Extra Puppy Post

Okay, first, here’s another cute video! Very brief, but Morgan REALLY wants the puppies to chase her. They are just a hair too young to really join in games of tag with adult dogs, but it’s adorable to watch them make their first attempts.

Also, here’s a cute picture that shows how I start crate training. The crate is just there in the living room. Naamah gets her meals in the crate because she’s slow to finish her food and this way I know she’s the one who’s eating it.

Anyway, these two puppies crept in there to yearn after Naamah’s cow hoof toy. She wouldn’t let them have it, so they just went to sleep instead. If I were keeping them, they’d move very easily from sleeping crowded together in a crate with the door open –> sleeping with an adult dog in a crate with the door closed.

If you ever have two puppies at the same time, by the way, it’s important to take them for walks separately and crate them separately and train them separately. Every day, not just occasionally. Otherwise you can get sibling syndrome in which one puppy becomes massively overdependent on the other (or both become overdependent at the same time). Either way, both puppies develop distorted personalities, often seriously distorted. Here’s a post about this. Chatting with very experienced dog people makes me feel that breed is not important as a predictor, as it’s a rather common problem for all sorts of wildly different breeds.

Nothing like this ever happens to my puppies when I keep littermates, which I have done several times, nor to breeder friends of mine who have kept littermates. That’s probably because our babies have an entire pack structure to fit into and therefore don’t focus just on each other in such a pathological way. Also, of course I train each puppy separately; nobody can train two baby puppies to both do basic obedience at the same time. You have to focus on one and then the other. Even so, I generally crate each puppy separately at night, with a friendly babysitter adult rather than a littermate. During the day, if the babies want to crowd into a crate together, that’s fine. I leave crates open, and it’s not unusual to see two or three dogs in one crate, a lot like the above picture, except all adults, so they’re kind of lying on top of each other. My three young girls like to do that, sometimes with both boys crowded onto the dog bed on top of the crate.

Ah, I really want to keep a puppy! But two boys are enough! I hope Morgan and/or Naamah will give me a lovely little female puppy later this year. Preferably both of them!