Nonlinear Dogs
 |  |
Part 2: Puppies
From: The 100 Most Silly Things That Have Ever Been Said About Dogs
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
From: The 100 Most Silly Things That Have Ever Been Said About Dogs
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
Myth 19: You can use a puppy test to pick the right pup from
the litter.
This myth was very popular for quite awhile. People thought you could test a puppy and find out what
her personality would be like when she grew up. The test consists of several parts. Does the puppy
approach you without being coaxed, or does she seem shy? Once she’s made your acquaintance,
does she follow you around the room, or does she seem totally uninterested in you despite having
smelled your hand? Does she resist when you suspend her in the air on one of your palms, or does
she just hang there passively? What does she do if you lie her on her side and won’t let her get up?
If you throw a wad of paper, does she go get it and bring it back to you? One of the rules was that
you had to test a puppy when she was exactly seven weeks old. If you were even one day later, then
learning would start to influence the outcome of the test, and you wouldn’t be testing her innate
personality anymore.
And that is the punch line, the reason the whole thing was a load of nonsense to start with.
There is no moment when you can measure a mammal’s behavior free of learning. We now know that
learning starts the instant the mammal leaves the womb, and perhaps even before that. When a pup
is born, she has inherited the sucking reflex without having to learn it. However, if she doesn’t find a
nipple and start to suckle within a few minutes, thus supporting the reflex with a learning experience,
the reflex will disappear forever. She is born with a reflex to wave her head back and forth, and to
crawl in ever broadening circles. This maximizes her chances of running into her mother’s belly (and
the nipples) in time to keep the suckle reflex. Finding the nipple is already a learning experience,
teaching her that creeping toward warmth and her mother’s smell is a good thing to do. She is also
learning, within seconds of being born, to associate the smell of another dog with pleasurable
experiences. This is reinforced perhaps a few hours later by the experience of sleeping in the warm
pile of siblings. Later, as her ears and eyes open, her muscles slowly develop mass and strength, her
milk teeth come in, and play begins with her siblings, she starts to have all kinds of other experiences
that will be teaching her about her surroundings and how to interact with them. By the time a puppy is
seven weeks old, she has already learned a vast amount. Whether or not she approaches you, or
lies there passively in your palm, or lets you pin her down without panicking, will all depend on her
learning experiences up to the moment you walked into the room.
In Myths 6, 11 and 12, we have seen that all social skills, even including the use of a dog’s body
language, are learned. Everything the pup learns ends up anchored in her brain. But at seven
weeks, none of it is, as yet, permanently decided, because her brain still has to do 80% of its
growing. If you put the pup in a different environment (in this case, your own home), she will
immediately begin to learn about the new environment and to adapt her reactions to it. This means
that the way you treat her will play a big role in how her brain grows, and thus what kind of adult dog
she becomes. Not heredity, but you, determine whether or not she will trust humans, whether you are
a pleasant or unpleasant factor in her life, whether she understands and willingly complies with your
requests, and so on. None of this is written in stone, not even in an adult dog. Behavior is always
generated in and by a back-and-forth process with the environment a mammal lives in. The breed
you buy (if you buy a pedigreed dog) will give you a predictor for a number of innate tendencies you
can expect, but as for the rest of the dog’s personality – the puppy test will only tell you what the pup
is like at the moment you give her the test.
A puppy test doesn’t predict anything about the future. The best way to know what kind of grown-up
dog you are going to end up with is to take an honest look at yourself.
Read more:
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Biological bases of behavior of domestic dog breeds, in Voith, VL,
Borchelt, PL, eds, Readings in Companion Animal Behavior, Veterinary Learning systems, Co., Inc.,
Trenton, NJ, 1996.
Donaldson, J, The Culture Clash, James & Kenneth Publishers, Berkeley CA, 1996.
Overall, KL, Clinical Behavioral Medicine for Small Animals, Mosby, Inc., Missouri, 1997.
Semyonova, A, The social organization of the domestic dog; a longitudinal study of domestic canine
behavior and the ontogeny of domestic canine social systems, Carriage House Foundation, The
Hague, The Netherlands, 2003.
Myth 23: You housetrain a pup by rubbing his nose in it when
he has an accident in the house.
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
This is an old-fashioned myth that many of us are brought up with. Many people know better at this
point, but many well meaning people do still believe in this myth. Since I still run into it very often, I
have to mention it in this book – for the sake of puppies.
Dogs (and cats) have a natural tendency not to dirty their core living area – the places where they
play, sleep and eat. This natural protection against the transmission of disease and parasites is
already present at birth. In the first four weeks of his life, a pup can’t relieve himself until his mother
pushes him onto his back and begins to lick his groin. This massage stimulates the bladder and colon
to empty themselves, and the mother consumes what they produce, thus keeping the nest clean. The
pup isn’t able to relieve himself independently until the end of his fourth week, when he’s become
strong enough to crawl away from the sleeping area to do so. From this point on, the pups start to
deposit their waste further and further away from the nest they sleep and play in. For the rest of his
life, an adult dog will not dirty his sleeping area (unless he is confined and ends up with no other
choice).
This doesn’t mean the pup will know he’s not supposed to poop anywhere in your whole house. The
house looks huge to him, with places everyone lives in and places no one spends time in. This is the
reason why most pups will look for a spot at the edge of the room or in a corner somewhere – in his
innocent puppy mind, he is following the rule of not dirtying the central living space. So he is acting in
good faith, and before you get angry at him, please try to solve the following riddle:
You are on vacation in Russia, and you have just been to the toilet in your hotel’s lobby. You are on
your way out of the lobby. The cleaning lady runs after you, grabs your sleeve, starts yelling at you in
Russian. Everyone is staring at you as the angry cleaning lady leads you back to the bathroom.
Once there, she stands there talking angrily at you and gesturing at the toilet booth you just used.
You have obviously done something wrong. Was it the empty roll of toilet paper you failed to
replace? Was it the light you didn’t turn off? Did you perhaps leave brown stripes behind, or were
you supposed to use some other booth altogether? Before you look at the answer at the end of this
chapter, think about how this would make you feel. You meant no harm, and you do your best (next
time replacing the empty roll or turning out the light, and using a different booth each time you go),
yet this keeps happening to you every time you use the bathroom. You just can’t figure out what
mistake it is you’re making. In the end, you become afraid to use the bathroom in the hotel at all, or
you try to do so only when you’ve checked to see that the cleaning lady isn’t around.
Once you’ve let it sink in how this would make you feel, you are allowed to look at the answer (see: *
at the end of this chapter).
A pup means well, but he needs our help to know what we want him to do (it’s no use yelling at him in
what is, to him Russian). What you need to do is carry him outside frequently, so he gets the
opportunity to do the right thing. When he does do the right thing in the right place, you reward him
instantly with some delicious tidbit and lots of squeaky-voiced praise. Besides taking him out about
every two hours, you also need to carry him outside an extra time just after he eats, when he’s just
woken up from a nap, and just after a session of enthusiastic play (these are moments when most
pups will suddenly feel a need to go). If he has an accident in the house, the best thing is to ignore
it. Rather than getting angry at him, just clean it up – and see it as a learning experience for yourself,
that you need to be more alert to the signs that he’s feeling the need. When you can’t keep an eye on
him (not to punish a mistake, but to see his signals and help him do the right thing before it’s too late
and he loses it), you can confine him to his sleeping area – his crate, or a large cardboard box he
can’t climb out of. He will do his best to hold it, reluctant to dirty an area just big enough for him to lie
down in. But don’t leave him there too long, because if he is forced to dirty this tiny area and then lie
in it, he will start losing the natural tendency to try to keep the living area clean! Our intention here is
to help him avoid mistakes, and to be able to reward the right thing as frequently as possible. If you
do this, it won’t take more than two or three weeks for him to understand where he’s supposed to go.
But we aren’t finished yet. Knowing where he’s supposed to go is one thing, always being able to do it
that way is another. A puppy’s sphincters aren’t fully developed yet. He won’t always have the
strength it takes to hold himself. His brain is also still growing, including the parts that control the
sphincters. To his dismay, the pup finds that his body sometimes does what it will, and that he can’t
hold it no matter how hard he tries. A lot of pups make it through the day alright, when they’re taken
out every few hours, but still aren’t able to hold it all night yet. He may start to squeak or squeal in the
middle of the night. Try not to get irritated. Remember that he’s small and helpless, he can’t get out
of the box, can’t open the front door himself, his body can’t hold it so long yet, and he is asking for
your help so he can do what you want him to do. Again, if you force him to dirty the area he sleeps in,
you may be creating a dog that will never be housetrained, because his growing brain will be storing
the wrong signals. So help him, even in the middle of the night. It won’t be forever. Within another
week or two he’ll be able to get through the night, and by the time he’s three months old, you’ll have
the Totally Housetrained Pup.
When you punish a pup for accidents in the house, you’re really punishing him for being small and
helpless. Never forget that your puppy is a baby, and that he really does want to do the right thing.
He needs our help, and doesn’t deserve our anger.
* I bet you couldn’t guess this one. In Russia, no one flushes toilet paper down the toilet because this
tends to block the generally ancient plumbing. The cleaning lady knows you did it wrong because (if
everyone is lucky) the paper doesn’t go down after the first flush. It floats around in the hole awhile
first. Toilet paper must be deposited in the wastepaper basket next to the pot. It’s considered bad
manners and very inconsiderate to do it any other way.
Myth 25: You can teach puppies to share with each other by
making them eat together out of one bowl.
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
This is a myth that some (lazy?) breeders like to believe in. This myth is not only incorrect, it can also
be damaging.
One of dogs’ basic social rules is, “we enter each other’s personal zone only with permission.” There
is also the subsidiary rule, “you’re allowed to keep what you have in that zone.” Socially skilled adult
dogs don’t normally take things from each other by force. If it’s in your zone, it’s yours until you
relinquish it. These rules are not instinctive or innate. Dogs have to learn them. Puppies generally
learn these rules with great ease. This learning starts the moment the pup is born. Each pup finds a
nipple on Mom’s belly, and gets all absorbed in eating his meal. If another pup comes along and
displaces him, the pup finds another nipple just a couple inches away. Once the pups are big enough
to accompany Mom to the dump, they find that food is spread about everywhere. They don’t need to
steal from each other to survive. (Remember this: the biggest causes of death among free-living
dogs are cars, parasites, and being shot, poisoned, or otherwise killed by humans – not starvation.)
The seed is planted for peaceful social interactions even in the presence of food, for a willingness to
compromise, and for the willingness to respect the other dog’s personal zone.
If we make the puppies in our household eat from one bowl together, we disturb this natural learning
process. We create a situation in which the pups do have to compete, one in which they do have to
take food from each other in order to eat at all. We force them to enter each other’s personal zone
without permission and take what the other has in order to survive. While they are very small, they
might not notice this, because they all fit easily around the bowl at once. However, once they get big
enough that it gets hard to fit all their heads in the bowl at the same time, then eating starts to
become a kind of war. This situation lays the foundation for two serious problems later in life.
First, there will be a problem with other dogs. The pup learns, at the shared food bowl, not to respect
the other’s personal zone. He must push into the other’s personal zone in order to eat – i.e., to keep
from dying. The other puppies have to do the same. The fact that there’s only one bowl makes
compromise impossible. Because the puppy’s brain is growing its basic structures and neural
connections now, he will also be forming his basic orientation in life. He will end up oriented to
competition instead of compromise. He will not hesitate to enter the other’s personal zone if there’s
something there he wants. He will expect the other to do the same to him. As an adult, this dog will
be constantly getting into unnecessary conflicts – either because he pushes into the other dog’s
space and meets resistance, or because he’s paranoid the other dog will and lashes out in advance.
The poor customer who bought the pup doesn’t know the breeder believed in this Myth, and ends up
wondering what he did to deserve such a difficult dog.
Second, there may well also be a problem with humans. The puppy learns, at the shared food bowl,
that the presence of others while he eats forms a threat to getting enough sustenance. The activity
“eating” ends up anchored in the pup’s brain as a stressed and competitive business, a fight for
physical survival. Someone else around while he eats becomes a learned signal that loss is
imminent. And the anticipation of losing a necessary life resource arouses aggression. The puppy
will be in an aggressive mood around food, because food is associated with the need to compete with
others and with a fear of loss. This dog will, as an adult, remain tense and sensitive when he’s
eating. He may defend his food fiercely against anyone who happens to walk by. This behavior tends
to expand itself to inedible objects because the dog is constantly worried about his personal zone. He
growls about a sock he happens to be lying near, or a kleenex someone left on the floor, and his
human is totally baffled. He wonders what caused this behavior, and why the dog lashes out at him
about a sock, since he’s never taken anything away from the dog.
It is a big mistake to make pups eat together from one shared food bowl. They won’t learn to share
the way we want our children to, quite the contrary.
Always watch how the breeder feeds the pups before you decide to buy one.
the litter.
This myth was very popular for quite awhile. People thought you could test a puppy and find out what
her personality would be like when she grew up. The test consists of several parts. Does the puppy
approach you without being coaxed, or does she seem shy? Once she’s made your acquaintance,
does she follow you around the room, or does she seem totally uninterested in you despite having
smelled your hand? Does she resist when you suspend her in the air on one of your palms, or does
she just hang there passively? What does she do if you lie her on her side and won’t let her get up?
If you throw a wad of paper, does she go get it and bring it back to you? One of the rules was that
you had to test a puppy when she was exactly seven weeks old. If you were even one day later, then
learning would start to influence the outcome of the test, and you wouldn’t be testing her innate
personality anymore.
And that is the punch line, the reason the whole thing was a load of nonsense to start with.
There is no moment when you can measure a mammal’s behavior free of learning. We now know that
learning starts the instant the mammal leaves the womb, and perhaps even before that. When a pup
is born, she has inherited the sucking reflex without having to learn it. However, if she doesn’t find a
nipple and start to suckle within a few minutes, thus supporting the reflex with a learning experience,
the reflex will disappear forever. She is born with a reflex to wave her head back and forth, and to
crawl in ever broadening circles. This maximizes her chances of running into her mother’s belly (and
the nipples) in time to keep the suckle reflex. Finding the nipple is already a learning experience,
teaching her that creeping toward warmth and her mother’s smell is a good thing to do. She is also
learning, within seconds of being born, to associate the smell of another dog with pleasurable
experiences. This is reinforced perhaps a few hours later by the experience of sleeping in the warm
pile of siblings. Later, as her ears and eyes open, her muscles slowly develop mass and strength, her
milk teeth come in, and play begins with her siblings, she starts to have all kinds of other experiences
that will be teaching her about her surroundings and how to interact with them. By the time a puppy is
seven weeks old, she has already learned a vast amount. Whether or not she approaches you, or
lies there passively in your palm, or lets you pin her down without panicking, will all depend on her
learning experiences up to the moment you walked into the room.
In Myths 6, 11 and 12, we have seen that all social skills, even including the use of a dog’s body
language, are learned. Everything the pup learns ends up anchored in her brain. But at seven
weeks, none of it is, as yet, permanently decided, because her brain still has to do 80% of its
growing. If you put the pup in a different environment (in this case, your own home), she will
immediately begin to learn about the new environment and to adapt her reactions to it. This means
that the way you treat her will play a big role in how her brain grows, and thus what kind of adult dog
she becomes. Not heredity, but you, determine whether or not she will trust humans, whether you are
a pleasant or unpleasant factor in her life, whether she understands and willingly complies with your
requests, and so on. None of this is written in stone, not even in an adult dog. Behavior is always
generated in and by a back-and-forth process with the environment a mammal lives in. The breed
you buy (if you buy a pedigreed dog) will give you a predictor for a number of innate tendencies you
can expect, but as for the rest of the dog’s personality – the puppy test will only tell you what the pup
is like at the moment you give her the test.
A puppy test doesn’t predict anything about the future. The best way to know what kind of grown-up
dog you are going to end up with is to take an honest look at yourself.
Read more:
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Biological bases of behavior of domestic dog breeds, in Voith, VL,
Borchelt, PL, eds, Readings in Companion Animal Behavior, Veterinary Learning systems, Co., Inc.,
Trenton, NJ, 1996.
Donaldson, J, The Culture Clash, James & Kenneth Publishers, Berkeley CA, 1996.
Overall, KL, Clinical Behavioral Medicine for Small Animals, Mosby, Inc., Missouri, 1997.
Semyonova, A, The social organization of the domestic dog; a longitudinal study of domestic canine
behavior and the ontogeny of domestic canine social systems, Carriage House Foundation, The
Hague, The Netherlands, 2003.
Myth 23: You housetrain a pup by rubbing his nose in it when
he has an accident in the house.
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
This is an old-fashioned myth that many of us are brought up with. Many people know better at this
point, but many well meaning people do still believe in this myth. Since I still run into it very often, I
have to mention it in this book – for the sake of puppies.
Dogs (and cats) have a natural tendency not to dirty their core living area – the places where they
play, sleep and eat. This natural protection against the transmission of disease and parasites is
already present at birth. In the first four weeks of his life, a pup can’t relieve himself until his mother
pushes him onto his back and begins to lick his groin. This massage stimulates the bladder and colon
to empty themselves, and the mother consumes what they produce, thus keeping the nest clean. The
pup isn’t able to relieve himself independently until the end of his fourth week, when he’s become
strong enough to crawl away from the sleeping area to do so. From this point on, the pups start to
deposit their waste further and further away from the nest they sleep and play in. For the rest of his
life, an adult dog will not dirty his sleeping area (unless he is confined and ends up with no other
choice).
This doesn’t mean the pup will know he’s not supposed to poop anywhere in your whole house. The
house looks huge to him, with places everyone lives in and places no one spends time in. This is the
reason why most pups will look for a spot at the edge of the room or in a corner somewhere – in his
innocent puppy mind, he is following the rule of not dirtying the central living space. So he is acting in
good faith, and before you get angry at him, please try to solve the following riddle:
You are on vacation in Russia, and you have just been to the toilet in your hotel’s lobby. You are on
your way out of the lobby. The cleaning lady runs after you, grabs your sleeve, starts yelling at you in
Russian. Everyone is staring at you as the angry cleaning lady leads you back to the bathroom.
Once there, she stands there talking angrily at you and gesturing at the toilet booth you just used.
You have obviously done something wrong. Was it the empty roll of toilet paper you failed to
replace? Was it the light you didn’t turn off? Did you perhaps leave brown stripes behind, or were
you supposed to use some other booth altogether? Before you look at the answer at the end of this
chapter, think about how this would make you feel. You meant no harm, and you do your best (next
time replacing the empty roll or turning out the light, and using a different booth each time you go),
yet this keeps happening to you every time you use the bathroom. You just can’t figure out what
mistake it is you’re making. In the end, you become afraid to use the bathroom in the hotel at all, or
you try to do so only when you’ve checked to see that the cleaning lady isn’t around.
Once you’ve let it sink in how this would make you feel, you are allowed to look at the answer (see: *
at the end of this chapter).
A pup means well, but he needs our help to know what we want him to do (it’s no use yelling at him in
what is, to him Russian). What you need to do is carry him outside frequently, so he gets the
opportunity to do the right thing. When he does do the right thing in the right place, you reward him
instantly with some delicious tidbit and lots of squeaky-voiced praise. Besides taking him out about
every two hours, you also need to carry him outside an extra time just after he eats, when he’s just
woken up from a nap, and just after a session of enthusiastic play (these are moments when most
pups will suddenly feel a need to go). If he has an accident in the house, the best thing is to ignore
it. Rather than getting angry at him, just clean it up – and see it as a learning experience for yourself,
that you need to be more alert to the signs that he’s feeling the need. When you can’t keep an eye on
him (not to punish a mistake, but to see his signals and help him do the right thing before it’s too late
and he loses it), you can confine him to his sleeping area – his crate, or a large cardboard box he
can’t climb out of. He will do his best to hold it, reluctant to dirty an area just big enough for him to lie
down in. But don’t leave him there too long, because if he is forced to dirty this tiny area and then lie
in it, he will start losing the natural tendency to try to keep the living area clean! Our intention here is
to help him avoid mistakes, and to be able to reward the right thing as frequently as possible. If you
do this, it won’t take more than two or three weeks for him to understand where he’s supposed to go.
But we aren’t finished yet. Knowing where he’s supposed to go is one thing, always being able to do it
that way is another. A puppy’s sphincters aren’t fully developed yet. He won’t always have the
strength it takes to hold himself. His brain is also still growing, including the parts that control the
sphincters. To his dismay, the pup finds that his body sometimes does what it will, and that he can’t
hold it no matter how hard he tries. A lot of pups make it through the day alright, when they’re taken
out every few hours, but still aren’t able to hold it all night yet. He may start to squeak or squeal in the
middle of the night. Try not to get irritated. Remember that he’s small and helpless, he can’t get out
of the box, can’t open the front door himself, his body can’t hold it so long yet, and he is asking for
your help so he can do what you want him to do. Again, if you force him to dirty the area he sleeps in,
you may be creating a dog that will never be housetrained, because his growing brain will be storing
the wrong signals. So help him, even in the middle of the night. It won’t be forever. Within another
week or two he’ll be able to get through the night, and by the time he’s three months old, you’ll have
the Totally Housetrained Pup.
When you punish a pup for accidents in the house, you’re really punishing him for being small and
helpless. Never forget that your puppy is a baby, and that he really does want to do the right thing.
He needs our help, and doesn’t deserve our anger.
* I bet you couldn’t guess this one. In Russia, no one flushes toilet paper down the toilet because this
tends to block the generally ancient plumbing. The cleaning lady knows you did it wrong because (if
everyone is lucky) the paper doesn’t go down after the first flush. It floats around in the hole awhile
first. Toilet paper must be deposited in the wastepaper basket next to the pot. It’s considered bad
manners and very inconsiderate to do it any other way.
Myth 25: You can teach puppies to share with each other by
making them eat together out of one bowl.
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
This is a myth that some (lazy?) breeders like to believe in. This myth is not only incorrect, it can also
be damaging.
One of dogs’ basic social rules is, “we enter each other’s personal zone only with permission.” There
is also the subsidiary rule, “you’re allowed to keep what you have in that zone.” Socially skilled adult
dogs don’t normally take things from each other by force. If it’s in your zone, it’s yours until you
relinquish it. These rules are not instinctive or innate. Dogs have to learn them. Puppies generally
learn these rules with great ease. This learning starts the moment the pup is born. Each pup finds a
nipple on Mom’s belly, and gets all absorbed in eating his meal. If another pup comes along and
displaces him, the pup finds another nipple just a couple inches away. Once the pups are big enough
to accompany Mom to the dump, they find that food is spread about everywhere. They don’t need to
steal from each other to survive. (Remember this: the biggest causes of death among free-living
dogs are cars, parasites, and being shot, poisoned, or otherwise killed by humans – not starvation.)
The seed is planted for peaceful social interactions even in the presence of food, for a willingness to
compromise, and for the willingness to respect the other dog’s personal zone.
If we make the puppies in our household eat from one bowl together, we disturb this natural learning
process. We create a situation in which the pups do have to compete, one in which they do have to
take food from each other in order to eat at all. We force them to enter each other’s personal zone
without permission and take what the other has in order to survive. While they are very small, they
might not notice this, because they all fit easily around the bowl at once. However, once they get big
enough that it gets hard to fit all their heads in the bowl at the same time, then eating starts to
become a kind of war. This situation lays the foundation for two serious problems later in life.
First, there will be a problem with other dogs. The pup learns, at the shared food bowl, not to respect
the other’s personal zone. He must push into the other’s personal zone in order to eat – i.e., to keep
from dying. The other puppies have to do the same. The fact that there’s only one bowl makes
compromise impossible. Because the puppy’s brain is growing its basic structures and neural
connections now, he will also be forming his basic orientation in life. He will end up oriented to
competition instead of compromise. He will not hesitate to enter the other’s personal zone if there’s
something there he wants. He will expect the other to do the same to him. As an adult, this dog will
be constantly getting into unnecessary conflicts – either because he pushes into the other dog’s
space and meets resistance, or because he’s paranoid the other dog will and lashes out in advance.
The poor customer who bought the pup doesn’t know the breeder believed in this Myth, and ends up
wondering what he did to deserve such a difficult dog.
Second, there may well also be a problem with humans. The puppy learns, at the shared food bowl,
that the presence of others while he eats forms a threat to getting enough sustenance. The activity
“eating” ends up anchored in the pup’s brain as a stressed and competitive business, a fight for
physical survival. Someone else around while he eats becomes a learned signal that loss is
imminent. And the anticipation of losing a necessary life resource arouses aggression. The puppy
will be in an aggressive mood around food, because food is associated with the need to compete with
others and with a fear of loss. This dog will, as an adult, remain tense and sensitive when he’s
eating. He may defend his food fiercely against anyone who happens to walk by. This behavior tends
to expand itself to inedible objects because the dog is constantly worried about his personal zone. He
growls about a sock he happens to be lying near, or a kleenex someone left on the floor, and his
human is totally baffled. He wonders what caused this behavior, and why the dog lashes out at him
about a sock, since he’s never taken anything away from the dog.
It is a big mistake to make pups eat together from one shared food bowl. They won’t learn to share
the way we want our children to, quite the contrary.
Always watch how the breeder feeds the pups before you decide to buy one.
By the way, the puppy test is also an experience she will learn from, so
if you are determined to do such a test, at least try to do it in such a way
that you don’t traumatize the pup!
if you are determined to do such a test, at least try to do it in such a way
that you don’t traumatize the pup!
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Possession and the personal zone:
Touchy dogs
Socially skilled adult dogs normally don’t take things away from each other by
force. However, we’ve all seen dogs at dog parks who don’t seem to know this
rule. The ball a dog’s owner brought to the park rolls away a good distance
and ends up outside his personal zone. Some other dog grabs the ball and
runs off with it. Or the dog’s owner throws the ball and a second dog manages
to speed in and get to the ball way before the first dog has dog-legal
possession. In both cases the first dog pursues this second dog, very angry,
determined to get his ball back if need be by force. This can be very surprising
the second dog, who does know the rules and resists having them broken. It
can lead to quite upsetting-looking fights. What is going on?
In my experience, dogs who do this have inadvertently been taught to do so by
their owners. Put more precisely, their owners have prevented them from
learning and accepting this dog rule. The human takes a ball to the park and
is, herself, possessive about the ball. After all, it cost her two dollars and a trip
to the mall, and she brought it to play with her own puppy. When another dog
manages to get hold of the ball fair and square according to the dog rules, this
human goes over to the other dog, takes the ball back, and gives it back to her
pup. She does this every time the pup loses possession of the ball. She also
does this if the puppy loses a stick he was playing with. After all, it was his
stick, and it’s so unfair that the bigger dog grabbed it just because the pup can’t
run so fast yet. This human taking things back from another dog is step one,
where the pup learns that he always gets his ball, toy or stick back. Step one
also means the pup never learns to deal cheerfully with the frustration of losing
the object fair and square, nor to seek some peaceful and dog-legal means of
regaining possession.
Step two is that the other dog is quite surprised to have something taken out
his dog-legal possession just like that. He looks around in amazement and
sees that the pup now has it. The dog’s brain isn’t complex enough to
understand that this is the human’s fault and that the pup doesn’t know any
better. Very likely he will jump all over the pup for the pup’s lack of manners.
Normally, if the pup had gone to try to get the thing back himself, he would have
gotten a warning not to approach too close, and certainly not without all kinds of
signals that he wasn’t considering theft. The pup would have been able to
avoid a whacking. As it is, his owner gave him the thing back, so he is back in
possession and thinks this is okay. He is very surprised when the adult dog
suddenly jumps all over him. His brain is not complex enough to understand
the human behavior that led up to this, nor what the adult dog is thinking. He
doesn’t know the chance to be warned about theft was taken away – skipped –
due to his owner’s actions. As a result, he learns that other dogs jump all over
him without warning when he has something.
Step three is that this same owner is concerned about her image in the eyes of
other humans at the dog park. When her puppy gains possession of another
dog’s object fair and square, she marches over and takes it away from him.
She gives it back to the other dog. After all, this is the only way not to look like
she’s favoring her puppy above others by insisting on her own two-dollar ball –
and to keep from looking like a total cheapskate or Mushy Mommy at the dog
park. Again, with their non-complex brains, dogs don’t understand this. The
pup just sees that now the other dog suddenly has the thing without any kind of
social interchange having taken place, again a skipped step. His owner took
something away from him and now it’s suddenly over there. He misses the
experience of being allowed to keep what he has. He has no way of knowing
this isn’t the other dog’s doing somehow.
By the time this pup is grown up, he expects other dogs to jump all over him
any moment when he has a thing. He also thinks the thing can disappear
suddenly, materializing in the other’s mouth. He doesn’t know how to get it
back. He has no idea he’s supposed to let the other dog keep a thing. Touchy
already while he has the thing, frustrated when the other gets it, unaware of the
rules, this is the dog who seeks conflict when another dog takes his ball, toy or
stick fair and square.
Puppies
Adult dogs do sometimes take things away from a puppy by growling and
staring at the pup, making her move away and relinquish the object.
Sometimes an adult dog will make a puppy move away from her food bowl.
Not all adult dogs do this. The objects they do it with vary. They won’t do it all
the time, just occasionally. This seems to be a kind of bullying, but it also
seems to be part of the parenting process (production of functioning, non-
aggressive system parts). I have seen many adult dogs bully a puppy this way
several times, then leave the pup alone after that – as if the adult is satisfied
the pup will avoid conflict, so now she can keep what she has.
There seems to be a moment in a pup’s life when the pup decides the grown
up rules apply to her too, and she doesn’t have to take it anymore. As far as I
can tell, this is a fairly reliable behavioral indication of the onset of
adolescence. The pup (who is now five or six months) starts to growl when an
adult dog approaches while she chews on her ball or while she eats. She may
suddenly lash out if the adult dog grabs the ball they were both chasing right
out from under her nose for the millionth time (which she never got mad about
before). She snaps, or she jumps all over the other dog (whose size she now
nearly equals or even surpasses). Many people are taken aback when this
happens. They worry that their always-sweet puppy is undergoing some
mysterious change and becoming a fighter. The adult dog can sometimes be
amazed too, because the script has suddenly changed. But the adult dog will
understand what’s going on and will leave this young dog (who has announced
that she’s no longer a pup) alone in the future, allowing her the respect of the
adult dog rules.
Watch out for observing only your own dogs
Some people live with a group of dogs in which one of the dogs is always
taking things away from the others. They conclude that this is normal behavior.
Because their other dogs tolerate it, they think the Grabber must be the
dominant dog and the leader. They then think that all dog groups will have a
Grabber – that all groups will tolerate having a bully around.
When the Grabber gets out into the wider world, he is suddenly having
arguments with lots of other dogs in the dog park. His behavior upsets them. It
might scare them. If he’s small, he gets jumped on or even chased off the
playing field. If the Grabber is a big and pushy dog, other dogs might try to stay
as far as they can from him, or even flee the field when he arrives. Big or small,
others start to avoid the Grabber or make him avoid them, refusing one way or
another to interact with him.
You can’t generalize about normal domestic canine social organization just by
watching your own group of dogs, nor in fact by watching any single group that
has no choice but to live together, or who pretty much interact only with each
other. An isolated group of dogs may arrive at some comfortable or
uncomfortable equilibrium together, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve
done it by universally normal canine means. It doesn’t tell you how theirs fits
into general canine behavior. The rules they follow may not be universal rules,
nor will those rules necessarily work with strangers. Some of them may be
human-generated rules. Other dogs in the world may not know these rules.
Before you can draw conclusions about the behavior of dogs in general, you
have to watch many, many dogs interacting. Dogs who do and dogs who don’t
know each other, who were raised by other people in other situations, and who
are free to leave the space if they want or need to.
The best measure of whether a dog’s behavior is normal is by watching how
other, well socialized dogs react to it.
Touchy dogs
Socially skilled adult dogs normally don’t take things away from each other by
force. However, we’ve all seen dogs at dog parks who don’t seem to know this
rule. The ball a dog’s owner brought to the park rolls away a good distance
and ends up outside his personal zone. Some other dog grabs the ball and
runs off with it. Or the dog’s owner throws the ball and a second dog manages
to speed in and get to the ball way before the first dog has dog-legal
possession. In both cases the first dog pursues this second dog, very angry,
determined to get his ball back if need be by force. This can be very surprising
the second dog, who does know the rules and resists having them broken. It
can lead to quite upsetting-looking fights. What is going on?
In my experience, dogs who do this have inadvertently been taught to do so by
their owners. Put more precisely, their owners have prevented them from
learning and accepting this dog rule. The human takes a ball to the park and
is, herself, possessive about the ball. After all, it cost her two dollars and a trip
to the mall, and she brought it to play with her own puppy. When another dog
manages to get hold of the ball fair and square according to the dog rules, this
human goes over to the other dog, takes the ball back, and gives it back to her
pup. She does this every time the pup loses possession of the ball. She also
does this if the puppy loses a stick he was playing with. After all, it was his
stick, and it’s so unfair that the bigger dog grabbed it just because the pup can’t
run so fast yet. This human taking things back from another dog is step one,
where the pup learns that he always gets his ball, toy or stick back. Step one
also means the pup never learns to deal cheerfully with the frustration of losing
the object fair and square, nor to seek some peaceful and dog-legal means of
regaining possession.
Step two is that the other dog is quite surprised to have something taken out
his dog-legal possession just like that. He looks around in amazement and
sees that the pup now has it. The dog’s brain isn’t complex enough to
understand that this is the human’s fault and that the pup doesn’t know any
better. Very likely he will jump all over the pup for the pup’s lack of manners.
Normally, if the pup had gone to try to get the thing back himself, he would have
gotten a warning not to approach too close, and certainly not without all kinds of
signals that he wasn’t considering theft. The pup would have been able to
avoid a whacking. As it is, his owner gave him the thing back, so he is back in
possession and thinks this is okay. He is very surprised when the adult dog
suddenly jumps all over him. His brain is not complex enough to understand
the human behavior that led up to this, nor what the adult dog is thinking. He
doesn’t know the chance to be warned about theft was taken away – skipped –
due to his owner’s actions. As a result, he learns that other dogs jump all over
him without warning when he has something.
Step three is that this same owner is concerned about her image in the eyes of
other humans at the dog park. When her puppy gains possession of another
dog’s object fair and square, she marches over and takes it away from him.
She gives it back to the other dog. After all, this is the only way not to look like
she’s favoring her puppy above others by insisting on her own two-dollar ball –
and to keep from looking like a total cheapskate or Mushy Mommy at the dog
park. Again, with their non-complex brains, dogs don’t understand this. The
pup just sees that now the other dog suddenly has the thing without any kind of
social interchange having taken place, again a skipped step. His owner took
something away from him and now it’s suddenly over there. He misses the
experience of being allowed to keep what he has. He has no way of knowing
this isn’t the other dog’s doing somehow.
By the time this pup is grown up, he expects other dogs to jump all over him
any moment when he has a thing. He also thinks the thing can disappear
suddenly, materializing in the other’s mouth. He doesn’t know how to get it
back. He has no idea he’s supposed to let the other dog keep a thing. Touchy
already while he has the thing, frustrated when the other gets it, unaware of the
rules, this is the dog who seeks conflict when another dog takes his ball, toy or
stick fair and square.
Puppies
Adult dogs do sometimes take things away from a puppy by growling and
staring at the pup, making her move away and relinquish the object.
Sometimes an adult dog will make a puppy move away from her food bowl.
Not all adult dogs do this. The objects they do it with vary. They won’t do it all
the time, just occasionally. This seems to be a kind of bullying, but it also
seems to be part of the parenting process (production of functioning, non-
aggressive system parts). I have seen many adult dogs bully a puppy this way
several times, then leave the pup alone after that – as if the adult is satisfied
the pup will avoid conflict, so now she can keep what she has.
There seems to be a moment in a pup’s life when the pup decides the grown
up rules apply to her too, and she doesn’t have to take it anymore. As far as I
can tell, this is a fairly reliable behavioral indication of the onset of
adolescence. The pup (who is now five or six months) starts to growl when an
adult dog approaches while she chews on her ball or while she eats. She may
suddenly lash out if the adult dog grabs the ball they were both chasing right
out from under her nose for the millionth time (which she never got mad about
before). She snaps, or she jumps all over the other dog (whose size she now
nearly equals or even surpasses). Many people are taken aback when this
happens. They worry that their always-sweet puppy is undergoing some
mysterious change and becoming a fighter. The adult dog can sometimes be
amazed too, because the script has suddenly changed. But the adult dog will
understand what’s going on and will leave this young dog (who has announced
that she’s no longer a pup) alone in the future, allowing her the respect of the
adult dog rules.
Watch out for observing only your own dogs
Some people live with a group of dogs in which one of the dogs is always
taking things away from the others. They conclude that this is normal behavior.
Because their other dogs tolerate it, they think the Grabber must be the
dominant dog and the leader. They then think that all dog groups will have a
Grabber – that all groups will tolerate having a bully around.
When the Grabber gets out into the wider world, he is suddenly having
arguments with lots of other dogs in the dog park. His behavior upsets them. It
might scare them. If he’s small, he gets jumped on or even chased off the
playing field. If the Grabber is a big and pushy dog, other dogs might try to stay
as far as they can from him, or even flee the field when he arrives. Big or small,
others start to avoid the Grabber or make him avoid them, refusing one way or
another to interact with him.
You can’t generalize about normal domestic canine social organization just by
watching your own group of dogs, nor in fact by watching any single group that
has no choice but to live together, or who pretty much interact only with each
other. An isolated group of dogs may arrive at some comfortable or
uncomfortable equilibrium together, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve
done it by universally normal canine means. It doesn’t tell you how theirs fits
into general canine behavior. The rules they follow may not be universal rules,
nor will those rules necessarily work with strangers. Some of them may be
human-generated rules. Other dogs in the world may not know these rules.
Before you can draw conclusions about the behavior of dogs in general, you
have to watch many, many dogs interacting. Dogs who do and dogs who don’t
know each other, who were raised by other people in other situations, and who
are free to leave the space if they want or need to.
The best measure of whether a dog’s behavior is normal is by watching how
other, well socialized dogs react to it.
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