Mine is fine with male dogs but can be snotty with other females. She’s intact - actually just had a full heat in February - and did have a 10 pup litter with my late male when she was 3. Unfortunately 4 of the pups had a genetic pancreas issue that meant she was a recessive carrier so I never bred her again.
She’s been food-crazed from day one. The morning she flew out of Frankfurt the shepherd’s wife emailed to confirm she was in transit and said “This puppy is lively and angry that she has not been fed” (Lufthansa regulations require that dogs fast for several hours before boarding). I thought huh, well that’s certainly a strange way to put it, maybe it’s a language thing?
So when you import dogs into the U.S. from other countries, you have to go to the bonded airport warehouse where the dog is, get the import paperwork, go to U.S. Customs to pay any duty and get the import papers stamped, and then you can go back to the warehouse and get your dog released to you. So I show up at the warehouse, and there she is in a small crate strapped to a pallet on top of four large crates with adult GSDs in them, absolutely screeching her fucking head off. And the adult dogs all had this “make it STOP” look on their faces, so for all I know she kept it up the whole flight
- and I understood what the wife meant right then and there! And of course the main U.S. Customs office in Boston isn’t located at Logan, it’s all the way over at the Black Falcon cruise terminal in Southie, because they never moved it from ye olde sailing shippe days or some stupid thing. She was still screeching when I got back with the stamped paperwork to claim her an hour later, and just about ripped my fingers off when I gave her some cookies before we started the drive home. To this day her tail still wags the entire time she is eating.
She went to live my kennel guy a week out from having the litter and stayed until they were 7 weeks old. I visited her three times, and each time she came over to the side of the welping box, said hello, and within ten seconds went right back to her litter. They sucked her dry, she normally is right at 80 lbs. and she was down to 62 lbs. by the time they were weaned. She was so food-crazed she broke down the storeroom door in the kennel one night and ransacked it.
I also came home one night a few years ago and found she had smashed out two panes in the kitchen door, ripped out the muntil between the panes, and had started gnawing the door to make the hole bigger so she could get out and deal with whoever was in the yard.
She also used to hunt, and was very skilled at it. Unlike most dogs who bullrush other critters, she would lie in wait patiently behind cover and ambush them. So one day I was at the neighbors’ house having a beer and they asked if I’d seen the woodchuck? They said it would come right up near their elderly dog and wasn’t shy at all. I said no, I hadn’t.
Well two days later I met the woodchuck. She was eating it. She’d cleaned out the kidneys and liver and had stripped the meat off one whole side of the rib cage with nothing but the bones left. My male was standing nearby barking at her, and she was looking up at him with woodchuck blood dripping off her jowls snarling at him, as if to say “fuck off and go get your own woodchuck.” She fought me like hell when I took it away from her, too. A week later I looked out the window and did a double-take when I saw her prancing around with the other woodchuck she’d just caught and killed. Didn’t want to surrender that kill either.
She’s also killed and eaten at least six skunks, apparently chemical warfare is no deterrent. It’s been an interesting time with her, to say the least.