If you’ve ever watched a lion or a cheetah killing a gazelle, you may have noticed that the throat is a big part of it. The lion or the cheetah will chase the animal down, usually jump up on the back of it, and knock it over, then grab the neck and choke it out.
The discovery channel ran a special on wild dogs, and I’m not talking about renegade golden retrievers and pit bulls. I’m talking about actual closed populations of wild dogs in New Zealand. And showed the way they hunt.
One of the amazing things I saw, outside the subject of this message, is that the dogs work together. Some dogs chase the quarry, and two other dogs go wide and cut the quarry off till it is surrounded. It’s amazing how coordinated it is.
Back to my point.
When it is time for a dog to take down the prey, they rely on the feet, and not the throat. Dogs track down their prey and grab the feet and legs.
Their mouth are perfectly adapted to that if you notice there seems to be a gap between the canines or fangs and premolars which is exactly where the arm with a leg of a prey animal would cross the jaw providing the dog and the amazing grip. Further back to my point is that when you do a nail trim on a dog, you have to hold the feet. And at an extremely basic level, down at the instinctive level, down at the barely conscious level, the amygdala: this speaks to the animal on the most primal level that it is about to be killed.
“My predator has my feet, I am a goner.”
Hence the frantic efforts to get their feet away from you. Then, of course, it might’ve been that time that you chopped the nail off and drew blood. LOL
