Behaviour

Canine Skills & Foster Parents

A big worry with handraised pups is their behavioural development. They learn so much from their dam and their environment.

Fortunately both of my litters were fairly large so the pups had each other to learn from in terms of canine communication and pack structure.

However they still need a good role model otherwise it is a case of "the blind leading the blind"!

I am blessed with the most wonderful surrogate father in the shape of my squatter-camp rescue dog, Dusi. Dusi would make frequent trips to the whelping box and the pups came to know him well before their eyes even opened.

Dusi would quite happily lick the pups, but he never quite stretched to cleaning them :-)

Dusi would count his puppies when he came into the whelping room and he became quite possessive over his babies when we had visitors. He would even give me the evil eye when I took photos - he didn't like the camera pointing at his kids.

Dusi continued to mentor the pups and he did a sterling job, even when "his babies" were bigger than him.

My Cattle dog, Dallas, also played a large role with the pups from about 4 weeks of age. She taught them manners and that older dogs will be respected.

Dallas was also a huge help in keeping the pups together when we went for walks in the garden - although she had to learn that a Dane pup requires much less force than a cow!

Teaching Resilience

A naturally reared pup actually has it much harder than a handraised pup. In a normal litter there is much jostling for position and often a pup will be nursing quite happily and a littermate will push them off the teat. The dam is quite rough with her pups too!

I was adamant that my handraised pups would not be molly coddled and initially I tried to feed two at a time to replicate natural nursing. Not a good idea! It was impossible and I achieved very little other than ending up covered in milk and with two hungry pups.

So I elected to make them work for their bottles. Sometimes I would just take the bottle away, other times I would remove the bottle and make the pup climb over my arm to find it. I honestly believe that giving the pups "expected obstacles" helped them develop into well-rounded puppies.

I was also not overly gentle with the puppies and tried to mimic the "rough but gentle" style of a canine mother when cleaning and feeding them.

The first litter was temperament assessed by a professional animal behaviourist at seven weeks of age. The comment was "If you hadn't of told me, there are no ways I would have said that this is a handraised litter". Those words brought such joy to me! I would have been devastated if the pups had been behaviourally abnormal due to being handraised.

Over Bonding

All puppies are prone to this and handraised pups are at a greater risk. It is not so much that they have a closer bond to people, but we tend to over protect them and shield them from any perceived harm or stress.

It is vitally important that the pups have a stimulating environment from 3 weeks onwards. The environment "lures them in" and actually helps cut the apron strings and thus develop their own identity.

Stimulus-poor primates show a greater degree of attachment to their mother (pathological hyper-attachment), which led Bobbitt (1968, in Fox 1975) to propose that detachment from the mother is a continual process linked to a young being's attachment to the environment. This conclusion can most likely also be applied to dogs.

Stimulus-poor puppies run the risk of developing hyper-attachments to their biological or adoptive parents (transposition of hyper-attachment to its new human masters), which is a source of intolerance to isolation, attention-seeking behavior, reutilization of behavior acquired during illnesses, etc.

My pups had a wide variety of toys, chews, surfaces and I exposed them to many different sights and sounds. The constant stream of visitors helped a great deal too.

Page last updated: 18-09-08 11:02:04 PM

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