Thread: Pedigree dogs

Originally Posted by Grizzley1

Glen,
I know the post has been there for some time but I would love to see some pictures,especilly of the Chows. I love them but the wife is scared of the Dobies already,and there pretty hairy,but sooo nice.

This was my best friend for 13 years. Her name was Greyson:

I hear ya Bud

German Shorthaired Pointer.. about as smart as they get!

Originally Posted by Ellsworth

German Shorthaired Pointer.. about as smart as they get!

Perfect example of a HUNTING dog-If they aint working-there not happy,great dogs

Perfect example of a HUNTING dog-If they aint working-there not happy,great dogs who ain't happy?

Originally Posted by Ellsworth

Perfect example of a HUNTING dog-If they aint working-there not happy,great dogs who ain't happy?

There are ALWAYS exceptions,Im sure hes happy,as I ment it as a compliment, and Im sure he was a good hunter in his day

As George Carlin once wisely noted, "Life is a series of dogs".

I love my Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Tchaikovsky Sings the Blues is his name. Loyal, Loving, Protective. I will own no other breed. Labradors you can train with a 2X4. Chessies you have to outsmart insist it is there idea not yours.

The inescapable rule of breeding is that if you select for one quality, you are deselecting for something else, and as long as saleability or dog-shows are the objective, intelligence and mental stability are liable to lose out. I marvel the hereditary aristocracy has held out as well as it has.

I mistrust any breed rising in popularity, because the need to breed in numbers is liable to bring in physical or mental defects. There is a pretty good rule that for dogs with an excessive guarding or combative instinct, the females are harmless unless provoked, but when aggression is due to inherited neurosis or mistreatment in the current generation, one sex is as bad as the other. Brings dogs into line with the rest or the world, really.

I don't think breeds vary as much in true intelligence as some people think. Our cairn terrier and labrador were pretty sharp customers, but a lot of it, in the labrador's case especially, went into craft self-interest. The Scottish working collie excels in willingness to please, and putting serious work into it. We bought one from a farm, but the brighter of ours I bought for about $2 from a Glasgow petshop in 1968. She learned to respond to subliminal hand signals from fifty yards off, without ever being taught, and an easily seen signal would produced a reproachful half-second's hesitation, because I was treating her like an animal. I once had a shepherd tell me it was pure sin for a collie like that to be raised an amateur. She could catch up with rabbits, but they didn't want to play, and she had no idea that dogs kill rabbits, for she didn't do violence. The little cairn terrier bounced up and down in fury, and wouldn't walk within six feet of her all the way home, in case someone thought they were related.

Whippets are not the intellectual giants of the dog world, but the half-whippet, half-collie cruise missile which followed did all the same things, and I think it was just because previous experience stopped me giving up on the assumption she wouldn't. The difference was, with the pure collie it was personal honour, but you could see the collie-whippet saying "The things I do for this man..." She was manically friendly with man or beast, and when she was 30lb. could knock a friend's German Shepherds over, or a 160lb. Newfoundland off one pair of legs at a time, if she lured him into a tight turn first.

We had a budgerigar which hated her, but she didn't know it, and unfailingly presented her nose to be pecked bloody through the bars of the cage. One day we came home to find the door open, and the budgie, filthy, without tail feathers and in a fearful temper, under the bed. Still, he had been salivated all over, which was sure proof she didn't want him dead. It turns out they need tail feathers to balance, and when he dozed off, he would take a dive and hang from the perch like a bat. Serves him right for pecking her.

She used to nip strange male rottweilers affectionately on the neck. She was so fast they couldn't have caught her if they wanted to. But in fact they were delighted, as I suppose the frequently mistrusted usually are. I've never met a rottweiler yet that didn't strike me as a good dog. There are strains of pit bull that are bred for fighting, so much that they have lost the rule about quitting when one's situation has deteriorated beyond remedy. Those are about the only dog I would really avoid trying to do anything with, even if acquired really young. I think most of their problems could be solved by neutering the owners.

Sounds like your a real dog lover,however,you might need a tuneup on treating every dog as an individual and train them as such.
(by the way I had a Cairn also -really smart dog and very brave)