Most golden bitches have very strong maternal instincts. My own ten-month old spayed bitch seems to love puppies, and toy dogs that loook like puppies.
Here’s footage of a mother golden named “Isabella.” She had just weaned her litter, when the tiger cubs needed her. (Warning: it’s Fox News. If you are of a progressive persuasion, just bear with it. If you can’t, don’t watch!)
Maternal instincts are very strong female dogs and wolves. Typically, each bitch in the pack would come into season at about the same time. The lead bitch would keep the others from breeding. When the lead bitch has her offspring, the other dogs have the exact same hormonal reactions to pregnancy that the pregnant lead bitch has. These bitches then all care for the offspring.
In some packs, if a lower ranking female gets pregnant, she is forced to have her pups in a different den. If the lead female finds out about them, she typically steals the lower ranking bitch’s litter or kills them. Howver, this action doesn’t always happen. In Yellowstone, multiple female wolves often had litters in the same pack and helped rear each other’s young.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s husky bitch killed her dingo’s puppies, except for one. The husky had her litter about a week earlier, and she saw the dingo’s litter as a threat to her puppies survival. This reaction could have been triggered becaue the husky had grown up as a working dog in the Canadian Arctic. She had produced her litters in a time of scarcity. This reaction could have also been triggered because the husky is relatively less neotenized that many breeds, and her lupine instincts told her to kill the offspring of the lower ranking dingo.
Interestingly, this same husky later tried to nurse an opossum joey, because its shape and movements reminded her of puppies.
You can read about the maternal behavior of these dogs in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s Hidden Life of Dogs. Her methodology is unorthodox and controversial. It is anecdotal, and she does let her dogs roam Cambridge, Massachusetts without leashes.
It is the shape and size of the tiger cubs that brought the maternal instincts in the golden. Animals that resemble newborn whelps really do bring out this instinct in dogs.
We have to be a little different, because many women I know do not find newborn puppies cute. But they find 6 week olds absolutely darling.
NB: I do not condone the raising of white tigers, because they do not represent a wild subspecies of tiger. Further, white tigers are unable to survive in the wild. Siberian or Amur tigers are not white, contrary to popular belief. The white color has no advantage in the wild. Further, all white tigers descend from one individual. They are heavily inbred to produce the color, and they have lots of genetic anomalies.
