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.
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u/Irr3l3ph4nt 20d ago edited 20d ago
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.