Oh yay, it's Hump Day
BY NICK BARNETTWhen I was 14, a collie took a shine to me. He was the pet of a friend of my parents who was visiting us one day. The dog ignored all others in the house and made for me, trying to make me his special friend. More correctly, trying to make my leg his special friend.
Something about me, or the way my teenaged knee flexed and dimpled in the sun, just made this collie get all excited. He wouldn't leave me alone.
I wasn't pleased. The collie was nice and all, good looking for a dog if you like that kind of thing, but it was hard, really, to take the attention as any kind of compliment. I was too embarrassable to laugh it off.
Eventually our guest left, taking her collie with her.
An hour later, I looked out of a window to see that the collie had returned, making its own way about a kilometre to our house. He was looking for me.
I didn't really want to present myself for further wooing but I had to: I was the only one who would be able to lead him home. Which I did, the collie panting and spasming behind me.
Dogs just have no inhibitions.
Now I have two dogs, a male and female. Both are neutered, but there's a lot of humping. Connor humps Phoebe, Phoebe humps Connor, in a canine Kama Sutra that we've grown not to blush at.
I realise that the humping is not all sexual these days, but it was earlier on. When we first got Connor he was still intact and took a fervent interest in shapely Phoebe. Neutering cut down on this, though not immediately. A few days after the snip, when male hormones were still surging through Connor's system, he made one last attempt at sexual connection with Phoebe.
This is a family blog, so what I'll say is that there was an extrusion, an unfurlment, which beggared belief. I thought he must have ruptured something, so I rang the after-hours vet, who through an audible grin told me there was nothing to fear, and that Connor was simply a normally, if disproportionately, arrayed chap, and that eventually the neutering would have its final effect after the counting of special votes, as it were.
Nowadays the friction between Phoebe and Connor seems to be dominance-related. It's their way of saying "I'm the King/Queen of the castle, and you're the dirty rrrrrascal".
A lot of it seems to be opportunistic. Phoebe tries to have her way with Connor when he's chewing intently on a toy; Connor, meanwhile, is completely unaware of her intentions, which makes for a sad tableaux of fervour repaid with indifference. A human analogy would be putting down your book, or unplugging your iPod, to discover that someone is attempting the marriage act with you. Pretty unlikely, don't you think? Oh.
Connor, in turn, is drawn to hump Phoebe mostly when she's being submissive to someone, rolling on the ground for a tickle. Trouble is, that's Phoebe's way of getting on in life: nobody can resist tickling her silky tummy, and so she makes human friends easily.
Result: the humping starts whenever anyone else is around. If we run into friends on the street while walking the dogs, and immediately Phoebe starts to make friends with them, Connor starts in on the humping. "He doesn't do this [much] at home," we have to say, laughing nervously.
Luckily, neither dog has taken a shine to any of my limbs, though Connor has romanced my partner's shin a couple of times before losing interest.
I just hope that neither of our dogs falls for a friend or house guest in the same way as that ardent collie fell for me. And if it does happen, I hope Connor gets let down easy.
Join Four Legs Good on Facebook.
Picture: Malingering
Sponsored links
Newest First
Oldest First
Very tactfully worded :-)
It seems like it's a learned behaviour now more than an actual need. If it was a problem you could train him out of it.
Haha great blog today – always nice to start the day off with a laugh.
Your household sounds just the same as ours. We also have a boy and a girl who like to take turns humping each other. Often it seems to happen when one wants the other’s attention or wants to play. It seems to occur mostly in the evenings just as its cooling down and the dogs start to get a bit more energy before their evening run at the park. We affectionately refer to this as “hump hour”.
You had me chuckling at "extrusion", nicely put. And you're right about it being dominance-related. When I was younger we had two bitches, the younger & smaller one being inclined every so often to hump the other... she always got quite firmly put back in her place:-) The older one never showed this behaviour, she probably felt she didn't have anything to prove.
As both were pedigree animals the breeder had insisted on them being spayed before she would sell them to us, so I'm pretty confident this means we didn't have a lesbian terrier.
mmm yes humping leg day reminds me of when i was a younger me and accompianied my mother to a alternative doctor and they had a little dog who as you say took a "shine" to my little leg and i was so embarrised that i decided to sit in the car and every other doctors appointment i sat in the car while the dog keenly eyeballed me on occassions. We also have a couple of dogs a male papillon and a female labrador and to be honest it never occured to me that the papillon would try and mount our female due to the size difference i mean surely it would be like climbing the largest mountain. But Louie (papillon) was found trying the wild thing on with my beautiful lab although she i dont think she noticed sometimes even when he looked like he was going like the clappers lol...Now he has lost 2 great friends lefty and righty and he has calmed down alot all he does now is bite the back of her legs which is much better then the humping because when visitors come they found it amusing but after a few hundred times enough was enough..
When I was younger we had a foxie that was totally enamoured with one of those Farmers Santa bears. All you had to do was squeeze its paw to make it sing and Sam would come dancing on inside doing his 'love trot' till he reached the bear...
humping is the main reason I'm not a dog guy.
Our two daxies like to have a hump every now and then. Neither of them have the parts required so it's more of a play/dominance thing. The miniature has some issues with direction so his big brother will be happily chewing a bone and the little one is trying to get on sideways. It looks like he's trying to jump over his brother.... repeatedly... and failing. Hours of entertainment!
Great blog, laughed all the way through it. Keep on writing positive things about dogs - after the negative knee jerk reaction to the latest dog attacks it is nice to read a normal story about a dog.
I never wanted a male dog, for this reason. When I met a little butter-ball of a pug-puppy, my mind was easily changed, however. We got him fixed early (about 4.5 months), before any of this behaviour began, so its never been an issue. Different story for our little female Cavalier. She was fixed at about 9 months, and is a randy little girl, to put it nicely... She has two favourite stuffed toys who get special attention. Its embaressing, and funny, but at least she doesn't attach herself to our legs, and the pug looks confussed about what she's doing to their toys, ha.
Schoolgirl sex video man guilty
Sir Richard Taylor named New Zealander of the Year
Dazzling Adele silences critics
Kiwis in cruise ship cocaine bust
'Starved, beaten' teen weighed just 32kg
Mallard offers ticket cash back
Sonny Bill Williams finds rugby boring: mate
No radiation leak on plane, says Fire Service
15-minute-old newborn gets heart pacemaker
Sir Richard Taylor named New Zealander of the Year
Electronic cigarette explodes in man's mouth
Charges over Kapiti coast fatal car crash
Feral cats 'worse than possums'
'Starved, beaten' teen weighed just 32kg
Mallard offers ticket cash back
We used to look after Chihuahua's while their owner was on holiday, one of them loved to hump a Rupert bear knitted toy. I always felt very sorry for Rupert.