As time has gone on living in a house with lots of dogs, I’ve had two dogs decide they were mine. One is Anka, who gets good billing on this site, mainly because she is an adult German shepherd that is pretty easy to put into poses.
But I do have another dog that has decided he’s definitely mine. He’s a bit fancier stuff than Anka, because he’s a show-bred whippet.
Yes, my other dog is a cushion that can run over 30 mph if he wants to.
So though I did mention him on here when he was a very young puppy, we have come to the conclusion that Poet is my second dog. He is one of the nicest dogs I’ve ever had pleasure to get to know.
He was supposed to be Jenna’s, but he came into her life at about the same time I moved in. He just decided he liked me, almost exactly the same way Anka did.
However, I don’t know a blasted thing about showing a whippet, but he is going to be a show dog and a lure courser. He also makes a darn good table for my laptop, a task which he serving to the best of his ability as I type this.
He’s of Sporting Fields lines. Here’s his pedigree.
This is a different sort of dog for me altogether, and right now, I have this dog, the German shepherd, and a saluki puppy I’m helping raise and send to Australia that have become rather attached to me.
I never thought I’d say it, but I think I’ve really moved on from golden retrievers. Nothing against the breed, but if I ever get another one, it better be a very special one.
I will always love and admire the really driven working goldens, but when I want that in a dog, I think it’s a lot easier to get that in a working German shepherd, which are much more consistently produced and more easily procured.
If I want a couch-cuddle dog, the whippet is the dog to have. I think most people who want a nice house dog would be well-advised to look at a show-bred whippet as a pet. They are just as nice to have in the house as a toned-down golden retriever, but unlike those dogs,they don’t drop lots of hair and then go outside looking for mud to roll in. (And if you want a dog that doesn’t shed much, don’t get a German shepherd. They are far worse than any golden. But they don’t go hunting for mud to wallow in.)
So have a brown hyena and a cheetah dog.
He’s awfully cute there cuddled up with you!
I call mine a German Shedder. :D
I would worry about a whippet chasing my cats.
Ours like cats a lot. They will play with them and cuddle with them. They aren’t pure coursing or racing lines though, and that can be a problem with some of those dogs.
So, question about sighthound top speed here…whippets and greyhounds and other such dogs have bodies that very specialized for speed, the result of selective breeding to produce the fastest dogs possible. Yet considering the level of specialization, the speed figures quoted for sighthounds don’t seem appreciably higher, or are in some cases lower, than the quoted top speeds of similarly sized wild canids with more generalized morphologies. Coyotes for instance, are usually stated to be able to run at 35-43mph, and they are less specialized for cursoriality than a whippet. Even non-canids like the rather ungainly looking spotted hyena are usually stated to be able to run at more than 35mph. Presumably a lot of data is available on sighthound speed, so you think that speed figures for wild animals are often just inaccurately high instead? Or is there some reason domestic dogs *need* to be hyper-selected for speed in order to match that of wild carnivores, perhaps to recoup some natural athleticism lost during the domestication process? (that doesn’t seem plausible to me, I’m just throwing it out there)
Coyotes do run as fast as greyhounds and salukis, but wolves really don’t hit such high speeds. I think coyotes in the West sort of evolved to run fast because jackrabbits made such a big part of their diet. Coyotes without hair look very much like sighthounds. Greyhounds are fast but they cannot hold that speed for long. Salukis are not as fast, but they can hold it way longer. The way to remember the difference is that greyhounds are cheetahs and salukis are African wild dogs. A lot jackrabbit coursers will run a greyhound and a saluki together. If the greyhound doesn’t catch it fast, then the saluki has a chance to run it down.
What likely keeps coyotes from getting all the extreme specializations in conformation that greyhounds have is that racing greyhounds are actually pretty delicate, and they do get injured on their runs frequently enough. A wild dog could never experience those risks and continue to contribute to the gene pool.