that makes sense.

Our dog has many mysteries, but the biggest has been her many cat-like behaviors. She grooms fastidiously, complete with licking her paw and cleaning her face. (It dawned on me at some point that if she takes her disgusting dog-breath and transfers it to her fur, that goes a long way to explaining the "Time To Wash The Dog" smell.) She head-butts into you as a form of affection. And she purrs, or at least has a solid go at it, with no help from her anatomy. It comes out as a very high-pitched whistling sound.

There are other mysteries, like how she could have been properly socialized as a puppy and then somehow abandoned without being microchipped, but our houseguest came up with the theory, based on her experience of mixed dog/cat households:

The dog was raised by cats.

When my niece was a baby, I watched her crawl around the floor saying "rarrr rarr rarrar rarr," which didn't make any sense until I saw her family's two Springer Spaniels making growly play noises around her, and of course they were the things down at her height, and she made her best approximation of friendly dog-noises.

There's a lesson in there about what we grow up with, versus what we grow up into.

I assume the dog was raised by particularly kind cats, since she's now very excited to go pull their tails off, because obviously they're giant rats. No animal does that who understands that cats are made of fast-acting, pointy pain.