Female dog humping people's legs...

I know this is kind of odd... My cousin's female dog has the habit of hopping on people's legs and humping them. It's quite embarrassing, and I've talked to her owners, but they just say ah, just push her off, she always does that. But just out of...

curiosity, why the hell would she be doing that? Her genitals don't reach the leg to rub when she does it, so there isn't any pleasure in it for her, I don't get it... I've seen cows mount other cows too. Strange.

Oh my GOD!!! We've established that it's dominance. Can we PLEASE move on?
I doubt very seriously it warrants 50 post.
Go outside and enjoy some sun, play a game, SOMETHING.

my horse was doing that and we found out she had a tumor

Here's my situation. My fiance and I have a one year old spayed female chihuahua. We had her spayed when she was about six months old. About a couple months ago, she started to hump my leg, and would try to do it every once in awhile. She never wants to hump my fiance's leg, even when my fiance tries to offer it to her. While I wouldn't be surprised if our dog viewed my fiance as the pack leader, I can't see her thinking I am below her in the pack. She seems like a very submissive dog, and she has no problems listening to my commands. She has also tried to hump the legs of two other people. First is my fiance's mom, who has taken care of the dog for a couple weekends while we were out of town. The other is a friend who the dog has only seen once, and he is a big guy, like 6'3 and 250 lbs.

I'm a little hesitant to believe that she is humping my leg because of dominance, because I can't think of anything else she does to suggest it. If she really is doing this to try and get dominance over me, it sure isn't working. I personally don't really mind her doing it, but in the past week, I've been training her to not do it when I don't want her to, and she seems to get the message.

Okay, add just a little bit of twist to this storyline. Our 2 yr old female pekingese likes to hump our 5 yr old male Himilayan cat. She humps nothing else and no human and we already have the Alpha male in the house which is a full grown Collie. This doesn't make sense to us and she doesn't do it all the time say maybe, 3 times a month or so. Thoughts?

If someone says it's always only dominance doesn't mean that they are right, even if they are famous.

Animals (generally at least :-)) are not ashamed of their sexuality, and shows it in public in ways we might find surprising (or even impossible) since we are taught not to do like that.

Sometimes maybe it's dominance, but why shouldn't it also have a sexual dimension at the same time? After all humping is a pretty sexual motion. And why shouldn't it sometimes be mainly about sex and love?

Some lesbian humans have the drive to hump their love, why should it be different with other animals than humans? I totally understand why these dogs might want to do like that :-)

Just wanted to add something more. I notice that when she mounts my leg, she only goes into the humping motion if her female parts are rubbing up against my foot. If I lower my foot so that it doesn't touch, she stops humping.