Husky... Kittens... What's she doing?
Husky... Kittens... What's she doing? Dog Breed Discussions
We have three dogs total, and we brought three kittens (now 11 weeks old) in to our home after rescuing them from a bad situation.Two of our dogs - a JRT x APBT, and an Akbash-similar dog are fine with the kittens. They treat them just as they treat our adult cats. No issues there.Our Husky, on the other hand, doesn't want to give them up. She chases them, sniffs them, tries to play with them (thinks them running away is them playing with her), and what bothers me the most is that she opens her mouth and puts it on the kittens' necks (similar to when a dam would pick up a pup by the scruff of it's neck - only she doesn't lift the kittens up, just puts her jaw on their necks). She doesn't clamp down, she doesn't even close her jaw when she does it, she just puts her jaw on the scruffs of their necks.She has also done nibbles up and down their backs two or three times. She would open her jaw around their necks, and then pull away, but then go back and do nibbles up and down their spine.Her and our Akbash do the same nibbles on our hands/wrists and on each other. They aren't painful, and we've always called them "love nibbles" (after getting the term from several other Y!A persons years ago).But I don't know whether she's just being a bullying older housemate, or if this is her first step toward full-out attacking the kittens.Any ideas?Tips for helping us socializing her to the kittens further?They'll have been here for three weeks tomorrow evening - so it's been about two and a half weeks of socializing them (we let them get used to being inside the house all the time and made sure they were litter trained before exposing them to the dogs fully). It's only been about 5 days of her doing the neck-holding/nibbling behavior.The kittens are left to roam the house all day and all night - with me being on break from college I'm home most/all of the day, and then while I'm working evenings my parents are home to with them.At night our Akbash has roam of the lower level of the house (he doesn't even try to go upstairs, not that we want him to), my Husky is in my room with me (and the door closed), and our JRT x APBT is with my parents in their room (with the door open). It's a fantastic arrangement, and the kittens have even curled up with my parents and with the Akbash some nights. So nights are perfectly fine.It's only the Husky that has issues, even though she's perfectly fin
