Letters from readers:
Labrador siblings fighting
Hello,
We have just gotten two Labrador puppies. We collected them in the same week with a few days between. They are litter mates and sisters. My niece put them together in one crate and they started fighting. The one we picked up first was the aggressor. We also have a two-year-old German shepherd who thinks of the first little girl as a playmate. He has not yet been introduced to the second female. Will this cause a problem and will the two of them gang up on the other one? Also, will they attack the cats? Separately they seem to leave each other alone.
Please help us in our concerns. We appreciate any help you could give us. Thank you and await your response. - Victor and Terrie
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These dogs enjoy a game of ball and are encouraged because they are not pets but are hunting dogs. A pet dog should never be encouraged to develop chase and bite skills that may cause problems for it later, but should instead be given scenting and intelligence developing games.
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Hello Victor and Terrie,
I see you already have an adult dog in your home (the German Shepherd), so you are already dog owners with some knowledge and experience. Can you tell me what food the puppies and adult are eating, what they are drinking, what age were they when collected from the breeder, how much exercise are they having, where they are sleeping and what their daily routine is please? All these questions will be help to me in giving you the correct advice for your dogs.
Whether or not your dogs gang up and chase the cat, depends on how you introduce them and if they are given opportunity for good association with each other. When indroducing the dogs make it a nice experience for all. Start at a distance with all dogs on long leashes in a field or somewhere they can have plenty of space between each other. Walk up and down the field, parallel to one another. Do this a few times gradually getting closer. If the dogs show any aggression as you get closer, give more distance and stop. If and when they gradually come together make sure all leashes are slack and not tight. Tight leashes lead to agression problems. My book comeing out soon explains how to do this in more detail (Living in harmony with your puppy).
Never place the two puppies in one crate together. This is very threatening and they do not cope with being so close. Imagine if someone placed you in a strange home, with strange people, taken from all you know and placed you in a crate with another person (even a sibling), so that you had nothing to do, nowhere to move away and no escape route. You would probably feel very uncomfortable and quite stressed. Your pup probably felt the same way, a scary situation for a young dog to be placed in. Try to use seperate crates - your puppies need space, they need time to adjust, time to learn to trust you, time to get over their fear periods (which happen around 7 weeks, four months and 6 months), and time to get used to their new environment.
Keep both the pups and the Shepherd apart for much of the day. They need up to 20 hours sleep daily and they will not get that if they are playing with each other all day. If your Shepherd goes between the pups and stops them playing, this is good, allow him to do so. But you must help him out by splitting up all play too. Splitting up is good mature adult dog behaviour. However if he does not do this, then you will have to do all the splitting up yourselves.
Puppies should never be left alone to play, this only teaches them to chase, to bite, to be aggressive, to be rude with other dogs they meet, to be bullies, to be bullied and to be posessive of toys and other things. If you allow this play behaviour, you will see your dogs chase your cats, lunge and pull towards other dogs, jump up on people, take food or toys from children and other dogs and many other behaviour problems. These problems can also develop from dogs that chase balls and other games of high activity.
Dogs in the wild do not play. Once puppies are about four months of age, play behaviour is unacceptable by the pack and the adults will stop all play. Yet when they live in a human pack the play is encouranged right into adulthood, which encourages all sorts of problems. Instead of playing games of high activity, have your dogs do nosework or brainwork. These are games that encourage intellience, confidence and independence through the use of their senses.
Hide treats around your home and garden each day for them to find. The first few times, allow the dogs to see you hide the treats, then say find and allow them to go searching. They will soon learn the word find and love the game. You can do treat trees - this is when you spread about a teaspoon of something your dogs like on trees, posts or logs outdoors, on a walk etc. We use peanut butter or cream cheese.
Give them all one of their daily meals in a kong. A kong is a big rubber toy in which you can place food. The dog will take time to eat the meal and will be quite tired afterwards, thus encouraging sleep or rest. Your dogs will need the large black king kongs available at your pet store or online. We stuff them with mashed foods such as mashed potatoes, fish, rice, leftovers etc. The kong can also be given frozen if your pups are teething and that will have a soothing effect on the gums. Treatballs are also good, they slowly dispense the dry biscuits as the dog pushes the toy around with its nose, but if you see this winds-up the dogs, take it away. We do not want to use games that wind them up.
Keep all exercise limited. Many people over-exercise rather than under-exercise. Under four months, your puppies will not need exercise. From about four months of age they will need about five mins walk daily for each month. So four months they get five mins walk, at five months they get ten mins walk, at six months they get 15 mins walk adding five minutes per month up until they are walking about 40min daily. From there keep the walk to around 40 mins daily for the rest of their lives. If there are days they do not feel like a walk, do not force it - sometimes we have days like that too.
I hope this helps. If you would like any more help, you are welcome to reply with the answers to my questions and I can then go into more detail. There are also some articles on my website that you may wish to read: www.shalvaholistics.com - Nicole
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