We've been working on training Memphis since she arrived. Since she's going to be such a big girl, it's very important to us to make sure she will respond to basic requests like sit, wait, come and so on. To make sure we're on the right track, we decided to work with a trainer, meeting every two weeks for a session and practicing in between. We had the first session on Thursday, which was primarily an assessment. The trainer Lex says Memphis is submissive and that we've been on the right track with our training so far, so she doesn't anticipate we'll have a lot of trouble training her.
Later on, I'd like to work with her on some other activities that will stimulate her mind and "give her a job".
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Our Newfoundland Dog
Memphis is a Landseer Newfoundland, born February 27, 2009. Memphis came from HunterHill Kennel near Mount Forest Ontario. She lives in the Toronto neighbourhood known as Longbranch with Mister Anchovy, Tuffy P and cats Jerry, Delia, Rossi, Spud, Shadow and Jacques.
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2009
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May
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- Training
- Stop and smell the flowers
- Milestone
- Memphis enjoying a day at Pigeon Lake
- Miss Memphis gets another invitation
- new poodle friend
- with Jacques as usual
- Friends
- A breakthrough
- Memphis discovers Lake Ontario
- Teamwork
- Excitement
- Memphis makes friends with Roscoe
- Playing with Jacques
- Fetch and targeting
- Last chance to be a lap dog
- With Rossi
- Home Sweet Home
- 16.9
- Firsts
- Dog-o-rama
- She finally figured out what to do with a kong
- Memphis and Jacques
- Mealtime Challenge
- beginning training
- Memphis plays dead in the garden
- Hookworm
- They both want the little piece of cardboard
- with Jacques and in the cat bed
- friends
- with Jerry
- Deck Stairs
- Memphis and the cats
- Homecoming
- We bring Memphis home...
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May
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4 comments:
She'll need a pannier for grocery shopping.
Sounds lie a lot of fun!
Hey...I wonder if you've seen this wonderful PBS documentary? The theory that humans somehow bred wolves or tamed them is shown to be a humancentric misunderstanding. It was wolves who domesticated themselves by scavaging off garbage near human, and how their behaviour altered their looks and vice versa... etc. It's really cool! Here:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/dogs-that-changed-the-world/introduction/1273/
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Dogs-That-Changed-World/dp/B000PMGKXY
It just occurred to me that you (and L.m>?) might not be able to see the web site of PBS in Canada. I really recommend this doc...and it might be available at the library?
Meanwhile...in case the web site wasn't available here is a segment:
'Traditionally, the experts studying the evolution of modern dogs believed that domestication was a conscious effort of humans. The theory was that ancient people took wolf pups from their dens, adopted them, fed them, trained and tamed them.
Biologist Raymond Coppinger, who has spent over 45 years working with and studying dogs, says that this story is nothing more than a romantic fairy tale. “I call it a ‘just so’ story. Nobody who has ever trained a wolf had any success if they started after 19 days,” says Coppinger, a professor of biology and animal behavior at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.
“We’ve got a graduate student doing it now. You take them out of the den when they are 13 days old and their eyes aren’t open, and you spend 24 hours a day with them, socializing them with people, bottle feeding them. You have to have a time surplus society like mine, where you have graduate students with nothing else to do. Mesolithic people would have been struggling for life. They wouldn’t have had time.” In addition, Coppinger says, even tamed wolves aren’t likely to be docile when it comes to food-or breeding. “I work with tamed wolves all the time. I don’t care how tame they are, try to take their bone away. It’s even worse when it comes to breeding. You start to fool around with wolves when they’re in a courtship performance, you could die right there on the spot.”
Biologist Raymond Coppinger Coppinger has another idea: the wolves domesticated themselves. He suspects that the process would have begun at the end of the last Ice-Age approximately 15,000 years ago when people began to gather and live in one place for the first time. The appearance of these villages was fairly rapid and coincidental with the fossil evidence of dogs as we know them.
“People are organized into continuous settlements — villages where they remain for a long period of time, whether there were sitting on the edge of a shell fishery or on the edge of a coral reef. When humans live in the same spot for a long period of time, they create waste, including both sewage and, more importantly for the dog, leftovers. There are things people can’t eat, seeds that fall on the ground, things that have gone bad,” Coppinger says, “The garbage, which might be found in dumps, or just scattered near houses, attracts scavengers: cockroaches, pigeons, rats, jackals — and wolves.”
Coppinger believes that a behavioral characteristic called “flight distance” was crucial to the transformation from wild wolf to the ancestors of the modern dog. It represents how close an animal will allow humans (or anything else it perceives as dangerous) to get before it runs away. Animals with shorter flight distances will linger, and feed, when humans are close by; this behavioral trait would have been passed on to successive generations, and amplified, creating animals that are increasingly more comfortable around humans. “My argument is that what domesticated — or tame — means is to be able to eat in the presence of human beings. That is the thing that wild wolves can’t do.”'
I've seen it Candy. It's excellent.
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