interesting. Honestly, I knew gypsies before as a kid, but for some reason...this one teen kid was really black, and his lips pronounced, like a stereotypical black person, and I was scared/intimidated from him for some reason.
My aunt's old greyhound actually was, uhh... dog racist, I guess. I don't mean towards humans, I mean other dogs. He'd happily interact with other greyhounds, doing all the usual dog greetings, but the less the other dog looked like a greyhound the more likely it was that he'd awkwardly ignore them and refuse to engage. Whippet? Cool. Lurcher? Ehhh, cautiously acceptable. Labrador? Absolutely fucking not
He was an ex-racer that my aunt got from a shelter, and he had clearly been through a lot before that. He got a good retirement with her though
Was it the size of the dogs? I know rescued greyhounds can have active prey drives since they basically chased a fake rabbit 24/7.
I didn't see any sort of a pattern about the size, but to be fair he wasn't my dog so I didn't see him interacting with other dogs most of the time. He was fine with both greyhounds the same size as him and whippets that were much smaller, so I don't think it was about size
That said you have reminded me of an entertaining memory. I worked at a greyhound rescue centre for a little bit (not the one my aunt's dog came from), and I was just about the only person there that wasn't a functionally-retired little old lady. One morning while we were walking the dogs, a squirrel darted across the path. It was carnage. Grannies scattered like bowling pins. Everyone was okay
Greyhounds are such wonderful dogs
the cat is smelly