It is easy to forget that dogs are pack animals, we are so busy telling them how to live like us, we forget that living with us is not natural to them.

A “good dog” is a dog that doesn’t behave like a dog, a “bad dog” is a dog that acts like a dog. The truth is dogs aren’t moral creatures, they don’t have a conscience, there only dogs we can train to live the way we wish them do, or dogs we can’t.

Left on their own, dogs do not need play groups, expensive gourmet treats and complex health care, human beds, or vacation treks with the family.

Dogs in the natural lives sleep for much of the day, can be alone for hours, eat all kinds of natural foods. But they are pack animals. They like being with other dogs at any age. People love to believe in separation anxiety in dogs, they want their dogs to miss them because they miss their dogs.

But a dog doesn’t know the difference between someone going out to get a jug of milk or someone going away for week.

And they don’t much care, unless we teach them to. The  idea that a dog can’t be left alone for a workday is preposterous, yet rescue groups routinely deny dogs to people who work. How insane is that?

I have never had a dog with separation anxiety, mostly because I don’t believe in it or feel it. I would never want a dog going with me on vacation, what, after all, is the point of a vacation unless it is changing my routine, exploring the unfamilar,  and resting?

People often ask me if an older dog can handle a younger dog, the answer is almost always yes, in nature, they do it all the time. Older dogs teach younger dogs how to survive and how to behave.

Dogs mentor one another all of the time, and quite naturally. Three is my favorite number in terms of having dogs. They form hierarchies and pecking orders. Bud loves Red and defers to him, but he does not try to play with him.

Fate and Bud are both dominant dogs, they are still working out who is higher up the ladder. They do this by playing, which is also a kind of hierarchical competition. They are coming to a good place. I don’t interfere, they must have space to work it out.

We think that dogs play for the same reasons human children do, but that is almost never the case. In the pack, this is how they work things out. They also work things out by growing, snapping and snarling, something that upsets human beings but it essential for dogs to do if they are to live and hunt and work together in groups.

So my pack is getting settled.

Red is the leader, he sets the tone. Fate and Bud are the siblings, playing, learning to get along, still working out their positions here. Bud is a much more dominant dog that Gus was,  I would  not wish to be a rat in a hole when he comes around.

I am forever fascinated by how dogs work things out, and always surprised and discouraged by how difficult it is for humans to do the same things. I love them because they are not like us, not because they are.