One reason for the morning walkie is to give Little Bear a chance to sniff out local doings. He’s a dog, and they say scent means more to dogs than sight or sound. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know sometimes LB will suddenly veer off from the beaten path and find a spot where something happened of which he clearly does not approve. He’ll get right down and smell the spot, rake the dirt with his claws and give it another good leisurely smell, then at last lift his leg and anoint the spot with what I imagine to be a comment of his own, probably something along the lines of “This is mine, so go away and don’t come back. If I meet you, you’re dead.”
Other than just keeping me company, which would work just as well and more economically with a smaller dog, that’s really LB’s only practical function. He does take coyote sign in his territory personally, I know that for a fact. I know for a fact that coyotes fear him, and that they stay away from the cabin and thus from my chickens. I assume those things are related.
So when LB wants to take a moment and commune with the local wildlife, I indulge him without complaint.
I call this PeeMail. All three of my Labs stop at every hotspot to squirt a reply on our walks. When I let them out in the back yard, they all make a bee line for the same corner of my fence line where others dogs stop to drop a “note”.
Consider yourself lucky that the coyotes are bothered by LB. The coyotes here (which according to science are actually part wolf, not pure ‘yote) are very not bothered by the pee mail left by my extremely large, intact male, dog. I’m sure they’d run away if they found themselves nose to nose with him. But as a general “yup, there’s a big dog there” sort of thing? Not so much…..
With all the Mexican Wolves the feds released north of here I’m not sure how long our local coyotes will remain of pure Aryan stock and welcome to post on WRSA. Unlike Gray Wolves, Mexicans appear as just big, hyperaggressive coyotes. We’ve had a couple of spells with uber-coyotes that scared dogs not normally impressed by ‘yotes infringing on territories coyotes normally avoid, but they never seem to last long and it’s been a few years since the last one. Never knew if those were wolves, or hybrids, or maybe something else entirely.
Damned illegal immigrants… 😉