Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dog behavior, hyperactive dog, hyperactive dogs on January 22, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Regular off-leash exercise, including playing with other dogs, is good way to deal with "hyperactive" dogs.
This is an article of mine. As you know, I like high energy dogs, so I hate the term hyperactive.
Please consider the dog’s energy level before choosing one.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aggressive golden retriever, food aggression in dogs, golden retriever on January 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Note the color and body type. Not a field bred dog.
Now the number 3 biter.
If you want a golden, you’ll have to hunt very hard to find a good one. And be willing to wait.
I guarantee you that this dog’s owner got him because the dog was light-colored and “calm.” Breeding for calmness, as we have seen, messes with the brain chemistry of what are generally good tempered and biddable dogs. Goldens are low fear and low aggression, but adding low activity leads to higher chances for aggression and seizures.
This is why you cannot adjust a working breed’s temperament to fit the needs of modern society. You are going to push the biology of the animal too far.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dog conformation, dog intelligence, dog shows on January 21, 2009 | 48 Comments »
Breeding the smooth collie as a show dog has made it significantly dumber than the working collie from which it descends.
A report just came out of Stockholm University. The author, Kenth Svartberg, writes that a study of purebred dogs finds that dogs specifically bred for the show have significantly reduced working ability when compared to dogs that have been bred for working ability.
The Telegraph, of course, uses the words “intelligence” and “stupidity.” I’ll use them only with this caveat: we don’t understand intelligence in our own species, so how do we think we can divine the intelligence of an animal? This is a nebulous term, which explains why most ethologists and psychologists avoid using the term. The authors merely are looking at sociability and curiosity as traits to determine intelligence.
However, the Swedish researchers explored 13,000 dog in 31 breeds, dividing them into those that were bred for appearance and those that had been bred for function (at least to a certain extent.) They were comparing the breeds based upon curiosity and sociability, which are all important traits for any working dog.
Those dogs that were bred for the show had much lower levels of curiosity and sociability. Both of these traits are associated with our projection of canine intelligence.
The author of the study thinks that there might be a genetic linkage between breeding for the show and higher levels of fear and introversion. That sounds interesting. It has to be a bit more complex than that, though, because there are lots of genes that make a dog “pretty.” And what makes one breed pretty is pretty unique to that dog.
The two breeds with the lowest levels of sociability and curiosity are the Rhodesian Ridgeback and the Smooth collie, which is a separate breed in the UK and the FCI countries.
I don’t know how one would compare these dogs to their working forms, because I don’t know if anyone hunts lions with ridgebacks. I’ve never seen a show smooth collie herd anything, and if it did, I’m sure it wouldn’t be as useful as a BC or an English or Australian shepherd.
The comparison study I’d like to see is a comparison of field line goldens versus the European show lines. I’m sure there will be vast differences between the two. My experience tells me that the two might as well be regarded as separate breeds.
Update:
Psychology Today’s blog has some issues with the sensationalized story that appeared in The Telegraph.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged philosophy on January 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »
That I’m odd.
I am a trained historian and political scientist.
However, my passion is all natural science.
I like to write, although I try to write my professional papers a little better than the blog.
I’m far younger than most other dog bloggers out there. I’m in my mid-20’s.
I’m currently in favor breeding better dogs, of maintaining breeds, but with greater genetic diversity. I’m not totally against conformation shows, but these should be secondary and complementary towards breeding for working ability and health, as well as breeding for a breed appropriate temperament.
I don’t really do much that’s exciting. I like reading Blake’s poetry and that of Wordsworth, and then remembering it when I’m out on my ancestral lands in West Virginia.
I don’t date. I don’t drink (I like being in total control of my faculties). People would think of me as eccentric, perhaps a wee bit introverted.
But oddness is the way that I’m wired. I’m proudly a noncomformist.
We live in a world in which everything must be mass produced to fit arbitrary standards that continuously change. This is as true for our culture and our academy as it is for our dogs.
This might make us produce better products. It might be the only way to generate wealth.
But I’m not so sure it’s helping us produce healthier people or better dogs.
We have a new president now, one who isn’t like the ones before. I hope that he can bring about new ways of thinking about differences in our society. Perhaps, we will start to think that the monoculture isn’t always the best thing for us.
Here’s the beautiful diversity that is all life. May it survive all attempts to further homogenize all that is living and all that is thought.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged "white" golden retriever, English golden retriever, golden retriever, working retriever conformation on January 20, 2009 | 2 Comments »
They start out as cute little “white” puppies:
Unlike field bred golden puppies, they aren’t nearly as active or obsessively intelligent and driven. The first dog I had of this type I actually thought there was something medically wrong with puppy, because she never wanted to play or get silly. Most consumers of dogs don’t really want the real drivey temperament in a puppy, so that puppy doesn’t cause that much trouble (at least by comparison).
Then they mature into dogs that run like draft horses. Have you ever ridden a draft horse? They may have once carried knights in full armor, but compared to a saddle horse, they are lump and choppy in their gait. You get the same out of a blocky English goldens. (Here’s an example of coarse English goldens running with that choppy, lumbering gait.)
Compare the gait of these dogs with some working bred dogs.
Here’s a video of “Shuttle” (The dog in the header). She moves very quickly and fluidly. I don’t see any lumbering around with this dog.
Now, you might like a cute dog that lumbers around. You aren’t going bird hunting, and you don’t want to work a dog. Well, I have a simple statement: Don’t get a golden retriever and stop accommodating breeders who are breeding in poor working conformation and mellow temperaments in the dogs. If you can’t handle the working temperament, you need another breed.
I hate to be blunt here, but I’m tired of seeing my breed destroyed by the caprices of a fickle public, one that wants a mass-produced animal that is not only good- natured and very trainable but also “white,” bear-like, and calm. To get those other three characteristics, you have to fundamentally change the other two. And people who like retrievers as retrievers and not playthings do not want those first two characteristics to change.
Further, a lot of these “white” dogs develop food possession for some reason. The one thing this breed always had going for it was its incredible temperament. It might have a relatively high cancer rate. It might not be as good a trial dog as a Labrador. But its gentle temperament was its asset. If that goes, this breed deserves to lose its popularity.
I hope it does. And I say this as someone who is absolutely in love with the golden retriever as a retriever and dog.
*I have yet to be challenged by any “white” golden fans out there. I’ll just tell you this– I don’t have any good scientific studies on the two separate lines of golden and their behavior and health. However, it’s been my experience dealing with this breed most of my life.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Labradoodle, Obamas dog, portuguese water dog on January 20, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Rescuing a Labradoodle would be a smart move.
I think he should rescue a dog, simply because he already said that he wanted a rescue dog and “a mutt.” I don’t like it when presidents don’t keep their promises, and this would be a promise kept.
Why this breed over the Portuguese water dog?
Well, I don’t think the water dog could survive a massive jolt of popularity and mass production by unscrupulous and uninformed breeders.
Gerald Ford was a moderately popular president when he purchased a golden retriever named “Liberty.” She was of the old type, and it didn’t take very long for this breed to capture the public’s imagination. But then Ford had Liberty bred, and she had a litter of little golden fur balls at the White House. As soon as that happened, everyone wanted a golden retriever. One of the puppies, Jerry, actually became a seeing-eye dog. And this further cemented in the public mind that goldens were beautiful as adult, cute as puppies, and incredibly intelligent dogs that were useful for humanity.
I can only imagine what would happen if Obama bought a Portuguese water dog. This breed has a truncated genetic base, and it does have some really bad genetic disorders. This is a regional water dog, one of the many poodle-type dogs that once existed throughout Europe from Portugal to Russia.
These dogs are ancestral to water spaniels and retrievers, which have more efficient swimming styles and easier to care for coats. You don’t have to clip as Lab to make him a good water dog (but you might want to breed him with less bone so he can swim better).
Labradoodles are being mass-produced by unscrupulous people. This is very true.
However, by rescuing the dog, President-Elect Obama would be setting a good example about the best place to find a regular, old pet dog.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ", "white" golden retriever, "British white retriever, European golden retriever on January 18, 2009 | 10 Comments »
This early light-colored dog from the 1950's or 1960's is still darker than the legions of "white" dogs that swarm European lines today.
In North America, our lines of golden have largely been immune to what I call the “‘white’ dog craze” that has already rocked Europe. Our show dogs were a bit heavy in the bone and heavy in the coat, but they largely weren’t coarsely built dogs that lumber around like bears.
Those days have changed.
All you have to do is go on youtube and type into the search function “white golden retriever,” and a plethora of European show-style golden breeders have videos on there. I don’t mind promoting you dogs online, but I wonder if these breeders are doing health checks and screening of their stock?
Never mind that European show goldens can’t work as long or as well a field type. Never mind that possessive aggression appears to be heritary in these lines. (A recent episode of the Dog Whisper had one with that issue. Although I don’t much like the show, this dog was the first golden I’ve ever seen snarl.) Never mind that the breed’s founders, including the 1st Baron Tweedmouth, always bred for darker dogs. Mrs. Charlesworth, although a proponent of the Russian circus dog hoax, refused to breed any dogs that were very pale in color. And in her day, they weren’t “white.” They were light golden dogs with some cream shadings.
Of course, none of this matters to people who want to sell you a dog for exorbitant profits. They tell you that the dogs are much calmer than the American and certainly more so than the field types. Then they quote the KC (of the UK) standard, which doesn’t allow for dark dogs (however, that standard is not the standard we use here.) Then they claim, although somewhat correctly, that the first litter that the 1st Baron Tweedmouth bred from Nous and Belle were creams. They were creams or really light golds, but they weren’t “white.” And it’s pretty obvious that the 1st Baron Tweedmouth did try to darken up his dogs quite a bit by adding “red setter” (probably Irish) blood to his strain.
Breeding “rare white goldens” that are “calm” is not really a breeding strategy for the best dogs. It is breeding for a market. A market that is highly susceptible to fads. In fact, it is based on nothing more than fads. We want “white goldens.” Why? Because Oprah has some!
My advice is not to refuse to buy a light colored dog, but if it lacks working conformation or refuses to work itself. Don’t buy it. Do you really want a white furry rug that lies around the house all day?
If you do, then really don’t want a golden retriever. You just want the idea of having a golden retriever. And you really don’t need one. There are plenty of very low energy nonworking breeds that you can buy. Plus, there are lots of good mongrels that have those characteristics.
Those little “Knut” polar bear golden puppies might be really cute, but this is what they mature into. A dog that lies around all the time, and when it does move, it’s really slow. Generally, their lumbering gait gets slower by age 5 and, by 10, they don’t want to move much at all. It’s nice if you want a dog to just lie around all day. It’s not very nice if you want a real golden retriever.
In British trials, you do see some of these light lumbering dogs around, but their field lines are very much like ours. Check this out, if you’d like to see it in practice. The dog in the top picture is the only European show type dog doing anything. And I’m sure that after about an hour of hard work, it will be down and out, exhausted or in pain.
Read this before you comment.
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