Toby the Puppy fears no one.
He doesn’t realize he is a small pooch. He spots a big bruiser, a dog with much more heft? “Let me at him!” he seems to say.
Now, having said that, I need to stipulate that we don’t let him loose to interact with said bruiser-dogs. We keep Toby on a short leash as we walk through the ‘hood. Just yesterday, a large boxer spotted Toby from across the street and sprinted toward us — at which point we picked our puppy up to avoid any kind of potential canine-on-canine conflict.
However, Toby has developed a curious friendship with another critter on our walks. It’s a neighbor’s cat.
The kitty lives on the street that’s one block north of ours and about two blocks east. We see the kitty frequently, as its home is along our normal route; we haven’t checked closely, by the way, to determine the gender of this furry feline.
The kitty initiates the contact when we’re walking by. It approaches Toby with zero trepidation. They sniff noses and, oh yes, occasionally sniff each other’s backsides; I guess this is something dogs and cats have in common.
The kitty makes no hostile moves. Nor does Toby, although he tends to tug on his leash in an apparent effort to engage the cat in a more friendly/aggressive manner. We discourage it — with emphasis.
My wife and I are longtime kitty parents, so we have a keen understanding of cat psychology. Now that we’ve been puppy parents for about two years and three months, we’re getting pretty good at reading dog psychology, too.
Has our puppy become a sort of “critter whisperer”? Hardly.
Unless, of course, we find him nuzzling one of the many squirrels we encounter during our strolls through the neighborhood.
