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A real dog trainer

1K views 24 replies 7 participants last post by  aldra 
#1 ·
 
#4 ·
Yes Jan, we look and fondle all the pups at markets but have to be strong and hand them back. Prue says vets fees to me and I say poop scoops to her.

Ray.
 
#5 ·
Sorry, but can't agree :( The expression on those puppies' faces is one of fear. Whale eyes, lip licking and yawning are all signs of fear. She is teaching them to be fearful. Not her fault as she has no escape route from them. All good breeders know to give the mother an escape route for times when the puppies are over bearing.
The normal behaviour would be for the mother to just leave the nest but she can't. This would teach the puppies to handle "frustration" but would not make them fearful.
We saw several really aggressive Golden Retrievers when I was working and if breeders are doing this sort of thing then I am not surprised. The gate, in this case, should have been low enough for her to jump but high enough to keep the puppies confined. In the wild she would just have gone somewhere out of reach. The puppies would have been frustrated but not fearful.
 
#6 ·
Sorry, but can't agree :( The expression on those puppies' faces is one of fear. Whale eyes, lip licking and yawning are all signs of fear. She is teaching them to be fearful. Not her fault as she has no escape route from them. All good breeders know to give the mother an escape route for times when the puppies are over bearing.
The normal behaviour would be for the mother to just leave the nest but she can't. This would teach the puppies to handle "frustration" but would not make them fearful.
We saw several really aggressive Golden Retrievers when I was working and if breeders are doing this sort of thing then I am not surprised. The gate, in this case, should have been low enough for her to jump but high enough to keep the puppies confined. In the wild she would just have gone somewhere out of reach. The puppies would have been frustrated but not fearful.
Pat

At the start of the video we saw the mother pushing to get through the pen gate into where the puppies were. Can you equate that with what you wrote above?

Geoff
 
#7 ·
Mothering instinct, Geoff. She wants to see, and check on them, but does not want to feed them. They look to be of an age where they have teeth and will be eating solids. Her udder was not that pronounced so they may even be mostly weaned. The person with the cameral thought it an amusing thing to film but I doubt the mother, or the puppies, found it amusing.

Puppies do learn to deal with frustration by the mother standing up and moving away while they are feeding. That is a normal part of their development. I had to advise the breeder of my dog to let the mother stand up and move away from her puppies. She was telling the bitch off for not feeding them as and when they wanted feeding. That happens at the beginning, but as the pups grow the mother will cut short a feed or refuse to feed. The puppies feel frustrated but learn to deal with it. This is a good emotion for them to learn to deal with.

The puppies in the video were learning to be afraid when another dog looks at them (if you watch the mother she looks at them first). This is not something you want a puppy to learn because it can lead to reactive behaviour later in life i.e. another dog looks at them and they retrieve a memory of being attacked by their mother which invokes a fear response. In order to deal with a fear response the brain goes into fight/flight, though a puppy may use "freeze" which is what you see in the video. Some dogs carry the freeze response forward into adult life but most invoke the adult fight/flight response to a scary situation.
Funnily enough there is a Golden Retriever in our village that still "freezes" when it sees another dog.
 
#9 ·
What don´t you agree with Pat, its a dog and she is training here puppies, she is also under instructions by a very gentle voice.
I see no scared puppies they are doing as there mother tell them, she doesn't have human words so its dog talk, and puppies have to learn dog talk which is best learnt from its Mother not another dog.
 
#11 ·
The aggression she is showing them, Jan, is not a normal part of a mother/pup relationship. My heart was in my mouth when she started. No puppy should be that fearful at such a tender age. Just google "whale eye", "lip licking", "yawning" "shake off" and you will see that they are all signs of stress and anxiety in a dog. Their lives should be happy and carefree. It is like smacking a toddler. It makes you feel better but does nothing to help the toddler understand its boundaries.

Right at the beginning the bitch looks round at the camera holder to see if they are going to rescue her from this stressful situation. Her body language is very tense and she actually snaps at them! Not normal mother/pup. The worst emotion a pup should experience at that age is frustration. In fact it is good for them to feel it as it sets them up for life in the real world.
 
#13 ·
I didn’t like that Jan, couldn’t work where the pup was showing disrespect

Though she was a bit heavy handed with that pup, more playing rough, a bit too rough in my mind, the pup didn’t seem that keen and wanted to get away even then she followed him

Sandra
 
#14 ·
I hadn´t put the second video on which shows the difference in the puppy after it Mother had had a word or two with it.

As the woman who was commentating on it said, if humans leave the Mother alone she will teach the puppies how to behave.
 
#17 ·
Oh, please, spare me from these people who believe that domesticated dogs behave in a "pack" mentality. It has long been disproved. In fact, John Fisher, who wrote the first theory on dominance in dogs, wrote a letter of apology to all the dogs that he subjected to his original theory. Unfortunately the theory was let loose on human minds who love to put human emotions on dogs. The theory that dogs will try to take over the world if we let them is just rubbish.
Barry Eaton followed up with his book "Dominance - Fact or Fiction". I can tell you, because I have read it, that it is not normal behaviour for a domesticated dog to behave like that.
The dogs in the video are in an unnatural situation and are behaving unnaturally. Like the original video they are, in effect, caged. A whole study was done on captive wolves, and their behaviour, which proved that their behaviour is nothing like the behaviour of wolves living a natural life in the wild. The captive wolves fought over resources whereas the free roaming wolves worked cooperatively to hunt and then proceeded to share the proceeds of that hunt. When one bitch hunted another bitch would stay behind to mind the pups. There was no aggression shown to puppies whatsoever. If they got bumptious they were ignored and not included in the games. That is all that is needed, just a feeling of being ostracised, by the mother or the other puppies, to cause a puppy to change its behaviour in future. Aggression is never used unless there is no other option. Both those bitches were trapped in cages and so displayed abnormal behaviour.
 
#18 ·
If you are easily distressed then don't watch this but it does have a happy ending!



Look at the dog's eyes - it is classic "whale eye" showing fear. It is cowering in a submissive way. Towards the end, as it approaches one of the people, it shows a lot of lip licking. All signs of fear. Just take a look at those puppies and you will see whale eye, cowering, and lip licking. Even the mother is showing signs of stress because she is going against her mothering instinct which is telling her to move away but she can't because she is trapped.
 
#20 ·
“Well I’d love a cuddle of those pups, the pale ones I adored, the brindle looks to be from another litter, older

I love the feel of a solid big dog, but never again for me.........unless alberts agrees to a rescue when shadow goes, I doubt he will and as it’s him who has to walk a dog

It needs to old and knackered to join this family

Sandra
 
#21 ·
John Fisher was a brilliant behaviourist. A friend of mine has just re written his classic book "Think Dog". He may well have been consulted on the Dangerous Dogs Act. Not sure he would have labelled any one breed as dangerous though. Those puppies may well grow up to be dangerous given the start in life they have had :(

Yes, Sandra, they all needed a cuddle. Are you a cat person? They do make good companions and are much easier to keep than dogs. But, of course, they do not guard the house or the motor home :)

I keep thinking about getting a guarding breed to guard Georgia. I have a lock on the garden gate and am thinking of getting cctv as a deterrent. This reminds me that MPs will debate the Pet Theft Reform Bill in parliament on Monday. If you haven't already done so then please write to you MP to urge him to vote for change to make pet theft a higher priority crime than simple theft of a belonging. The dog thieves are laughing at the law that is in place at the moment.
 
#22 ·
That made me think of our latest rescued dog Nancy when we first had her. We were walking on a local beach and there was a man walking his very large dog and this dog was very playful so no problem there but it kept bouncing into Nancy, next thing Nancy is all teeth and very aggressive toward the large dog and it backed off and I thought oh no have we ended up with another aggressive dog. Then I realized that although the dog was large it was in fact very young and Nancy was only teaching it some “manners”. We have had Nancy now for three years and she has never shown aggression towards anther dog apart from just that once.:smile2:
 
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#23 ·
Perfectly normal behaviour for an older bitch to teach an adolescent some manners. He could escape her wroth any time he wanted :) Those puppies were helpless little babies and it is not normal for a mother to be so aggressive to her puppies. She needed to be able to escape them and she couldn't :(
 
#24 ·
I think we might be using human logic here Pat and not fully appreciating animal logic.

Not that I am in any way a pet expert.

Ray.
 
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#25 ·
When Odin our German shepherd was a 6 month old pup he met an Old English sheepdog on a beach who rushed at him and was very rough although did no harm to him other than bowling him over A few times before his owner got control

Odin grew into a powerful big boned dog, but would go nowhere near an old English sheepdog for the rest of his13 year life and showed anxiety whenever he caught sight of one

Odin however remained a gentle giant all of his life

Sandra
 
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