I was having lunch with an old friend last weekend and was telling him about this blog. We hadn’t talked since Kody came into my life so I told him all about what I had learned about training and the ups and downs with that.
After telling him Kody was a dachshund, he told me how he had thought about getting a chihuahua at one point for all the reasons people usually want chihuahuas. He wanted to dress him up and take him around.
I realized how often I’m having a discussion about my dog, and people group him in with other small breeds. Now there’s nothing wrong with those breeds, chihuahuas are very cute and fun. But I know, and other dachshund owners know that dachshunds are definitely not like other small breeds.
Kody is very much an example of that. He isn’t as immediately loving of strangers as many dogs are. And even after he warms up to a person, he’s not desperate to spend time with them. By nature he’s protective, territorial, and he just wants to hunt. When we go out to the trails, he starts hunting, and he loves it. It’s sort of a whole different personality that’s maybe a little difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t spent time around dachshunds. Even I had a hard time understanding it at first. But once I realized who he was, he had already turned me into a dachshund owner.
A dachshund matches my personality. I’m not immediately approving of other people. I’m very bonded to my dachshund and extremely protective of him. I don’t like other people getting near him too fast. And if we just spend all day together that’s fine with me.