Behavior

Pups who are raised in a litter for the first eight weeks of their lives (and in the presence of older dogs) have the advantage of learning skills from their siblings and elders. They learn to accept the leadership of a just leader. They learn simple, but crucially important lessons such as bite inhibition. They come to understand when play is too rough or inappropriate. And they have the opportunity to learn the language skills that will enable them to be peaceful pack members.

We adopted our rescue dog about a year ago. She had been a stray, and at the time we adopted her the vet thought she was about ten months old. Ever since we’ve had her she has had the same symptoms – she doesn’t seem to be able to properly digest her food. She is ravenously hungry all the time. She will eat unlimited amounts of anything – fruits, vegetables, yogurt, bread, anything she can get her paws on. And her stools are not normal; she has about four bowel movements per day, and they get progressively softer throughout the day.

All of our dogs are capable of far more than we ever ask of them. Their senses, especially their hearing and ability to smell, are so highly developed that they can perform feats that appear miraculous to us. Their physical abilities can cause us to gape in awe, as demonstrated by the prowess of highly-skilled Frisbee and Agility dogs. And they have all kinds of talents that, unless we look for them, we may never notice; hidden talents that reveal their versatility and breadth of their potential to think, reason and learn.

If your dogs are fighting, and are causing severe damage to each other – or one dog is causing severe damage to another – I’m sorry to say that you are dealing with the most difficult of all canine behavior problems, the one with the worst possible prognosis. Your options are extremely limited, because the treatment really should have happened when the dog was 4 1/2 months old, which is when dogs normally learn bite inhibition.

I have a serious problem with my six-year-old neutered male Vizsla. He was a high strung, but good tempered dog for the first three years of his life. Something seemed to snap after that. He is loving and affectionate most of the time, but he gets aggressive when family members leave the kitchen (he and our other dog are limited to the kitchen and family room). He barks, snaps at them, and snags clothes with his teeth. He has never chomped down and bitten anyone, but he has scratched people with a tooth.

Electronic fences and their partners – collars that deliver an aversive agent – have been around for more than 20 years. They seem like the perfect canine confinement alternative to a solid physical fence. They are often marketed as the ideal fencing solution to homeowner association fence prohibitions and for problematic, difficult-to-fence, steep, rocky and rugged living spaces. But while occurrences of a collar shorting out and administering repeated shocks to a hapless, helpless dog are relatively rare, there are other drawbacks to using electronic fencing systems. A conscientious owner will weigh all the pros and cons before deciding whether or not to invest in this sort of fencing" system. "

I was trying to be a responsible dog owner. We lived in a rural area of Northern California, in a house with no fenced yard. My boyfriend's Irish Setter had recently been shot and killed while chasing a neighbor's goats. A hard lesson to learn, and one I wasn't about to repeat. So when we were leaving the ranch for a day I insisted we tie up our recently acquired St. Bernard, Bear. We tied him to a tree, made sure he had access to plenty of water and shade and was nowhere near a fence that he could climb over. Confident that we had done the right thing, we drove off.

Many behaviorists and dog trainers believe that puppies go through a so-called fear imprinting" period sometime between the ages of eight to 20 weeks

When the average dog hears a loud or unusual noise, as long as no one around him panics or acts strangely, he'll generally figure out that there is nothing to worry about. But noise-phobic dogs don't seem to notice that the earth just keeps turning, noise or no noise. This is where Tellington TTouch can make a difference. While TTouch works to help every animal become better balanced and more consciously responsive to itself and its environment, it is with the fear-based and/or habitual response patterns that TTouch can truly work wonders.

Not all dogs have the benefit of a nice start in life. Sergeant had about the worst start possible. His first owners left Sergeant locked in their apartment when they abandoned it in October 1997. By the time the landlord found him, the three-year-old male Rottweiler-mix was emaciated. The landlord brought him to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty (SPCA) of Upstate NY, a no-kill shelter. It was several days before Sergeant could eat solid food without vomiting.

Statistically, dog bites are the number one health problem for children in this country, outpacing measles, mumps, and whooping cough combined, according to Jeffrey Sacks, MD, of the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The CDC estimates that some 4.7 million persons were bitten by dogs in 1996. Of these, approximately 830,000 of the bites required medical attention, up from 585,000 in 1986. Children are the most common dog bite victims, due to their size, vulnerability, and tendency to move quickly and make strange noises, especially when excited or frightened.

People fear Rottweilers for a variety of reasons, and only a few of those reasons are due to the media. Some Rottie owners deliberately foster the intimidating look, fastening huge Gothic collars on their dogs and encouraging their dogs to be aggressive. Many Rottweilers are used for guard and protection work, a task they were bred for and excel at. And, face it, whether you want to blame nature or nurture (poor breeding or wrong-headed training), there are a certain number of aggressive, unpredictable, dangerous Rottweilers in the world.