How to Raise the Perfect Dog by César Millán Page B
Authors: César Millán
Tags: General, Health, Pets, Dogs, Human-animal communication, Dogs - Training, Training, Dogs - Care, Dogs - General, Behavior
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share the job of feeding the maturing pups, returning from hunts and regurgitating food for them. More important, the whole pack always shares in the education of the pups, including disciplining them. The adult dogs work together to form what amounts to an amazing, comprehensive, and cooperative “public school system,” to build a healthy, productive new generation. If another adult member of the pack feels the pups are getting a little too boisterous in their play, she may use physical touch—a nudge, or even a firm but nonaggressive bite—to communicate. If an adult or adolescent senses a pup doesn’t understand the manners of the dinner table, she may emit a low growl to warn the pups away from her food. Every dog recognizes that having obedient, well-adjusted, socially literate puppies is necessary for the survival of the entire pack.
However, domestic dogs don’t live only with dogs; they live with and must rely on us humans. In a way, your puppy needs to grow up “bilingual”—speaking the languages of both dog and human—before he can go out into the world. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, of years of evolving with us side by side have given our dogs an inborn proficiency in understanding our energy and body language, a proficiency that is just as impressive as that of our closest evolutionary cousins, the other primates. Nevertheless, being domesticated doesn’t bring automatic understanding. “Human” is still very much a second language to puppies. To become good pets, puppies need positive interactions with humans on a daily basis during the period between five weeks and nine weeks. They also need to be exposed to the different kinds of stimuli that await them out in the modernized world. That’s why a diligent breeder participates as actively as the canine mother during the socialization period of her puppies’ lives, to expose each puppy to different aspects of human culture and to introduce him to the oddities of the half dog-half human society into which he’s been born.
Diana Foster describes the routine she and her husband, Doug, go through with every German shepherd litter that they raise.
At about five weeks of age, we start bringing the puppies indoors one at a time, so we can get them used to being in the company of humans without their littermates. They’re so dependent on being with each other and being with the mother, when we first bring them in and put them down, they’ll start whining. So we’ll hold them for a little bit, then we put them back with the mother. It’s good to give them a little bit of stress so they learn how to handle it, but a few minutes a day is plenty. We do it in short increments, so the dog gets used to being away from the whelping box, and around people.
The Fosters also make sure their shepherd puppies continue being exposed to a series of new, real-life stimuli and stressors during this time:
We try to have them situated on the property where there’s the most commotion. We have five acres, but we never put them in the back pen or up on the hill where they can’t see everything that’s going on. Instead, we have a huge pen in the front, and that’s where we have a lot of people who pull up to come look at our dogs. The kids get out of the car screaming. There are other dogs barking. There’s music. There are my kennel workers. There’s the trash truck. Since we can’t take them out in public when they’re that young, we bring the environment to them, so when they hear a loud sound, or something scares them, they may go screaming to the back of the pen. I tell my kennel workers, “Do nothing. Don’t go over to them. Don’t talk to them. Don’t pick them up. Allow them to work it out for themselves.” And little by little, they start coming toward whatever made the noise and getting a little braver, and then they realize the big bad thing’s not going to hurt them, and then they’re fine. The less you do, the better. If I were to
However, domestic dogs don’t live only with dogs; they live with and must rely on us humans. In a way, your puppy needs to grow up “bilingual”—speaking the languages of both dog and human—before he can go out into the world. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, of years of evolving with us side by side have given our dogs an inborn proficiency in understanding our energy and body language, a proficiency that is just as impressive as that of our closest evolutionary cousins, the other primates. Nevertheless, being domesticated doesn’t bring automatic understanding. “Human” is still very much a second language to puppies. To become good pets, puppies need positive interactions with humans on a daily basis during the period between five weeks and nine weeks. They also need to be exposed to the different kinds of stimuli that await them out in the modernized world. That’s why a diligent breeder participates as actively as the canine mother during the socialization period of her puppies’ lives, to expose each puppy to different aspects of human culture and to introduce him to the oddities of the half dog-half human society into which he’s been born.
Diana Foster describes the routine she and her husband, Doug, go through with every German shepherd litter that they raise.
At about five weeks of age, we start bringing the puppies indoors one at a time, so we can get them used to being in the company of humans without their littermates. They’re so dependent on being with each other and being with the mother, when we first bring them in and put them down, they’ll start whining. So we’ll hold them for a little bit, then we put them back with the mother. It’s good to give them a little bit of stress so they learn how to handle it, but a few minutes a day is plenty. We do it in short increments, so the dog gets used to being away from the whelping box, and around people.
The Fosters also make sure their shepherd puppies continue being exposed to a series of new, real-life stimuli and stressors during this time:
We try to have them situated on the property where there’s the most commotion. We have five acres, but we never put them in the back pen or up on the hill where they can’t see everything that’s going on. Instead, we have a huge pen in the front, and that’s where we have a lot of people who pull up to come look at our dogs. The kids get out of the car screaming. There are other dogs barking. There’s music. There are my kennel workers. There’s the trash truck. Since we can’t take them out in public when they’re that young, we bring the environment to them, so when they hear a loud sound, or something scares them, they may go screaming to the back of the pen. I tell my kennel workers, “Do nothing. Don’t go over to them. Don’t talk to them. Don’t pick them up. Allow them to work it out for themselves.” And little by little, they start coming toward whatever made the noise and getting a little braver, and then they realize the big bad thing’s not going to hurt them, and then they’re fine. The less you do, the better. If I were to
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