Kahlua and Lady's first play date!

Recently Kahlua had her first play date with Lady Riddell. It was a rough start. We thought that they would click instantly because their personalities are so alike (hyper), but that wasn't the case at all.

It all started when Lady arrived at our house. She was all happy and excited to see me! We kept Kahlua inside so that Lady could get used to the backyard. We also had the neighbors dog, Mugsy, over. After Lady had a couple of minutes to sniff around we let Kahlua and Mugsy out to say hi. Lady was really nervous and her hackles were sticking up (Hackles: hair on the back of the neck, like when cats get their arch). All Kahlua wanted to do was play with lady, but her barking just made Lady more nervous. They all took about ten minutes to sniff each others butts. It was really funny because they had a dog butt sniffing train going on! (I wish i would have gotten a picture!!!).

After a research on the internet, I have found out why dogs insist's on sniffing other dogs butts. It is their way of shaking hands as us humans do! By smelling another dogs butt, they can detect lots of useful information such as: "...the sex of the other dog, whether the dog is in heat, what the dog ate lately and whether the encounter is likely to be a friendly one." A dog smelling another dogs butt can also be considered a form of stress reliever for the dog, it has a calming affect. It is very weird that dogs must sniff butts to find all of this information out.. could you imagine if we had to do that too?! I'm glad that we have the handshake instead!!  

Anyways, eventually Lady settled down. All of a sudden, out of no where, Kahlua started racing around the backyard. Lady chased after her and got her cornered a few times and they really were starting to have fun! (Mugsy is an older dog so he just stood by and watched from a distance). Afterwards they each got a treat for being good, and a nice cold drink of water. It was time for Lady to go back home. I would say that it was a very successful play date and that Kahlua and Lady are on the road to a very long friendship!



All of the research that I did for this post came from here.