Changing Places

This past week saw a change in the porch population. Around Tuesday or Wednesday, we noticed Dora wasn't around in the morning. Dora is the blond juvenile on the right in the photo. The red female is Wodi, Dora's mother.

For several months now, Wodi has been the alpha and Dora, the beta, with Carmel, as the omega female. Dora and Wodi took the top of the porch and Carmel hid under the house. We've gotten used to this arrangement.

When we noticed Dora was gone, we figured she was out hunting. When we didn't see her the next day, we started calling her. Lo and behold, she was hiding up in the brush on the hillside to the left of the house about 300 feet away. She wouldn't approach the porch and I had to feed her away from the others. They would "school" her whenever she got close to them.

There is a shift in pack rank going on. Dora was skinny and covered in ticks on Friday. She took a trip with Wodi and Carmel to the local Animal Control office to help the staff identify Carolina Dogs that may show up. Two males we looked at both tried to mount the girls. A sure sign someone might be in heat soon. Neither male comes here because either one would cause a heat cycle for the alpha female, Wodi. Neither male has been verified as a Carolina Dog, either. The beta female, Dora could also be in heat but not show signs. This could be a reason the pack dynamic is changing.
Carmel has come out from under the house and is her mother's constant companion two days later. She is only 5 months old and thus not a threat to the alpha status. Our pack management question becomes what to do with Dora to not excessively interfere with the natural order of things but also allow her to survive. There is a real possibility that she would perish as the new omega.

Yesterday, I thought about how juveniles in any pack will split off from the main pack at a certain age to form their own groups. Perhaps this is also part of the situation here. I set Dora a double ration near a dog shelter that we are not currently using. This shelter is in the back yard of the house near a wet weather creek that will be dry until late fall. I then placed her food in the creek bed where she would be visually shielded from the other dogs should they decide to look around the side of the house. I tried to set up a situation for Dora to inhabit as her own territory without threatening Wodi's territory.

Yesterday became a turn around day for Dora. She ate and ate well. She no longer looked too skinny. She stopped hiding under the milking table on the back porch (where she had been early in the day) and stretched out on the pavement of the back porch and slept. Not a half awake monitoring sleep that many dogs will do during the day, but a full body, sacked out, long breath deep sleep. She was sleeping in the same area this morning, albeit in a different position.

Today when I fed, Dora accompanied me, careful to keep her distance from Wodi and Carmel. Wodi and Carmel were only interested in the porch territory and did not accompany me on any of my feeding routine. They didn't show any interest in Dora once she went to the side of the house. I fed Dora last. She anticipated where I would go with her food and led me to the exact spot I had fed her yesterday. She had a small pile still there. I added today's food and she immediately commenced eating. This is to be her feeding spot for the time being.

In conclusion, I think the pack rank changed due to Dora's relative age and maturity and this is a natural process to be expected. By providing a safe den area for her to go, she is able to successfully survive and perhaps later have her own family without a challenge to Wodi. What remains to be seen is how long the two home territories; the front and back of the house remain as such and whether we can do the same thing on other spots of our property.

Grooming

Yesterday, Mercedes went to a new home and today her two sisters were hanging out with Wodi, their mom.

To be more accurate, Crystal was hanging out with mom being groomed and Carmel was sleeping on the porch when I first looked in on them this morning.

Most of the information you read about Carolina dog fur on the web will indicate that because of its characteristic coarseness, the dogs do not have to be groomed much. In short, their coats are self-maintaining. This we have found to be basically true. There is however, a grooming ritual.

Who grooms who may be related to hierarchy. I cannot tell. It is most prevelant amongst the mothers and puppies. I have seen Wodi groom cats who happened to live here. There is not the excessive licking that you see cats do, but rather a nose led exploration of the dog's coat. The dogs make a kind of nibble on various spots. They will often do this to our outstretched hand when we greet them.

In our pack, that nibble might look like a close mouth bite, but it is really just a nibble. Special attention is paid to the ears when grooming which explains to me why their large ears don't require extra maintenance on my part. I think this is what they do to us or try to when we sit down on the steps of the porch. I have also noticed that the males are not typically involved in this activity.

This morning Crystal and Wodi were involved in grooming. Wodi was checking Cystal's coat and ears while Carmel was sleeping on the porch in the favorite orange chair. A little while later, Carmel was up and out with her mother and sister. Wodi was grooming herself and Crystal was grooming Carmel who seemed to be disinterested in this activity. A little bit later Carmel groomed Crystal with the enthusiasm of a 14 year-old cleaning his room. After a half a minute of this, both Carmel and Crystal curled up. Carmel actually closed her eyes and was "sleeping" the way dogs do. Crystal got up and was grooming her again. And she didn't seem to care much. Didn't even open an eyelid.

What's all the fuss?

Came home about 8:30 or so this evening and everything seemed to be normal with the girls on the porch. As we settled in, there seemed to be some commotion amongst the porch community, but didn't seem to be too much. I looked at the 2 of the puppies barking. They were facing the north hillside, and the adults, Wodi and Dora, seemed rather disinterested. Not elaborately feigning disinterest, the ladies were looking at the puppies but not moving from their cozy spots. As time went on, the barking grew more frequent. It was the kind of bark that tells you something is out of the oridnary. It doesn't sound like the hunting bark or the get out of my space bark or any of the other various vocalizations these dogs make.

As the intensity and loudness and particpation in the barking grew, it became impossible to sit still and do nothing. So I from my computer spot and Jim from the TV spot moved toward the door. What we found was the females guarding the porch from one of the male dogs, Hoover. Hoover had twisted his cable until it frayed apart and gone visiting. The girls were not about to let him on the porch. He came up to me readily and although the older ladies settled done abit, the younger pups, especially Carmel a.k.a. Crawfish gave a warning bark from under the porch in her spot she likes. Crystal also growl/barled a warning. We took Hoover back out to his run in the back of the house and emergency repaired his cable so as to keep the peace tonight.

The cable we use for his run is the heavy duty twisted cable for the larest size dog. It is the strongest cable outside of a chain that we can put him on. We learned from experience with our older male that even this strength cable only holds them on their lines just so long. Usually they break it when one of the females is in heat and isn't paying "enough attention" to the male. Through careful observation, we have been able to break the twisted cable cycle. Once a female chooses whichever male she wishes, we put them together in a kennel until her cycle is finished and then everyone goes back to their normal order.

Before we get up in arms about the lack of free movement the males have, let us consider what will happen should one of them or both them be loose. One word. Death. Whichever male is free will attack the unfree one. If both are free then fighting happens at the nearest convenient spot. Hoover and Yellow Boy are evenly matched and would surely kill each other. That would not be a desireable outcome for our pack. So one lives in front of the house, Yellow Boy and one lives in the back of the house, Hoover. Both are on generous runs. Neither can see the other which eliminates the mutual posturing they would do, if they were close enough for visual challenge, not to mention the twisted broken cables that would result. Ideally we would like to securely fence two 10-15 acre sections of property and allow each male their own area and their own pack. We are working on the fenced areas as a long term goal because the fencing requires a fairly sizeable investment of time, money & labor.