Hanno At Rest
Hanno did something interesting and new today. For I along time I’ve called Katya “Speaker for the Dogs” because she is very communicative using both verbal and signs. Often she has translated for other dogs, letting me know what they want.
Today Hanno came and got my attention. He took me over to the door and said “Out”. I opened the door thinking he wanted to go out but he then went and laid down back inside the cottage. I was puzzled until I looked out and there was Katya waiting to come in. It appears that Hanno did Katya the favor of letting me know that she wanted to come in.
What makes this interesting is Hanno uses signs the least of all of our pack and tends to do little in the way of altruism. Mostly he’s interested in competing with Kavi for becoming the new Alpha – a position Kavi still defends with sufficient force as Hanno’s face and ears demonstrate. Hanno, so far, always comes out on the losing end although he is now bigger than Kavi and much younger. Perhaps age and skill matter more than might be thought. I would not call Kavi a born leader, rather he got promoted to that position by outliving the previous pack Alphas and so became the top dog by default. I suspect sometime in the next year Hanno will supersede Kavi and I hope they can do it gracefully.
In the photo above Hanno is sleeping inside a barrel of hay. The pack spends almost all of their time outdoors, watching over the pigs and other livestock. They have strategically located resting spots scattered about the farm from which they watch the world.
Outdoors: 30°F/24°F Partially Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 57°F/62°F
Daily Spark: Sometimes you have to trump an ace with a deuce.
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Nice to hear from you again. It has been a little while! I have a pair of pigs I need to put in our own freezers, and if I were doing that, I probably wouldn’t be on the computer much, either.
January was an interesting month with the web hosting company. They lost my server multiple times to hardware failure and human errors. I lost a bunch of posts – on my to-do list to reconstruct them.
Welcome back !
Interesting that you say you would not call Kavi a born leader, would like to know what you mean. Certainly from your posts he is quite intelligent, even wily (although I doubt any of your pack are very lacking in smarts!) and he looks, hmmm, very well-knit physically. Size isn’t everything by a long shot.
Over the last three decades I have observed some members of the pack who were naturally omega, such as Sheba, Lili and Romula. Then there are others who are naturally Alpha such as Hanno, Hagrid, Coy, Katya, Kia, Kita, Tika. The rest fall on the spectrum between. Kavi is about the middle of the spectrum. Circumstances put him in the position of being Alpha. Even an omega can shift to Alpha status although they never have that natural born charisma and attitude of the true Alphas. There is no strong correlation to size. Kita was the largest female and very Alpha. Katya and Kia are very small but also very Alpha.