Finland. It’s a beautiful sunny day, but the water is still probably about -23C. I’m with the dog, eff that water.
NICE FIND! Made my morning a laughed so hard. Thanks!
One of my dogs has a sixth sense about when I’m about to clip his toenails, which I avoid doing because he hates it so much. But he has this one funny nail that bends inward and will become ingrown if I don’t clip it regularly. But somehow he can tell when I’m getting up to get his clippers as opposed to when I’m getting up to do anything else, and he runs and hides in his little sister’s crate until I give up. It must be my body language he’s reading but I can’t really tell what I’m doing differently.
I love the look the dog in the video gives to the camera person at the end, after he’s defeated the bath. Its a little bit of a smile and also a bit of mirth at the whole scene. People think I’m reading in when I say stuff like that, but I don’t think so. Dogs are more like us than not. In fact, my eldest dog has laughed twice in his life, and both times it was when one of his little sisters accidentally got water dripped on her from the hose in our backyard. Apparently that is the funniest shit he’s ever seen.
And our youngest has also cried twice. Literally cried, once like a wailing baby when I was trying to get her away from some poisonous weeds I was pulling out and I got a bit upset and worried, and another time when her older sister snapped at her for something unexpected. She cried with that stuttering sound a little kid makes, and then pushed softly at her sister, clearly exclaiming her shocked surprise that her big sis would be mean to her like that and reproving her for it. Our middle dog barks with a disapproving roo roo roo sounds that drops pitch and trails off at the end. She does this whenever we are out for a while and then come back.
I love dogs.
Rule #1 of overpowering a large breed dog: Be stronger than said dog.
I had a St. Bernard-English Setter mix growing up. Fortunately, there was never a time I wasn’t stronger than him, and he knew it. I trained him early on to be a big pushover because I never let him win in a battle of wills.
Some people say that’s breaking the dog’s spirit. I see it more like applying discipline. How could a big animal respect people if he knows he can always ignore them, or shove them out of the way? So I never let him get away with shoving me, or ignoring me. And I think he benefited from that. I never bullied him. I just refused to allow him to get away with being stubborn, or trying to push anyone out of his way. And I did it early enough, and asserted myself often enough that he respected me.
There’s only two ways that dog is going in the water…
- pick it up; jump in
- pretend to drown
The downside is that neither of these is likely to work twice…
All depends on how you do it. Pyr’s are famously independent and work more in a “I am your partner” way with their human pals. They are not mastered by a human. Nemo knows how to do all the tricks and when he is feeling cooperative, I can walk him barely holding the leash. When he decides to pull, I am a kite. It is all about showing him that listening to me is in his best interests. As long as he trusts that I am doing the right thing/taking care of him he listens. When he decides I am just doing shit to make my life easy or his hard, he plants like the dog in the video and becomes one with the Earth.
I get that, and admire people with the patience to train their dogs ways that don’t involve overpowering or physical positioning.
In my situation, the St. Bernard-English Setter mix became a part of the family when he was already a year and a half old, and he’d never had any training at all. So he was very big, and had no manners, and was a very smart trickster. He didn’t respect me, and I got fed up with him knocking me over to get where he wanted to go, so I stopped being a bowling pin, and became a beartrap instead. Every time he tried to knock me over, it ended with me sitting on him and holding him down till he stopped struggling. After a week or two, he stopped trying to knock me out of the way, and instead yielded the right-of way.
Doesn’t work with every dog, and I wouldn’t recommend it with emotionally sensitive dogs who get their feelings hurt. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend that training method generally. Ideally, you have your dog from when they’re a pup, and they grow up knowing who their best buddy is, and they naturally gain respect for you, because you treat them well.
What really irks me are people who get a small breed/toy breed dog because they’re cute, but are totally unwilling to correct them when they misbehave. So often they end up letting a little furball have all the power in the house. Most dog bites and attacks come from untrained small breed dogs against children. I trained my current dog, a lab, comparatively gently. He doesn’t mouth/play bite, because he was never given treats when he did that. He also gets out of the way when told “excuse me”, and is generally a very good boy. Of course, individual personality is a major, if not the majority influence on what’s going to be an effective training method. So you got to experiment to see what the dog responds to.
My labrador was the opposite, he was the one that pulled ME in the drink.
Every time.
i have two pyr siblings, and i have yet to bathe them.
in fact, one of the more popular doggie-day-cares here in ATL now refuses to bathe them, claiming it’s too much work. in other words, you can’t pay somebody to clean a pyr.
My groomer is happy to work on Nemo. I brush him regularly and they claim it is very easy. He is in and out in less than an hour (they like me to pick him up quick cause he takes up space in a small salon.)
A Labrador is a water dog, bred to retrieve ducks and other fowl from wetlands. A Great Pyrenees is a mountain dog, bred to guard livestock in hilly terrain.
Hence why labs love water, and Pyrenees do not. 
Dogs really do look like their owners, or vice versa?
An acquaintance of mine had a black lab trained as a retriever. If his bumper (the rubber training thingy) was thrown into the pool it would immediately sink to the bottom (about 7 feet), and with the right command, that dog would, with nary a second thought about water depth or temperature, dive right to the bottom to retrieve it. It was beyond awesome to see. Having grown up with retrievers of various sorts, labs and setters have always been my favorite breeds.
Unfortunately the lab’s master was a pondscummy imbecile douchebag who should be gunned down in the streets for various offenses against his own family, including that dog.
He needs to adopt an Otterhound.
“Dogs are better than cats because they’re obedient” … yeah, right.
(On the other hand: Now that’s a dog.)
On the gripping hand, a cat that size would have killed him for trying that. Not that you normally have to clean a cat.
What really amused me about watching this is I have a dog who I normally bathe in the bathtub, and he hates it. But take him to a large body of water like a lake or, even better, the ocean, and he can’t wait to get in the water and romp around. Go figure.
Ha ha. I have a cat that I swear knows the word “vet.” I have gotten to calling it “The Place That Cannot Be Named” anytime a cat needs to go in for a tune up, for fear that he will let on to the other, less intelligent, kitties. He is impossible to catch and the last time I thought I was so clever, opening the door for him to go out, then slamming it shut before he could get out and snagging him. He did not forgive me and for at least a week would not go out if I were holding the door. Thank god he is not gigantic like this dog.
And you’ve now explained why homeopathic remedies seem to “work” on pets.
