Why do dogs try to mate with your leg?
Many people have experienced the embarrassing moment when their host’s male dog suddenly locks his front paws around your leg and begins vigorous pelvic thrusting.
Why do these dogs start out with such an unpromising activity?
The answer is that dogs go through a special socialization phase as puppies, during which they establish their identity. This critical period lasts from the age of four to twelve weeks, and any species that shares this time with them in close and friendly proximity becomes their species. For all domestic dogs, there are always two species present during this crucial stage of growth: dogs and humans. As a result, they become ‘mental hybrids’, strongly attached to both species. For the rest of their lives, they are comfortable in both canine and human society. His human family members serve quite well as an adopted ‘pack’. Human beings share their food, they share their den, they go out together to patrol the territory, they play together, they enjoy some social grooming, they perform the required greeting ceremonies and, in general, they act with alacrity the role of companion dogs.
Canine society and human society make a good match. Only when it comes to sex is the relationship broken.
Fortunately, there are some powerful innate responses involved in canine sexual attraction, which generally serve to keep dogs heading in the right direction. Since humans do not possess the dog’s particular erotic fragrance, they do not normally trigger the sexual responses of the male dogs that share their homes. As far as dogs are concerned, people are simply “members of their pack who are never in a sexual condition.”
Everything should be fine, but sadly for most male dogs, encounters with female dogs in heat are unusually rare events in their domesticated lives. A level of sexual frustration builds where even the family cat begins to look attractive. At this point, a horny dog will try to mount just about anything that sits still long enough, including cats, other male dogs, cushions, and human legs.
Human legs are attractive because they are easy to hold. The choice of a leg instead of a more appropriate part of the human anatomy is simply due to the clumsy and undoglike shape of human beings. They are too big and too high, making the leg the only easily accessible region for last-resort sexual innuendo.
The correct response to a dog grabbing its legs is compassion rather than anger. It is we, after all, who have condemned such dogs to an abnormally celibate existence. A polite rejection of his advances is all that is needed, not the angry punishment that is sometimes meted out.
The comment about the dog’s interest in the family cat was not meant to be funny. Some sexually frustrated dogs try to mate with cats, but this only happens when the animals in question have grown up together as puppies and kittens. A close relationship with young cats during the critical phase of puppy development simply adds felines to the ‘my kind’ category in the canine mind.
A puppy that has played with:
(a) other puppies in her litter,
(b) the family kitten, and
(c) their human owners, during the four to twelve week socialization phase, will have a lifelong triple attachment.
There is another side of the coin in this attachment process. The absence of a species during the socialization period of puppy development will automatically make it something to avoid later on. This applies even to the true species of the pup itself. If a young pup is separated from its mother before its eyes and ears are open, for example when it is only a week old, and is hand-reared in isolation, it will become extremely attached to humans, but it will always be shy with other dogs. in adulthood. Therefore, it is a big mistake to remove a puppy from the family from him too soon. If there is a disaster, with the mother dying and only one pup surviving, for example, then it is important to try to have other puppies or dogs around the young while it is being hand-reared, so that it gets used to the company of its kind during its critical period. of growth.
If a puppy is left in the company of its own canine family but kept completely away from humans until it is over twelve weeks old, it will never become tame or friendly with people in later life. Pups raised in a field on an experimental farm, where they had no close contact with people until the litter was fourteen weeks old, were effectively like wild animals.
The idea that the domestic dog is somehow a ‘genetically domesticated’ animal is not true. The suggestion that wolves are more “wild” and untamed than dogs is also wrong. A wolf pup caught at a young enough stage of development becomes a remarkably friendly companion, so much so that most people, seeing one walking around on a collar and leash, would imagine it to be just another large dog. In fact, on one occasion a domesticated adult wolf was brought from England to the United States on the Queen Elizabeth, registered as an Alsatian, without causing any comment. He was given a daily walk around the deck and gleefully petted by the passengers and crew, who would have been horrified had they known his true identity.