I haven’t brought you up-to-date on Mira’s show career. Mira just isn’t interested in showing. “Mira doesn’t want to be famous” was how our handler put it. So Mira’s show career is over.
We aren’t disappointed at all in Mira. The way we think of it is that, if Mira loved the show ring (as Tally did), we’d be happy to support it. But since she doesn’t we don’t feel any sense of loss. We want Mira to be the best, happiest, healthiest, most complete dog she can be and the best friend that she can be and whatever that is is fine with us.
People who don’t work dogs frequently don’t understand that you can’t force a dog to do anything. When a dog pulls a sled, or herds sheep, or jumps after a frisbee, or pursues a lure, or hunts, or any of the other kinds of work that dogs do, it’s because he wants to do it. You can’t beat a dog into pulling a sled—if he doesn’t want to do it he’ll just sit down and nothing you can do will make him pull.
Dogs are, in many ways, better than we are and this is one of them. You can mistreat a dog or even kill him but that won’t make him into a slave.
So Mira will have a wonderful career as a sled dog and as a therapy dog or just as our house dog if that’s what she wants to do. It’s fine with us.
although dogs are smarter than we usually think they are, punsihment doesn’t really sink in because they don’t understand why they are being punished. They learn by repetition-much as does a child.
I have found that most of the dogs that I have trained a good reletionship with the dog works better than food when training. A little roughhouse and “good boy” or “Good girl” is usually sufficent to get them to do what you want.
Part of the training though, is to always get the reaction from the dog that you want, and not stop until you do-at least once. Otherwise the dog learns that he/she can do it when they want and if they don’t want to they don’t have to–just like a child.
I fully agree, you can’t make a dog do something it doesn’t want to do. One of our dogs fetches like a maniac, the other not at all. If you threw a ball for him, it wouldn’t even register with him that you wanted him to go get it. And even if it did, I’m sure his expression would be along the lines of “meh, I’d rather lie on the lounge, you get it if you want it so bad”!
I’ll never understand people who mistreat or abandon animals, it’s just wrong. I love our two dogs, they bring so much joy to our lives.
Guyk:
Yes, dogs are built that way. Order is very important to them and if you don’t establish order they’ll establish one for you.
Amanda:
Great to hear from you, Amanda! How’s the new job coming along?
Yes, that’s true even for very closely related dogs of the same breed. Our dogs are all purebred Samoyeds. We have Jenny, her nephew Qila, her daughter Tally, and her grandniece Mira (they’re actually somewhat more closely related than that due to linebreeding). Qila and Tally love to fetch. Jenny and Mira don’t see the point of it.