Anniversaries

Bareit the whippet joined our pack a year ago last Sunday.

This is how the boys marked the occasion. They get crazy like that sometimes.

Whippets are not like greyhounds. I realize I'm working with a sample size of one, here, but they're just not. It's not just the size difference. We've had small female greyhounds that were not much larger than a large male whippet. It's not just the energy level, although admittedly, other than Ernie, all of our greyhounds have been old age pensioners when they came to live with us. It's more a different perception of reality. Faced with an obstacle a greyhound will, quite sensibly, go around. It would never occur to a whippet to do this.  A whippet will go over the obstacle, at great speed, clearing it with feet to spare, without thinking about who might be asleep on the other side. A greyhound could easily do the same thing. They just don't.

A greyhound will happily sit or lay on the same part of the couch a human does, usually taking his half out of the middle. A whippet will sit on the arm of the couch with its forefeet on the seat, or stand on the back, or drape itself in unusual ways over an available human (as illustrated above).
Our first experience with this was when we first got Bareit.  This was his solution to the problem of one laptop, one lap dog, and one lap:

Their reality is very three dimensional.

When faced with something new, a greyhound, like most sentient organisms, will take its  measure from a safe distance. A whippet will walk up and poke it with his nose. If it turns around and makes a scary noise, the whippet will run away really fast. Which it is, fortunately, well equipped to do. Were that not the case, few whippets would survive to reproductive age.

I realize that you can't really generalize from one year with one whippet to all of whippet-kind, but if I were to do that, I'd say I like whippets very much. They're not like greyhounds, but I like them both.

Yesterday was Scarecrow's birthday. I got him a trash can for the bathroom, and a DVD of a movie (Sweet Land) he's already seen. Hey, it's what he wanted!

Last year I got him a whippet.