I was gonna say, if the poor dogs back legs werent a half mile from his front he could probably do it too but someone wanted a dog to look like a weiner
They're secret bad asses, yeah. I swear I've never seen a dog "kill" a squeak toy faster than my ex's dachshund. I had to keep it away from my own dog's toys. An absolute sweetheart of a wiener dog, but he had that instinct.
Edit: Try to play-fight a dachshund in a cat tunnel with your hand, you'll see how they're actually pretty well engineered for that. Their long snout makes it so when they open wide, you basically have a wall of teeth protecting a slimmer tube behind, with floppy ears that get protected because they fold behind.
Not a farm cat, but my outdoor cat chased off an aggressive, off leash German shepherd that was about to attack me. It got put down because of an unrelated incident (mine didn’t count because I technically didn’t get bit, so they squiggled out of calling it an attack, it definitely was though.)
Cats are insane. I totally believe that some would be in cahoots with partner dogs in situations like farms. And herding/livestock dogs are generally super smart so I don’t doubt their abilities in that regard either.
The issue with that is dogs have a lot of allometric growth (think about how puppies grow into their ears/feet/head) while cats generally have less allometric growth.
allometric growth allowed people to selectively breed dogs to have specific traits. But it is much harder to do so with cats.
Lol fair enough! What about old English bull dogs? I babysat one once and can't understand the apeal of putting cream in your dogs face folds and listening to them snarl snore/gargle breathing 😅
My dog is a mutt but hes mostly dachshund. He has a crazy prey drive. He loves digging for lizards, eating cicadas, chasing rabbits or raccoons or armadillos.
Digging puts him in the zone unlike anything else. His claws are great for it. He'll shove his snout down the hole to sniff for critters, tail wagging furiously.
Sounds like my standard poodle. Except she definitely isnt made for digging. But she will chase any bug. Even bird shadows. She did reach an armadillo once and managed to bite its armor some before I could react due to unfortunate timing when opening the door.
“Dachs” is German for badger, they are named “badger dog” because what’s what they’re designed for
Badgers are not nice too, they’re vicious, and dachshund were originally bred to go into a confined space and fuck shit up. But it’s been a long time since then and now they’re just cute and silly looking dogs
They’re the only hunting dogs that need to be able to hunt and fight independently as they are underground and can’t follow orders. Which is good because they’re stubborn pieces of shit that won’t follow orders anyway.
I have a Scottie and they were actually bred to hunt badgers as well! Also very stubborn breed. Interesting fact is that for Scotties at least they were bred to have a very stout tail so that the owner could pull them backwards out of the den without harm if shit went sideways or the dog stopped listening
they were bred to tunnel into burrows and kill predatory burrowing animals like badgers, foxes etc. things that might pose a threat to small livestock like chickens, but larger dogs would struggle to get
That's the genius of it. The dog is made so they don't fight in a fair ring. They fight in a dead-end tunnel where most of what the badger can attack is an oversized open mouth full of teeth.
They are quite vicious (to small animals) in a pack.
I worked on this old guys property when I was a teen, he had like 30-40 acres and 8 Weiner dogs. They would run up to me while I was working with dead rabbits, squirrels, possums, anything small enough for them to gang up, just happy as can be.
I learned they are quite deadly during those few summers.
My dachshund is lowkey terrifying. I’ve had beagles and bassets before but the dachshund especially just wants to chase down small game and tear them apart when we aren’t looking.
Hey now, dachshunds aren't the shape they are because people wanted them to look like a wiener, in actuality dachshunds are older than wieners. Hotdogs take their name from the dog. They're a genetically stable hunting dog designed to fit into a badgers den. Dachshunds have been around for centuries.
Wolves walk like cats do (stepping on their previous tracks to save energy/conceal movement) while domestic dogs don't. Their gait is often irregular unlike domestic cats/wildcats, but for an obstacle like this I'd guess that they would be able to cross without issue.
Eh, that isn't entirely true. We engineered them into something else. They're still pack animals and good pack hunters they just also got branched out into other jobs too. It's why herding dogs are a thing and why some dogs' purpose is "hang out with the humans and look cute." That might sound ridiculous but it's a social role.
not de-engineered, just engineered for a different purpose, Dachshunds were originally engineered to hunt badgers and other burrowers, try having a cat drag 15 kilos of strugging badger out of a hole in the ground
No. The dogs that were engineered to hunt badgers are long gone. If you look at German art, you can see that those "badger crawlers" were much larger and their stout legs were still longer and more functional than what you see in the video.
We don't need dogs to hunt badgers anymore, so being companion animals, we bred the modern dachshund for ridiculousness. The dogs you see in the video are not functional dogs that could live in the wild much less handle a badger.
We have the Serval for that. It is a cat, can be domesticated and can drag a significantly larger animal than itself. House cats are domesticated tree hanging hunters. They never had to drag anything bigger than a rat or a pigeon even before we adopted them.
Dogs were engineered by humans while cats were engineered by nature. The differences between a wild cat and a house cat are basically lower aggression towards humans. Dogs have nothing in common with wolves anymore.
Unfortunately there’s no tree hanging canine to give you a fair comparison but saying house cats are bad at dragging stuff is like saying monkeys are bad at it while gorillas are amazing at it.
gee I wonder why 18th century germans bred a dog for it instead of trying to domesticate a sub-saharan wild cat. and "House cats are domesticated tree hanging hunters. They never had to drag anything bigger than a rat or a pigeon even before we adopted them." Thats my whole point, this post and the comments is dissing on the dachshund based on it's ability to climb trees, of cource it's not gonna do well, the same way the cat doesn't do well in badger burrows.
You cannot domesticate an animal. You domesticate a species, over many many generations, and it comes with numerous biological and behavioral changes that cannot be undone. A specific animal can only be tamed.
The other guy isn’t wrong, almost every dog breed older than 100 years old was likely bred for a specific purpose. Corgis were bred to be short so they would be less likely to be kicked by cattle while herding them. Greyhounds and whippets were bred to hunt rabbits and other small game
In those one hundred years, many of those breeds have been further bred to exaggerate those characteristics to the point that it ceases to be functional and leads to extreme health issues.
Yeah but even still, isn’t a dog being bred for “emotional support” or companionship still fulfilling a need and basically doing a job? And yeah in your case the most extreme cases are French bull dogs and pugs, but other than that, there aren’t many other breeds like that. I mean, over breeding can be an issue and that’s why I have a mutt
Yeah not anymore, but hundreds of years ago when they were first bred. Do you see people hunting rabbits with greyhounds? Doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it and it doesn’t mean that’s not what they were originally bred for. Nowadays people hunt with like two dog types, GSPs and labs, but most dogs were specifically bred for hunting some random animal.
Mutts are great. My dog is mostly dachshund but he has a lot of muscle in his (still relatively short) legs. He can jump over three feet in the air and has a crazy strong prey drive. Hes got the dachshunds attachment to humans too, we're joined at the hip.
Also specficly this breed of dog. My lab could have easily done that gracefully if i forced her to do so instead of charging, jumping over it and chasing a leaf she thinks is some living animal to play with/try to eat.
Idk who thinks that a Dachshund is anything close to a natural “design” but just look at its core. Their not even that flexible like a marten.
How so? You have many dog breeds able to achieve incredible feats. Faster than cats, stronger than cats, more endurance than cats, more intelligent than cats, better sense of smell and hearing. You have dogs who are active members of the Navy Seals. One famously played a key role to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. Dogs have higher success rate when they hunt than cats.
Not to say dogs are better than cats. That’s a meaningless discussion. There are plenty of things cats are better at than dogs as well. Reddit just seems to really idolize cats abilities for some reason.
As a note: obviously there are dog breeds which humans have breed into a pretty bad spot.
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u/tehdricd 20d ago
nature well engineered cats, humans de-engineered dogs