A family is a family is a family. Sometimes your family is a ragtag collection of oddballs, but I bet you love each other way more than actual blood relatives do. What I’m trying to say is that dogs will form their packs from any creature living in the same home, even if they’re not a dog. I have experience of this. I’ve always had cats. My husband always had dogs, but learned to love cats by spending time with mine when we were first together (Mary and Ringo were their names, I really do miss them a lot). About 10-11 years ago, I was driving home from work during a really bad heatwave, when I saw a pitiful-looking little dog on the side of the road. So I stopped, and asked him if he wanted to come home with me, and he walked right up to me and basically said yes. I scooped him up and took him home. I know he would’ve been dead from the extreme heat and humidity, or from being hit by a car, by the same time next day. Anyway, that was when Scruffy came to live with us. He wasn’t fixed, and he was just skin and bones, full of matted hair, and his nails were so long they were curling and crossing over each other. The vet said he was older than 3, which is the limit for them giving a more accurate estimate of their age, so we really never knew his real age. We estimated maybe 4 or 5, but he could’ve been as old as 9 or 10. He did start really going gray within 4 or 5 years, so probably was older than our estimate. We didn’t already have a dog (never did get another one, though we thought about it), so right from the get-go, the cats and my husband and I were Scruffy’s pack, and he was so protective of us that he would have sacrificed his own life to protect us. As far as the yard was concerned, it was his, and Scruffy did NOT tolerate any other animal crossing it without his express permission! Scruffy passed on a couple months ago, after two of our older cats passed on within a year of each other, one about a month before Scruffy (Love you and miss you terribly, Cruff-Cruff!). Three pets dying within a little over a year, even if of old age and fully expected and accepted, is just a lot of little deaths to go through. Scruffy went downhill fast. Less than 24 hours. before he died, he was acting totally normal. But we knew he was old, probably way older than we thought. At least his last 10 years were happy, loving, safe, and kinda spoiled (well-deserved, though), and he loved us for loving him, and looking after him so diligently. (Sorry for such a long comment.)