On the whole, Scout is a relatively timid dog. Cautious might be a better term. Some of my neighbours in Milton have inflatable lawn decorations at Christmas and Hallowe’en and she will go out of her way to pull us to the other side of the street. She’s not crazy about loud noises (although thunder storms and fireworks don’t really seem to freak her out) and when I say, “Google, set timer for four minutes”, she will quietly get up and ask to be let outside, because she knows the beeper will be coming soon.
Pretty much all the gates we come across in Scotland are kissing gates – they are probably the easiest to maintain and manage, as they have no hardware other than the hinge. And unlike Canada, the ground doesn’t freeze and get covered with a thicker and thicker layer of snow and ice, thereby blocking the gate where the ground is worn.
Scout hated them when we first arrived. They creak, they would be pulled into her face then she was expected to squish around them, they were just generally foreign to her. I had to walk from behind her, nudging her bum with my shin to get her to push through.
Well, she is now so comfortable with them that she has actually figured out how to open them (well, at least the ones behind my house). She was off leash and I was walking ahead. I turned to call her and she was gone?!? It seems she had remembered the gate just around the corner from the path, had bee-lined for it, and had worked her way into the football field. (It wasn’t a big deal as the field is fully enclosed.) I called to her and watched in awe as she came up to the gate, pushed her nose around the side of it, backed up, and opened the gate to sidle through.
She can’t catch a ball, she’s afraid of heights, and rolls in dead seal guts, but she managed to open a kissing gate.