The pitter-patter of tiny paws

And how we came to find them

I spend a good proportion of my time working with other people’s puppies.

But, in 10 days time, we’re going to be adding a new puppy to our family.

Talk about bringing your work home with you.

Our pup’s name will be Moye, and she’ll be a working black labrador. She’ll be a working gundog, too, as our other two dogs are.

I’m going to take full advantage of having a pup around, to make lots of training videos for my clients and to document her early socialisation.

Although I don’t have Moye yet, I have already done some of the most important work of any new puppy owner.

I have chosen a breeder and a mating.

Why are these early choices so important?

It’s the genes

Over the years, I’ve seen thousands of 8wk old puppies at class. Literally thousands.

What makes one puppy, arriving at her first puppy socialisation session, hide under a chair? What makes another puppy jump, snarling, into the face of another inquisitive puppy, at his very first session? And another puppy is happily sniffing and relatively at ease, having never met another puppy except for his siblings.

Too often, people ignore the influence of genetics and believe that, if only they raise and socialise their puppy really well, they can overcome any genetic predisposition to fear or reactivity.

But genetics are hugely important. Posts like this illustrate what happens when a dog with a less-than-ideal temperament becomes a parent.

When you get a puppy, you are not buying a blank slate. You are getting something which is a bit like a seed, something which will unfurl along predetermined lines laid down by genetics.

Of course environment plays a large part, too, but many people put too much faith in the capacity of environment (nurture) to influence the development of a puppy, and accord too little influence to genetics (nature). (Some people do the opposite, which isn’t good either — both are crucial!)

We’re ‘just’ looking for a pet dog

Firstly, raise your standards. All too often, I hear of people who ‘just’ wanted a pet dog, so they bought one from the nearest and soonest available litter — without any further thought to it. After all, he was ‘only’ to be a pet, so why bother with checking anything further? It frequently ends in disaster. (Yes, sometimes things work out great. But don’t you want to stack the odds in your favour?)

You may ‘just’ want a pet dog, but that doesn’t mean your dog shouldn’t be from health-tested breeding stock and temperamentally sound. Even crossbreed puppies can (and should) be from health-tested parents who are temperamentally sound.

Being physically and emotionally healthy are prerequisites for ‘just’ being a pet dog, successfully. Are your family going to thank you if your dog starts attacking other dogs at a year old? Or develops hip dysplacia at 2yrs?

‘Just’ being a pet dog is actually one of the hardest tasks there is, for a dog.

Failure to be ‘just’ a pet dog successfully is the main reason dogs end up in rescue shelters — they don’t often end up there because they didn’t make the grade as agility or obedience dogs, or as show dogs. They end up there because they didn’t make the grade as pet dogs.

So, in looking for ‘just’ a pet dog, know that you are looking for quite a lot, actually. And this dog will hopefully live with your family for up to 15 years or more. So raise your game.

Expecting more is not the province only of people who compete with their dogs, it is (or should be) the province of anyone looking to add a dog to their family.

How?

That’s what I’m going to be talking about in future posts, this week.

I often wish that I could take people who are thinking of getting a puppy with me, on my daily rounds of behavioural visits. If they could just shadow me and see the distress, the pain and the hurt which families who own difficult dogs have to endure, they would bust their guts to get it right in every way they could, when it counts — at the beginning.

It is at the beginning that you have to make the most important, the most influential decision in the lifetime of your dog-to-be:

Who should you get him/her from?

There’s kinda too much to fit in one post, here.

So stay tuned!