The two puppies rescued from under the rubbish pile are still here. I’m beginning to understand why, despite the cute pictures and the nice descriptions, nobody seems to want a puppy right now.

The real mystery, in fact, is how the dog has hung on as a human companion for thousands of years.

This morning, I looked up from the breakfast table to see that Bruce, who had been out minutes before, was peacefully beginning to poop on the carpet. I shot to my feet. “No!” I bellowed. “Outside!!!”

He gave me that peaceful serene look that puppies have at moments like those and didn’t move. I trotted to him, meaning to scoop him up and deposit him outdoors — gingerly, you understand.

Wanda, dear little sister Wanda, charged with me. However, she began on the right and ended on the left, managing to trip me twice in a single straight-line diagonal. She doesn’t really understand about accidental stepping-on, assumed I was trying to kill her (I was assuming something similar about her) and screeched. I did too. Bruce reached a logical conclusion: we were both out for his blood. He bolted.

However, he has been eating fur off the floor, which was hindering him in his original project. At this point, I had a puppy running terrified through the house with poop in progress and stuck. Unhappy with the situation, he too began to screech, which fascinated his sister, who began to chase him. Meanwhile, I went to the door caroling “Outside!” and eventually “Get out the ******* door!” This had all the effect one might expect — the adults shot outside while the puppies vanished in another lap around the laundry room circle.

I did eventually capture and release Bruce. We did sort out his fibrous issues. I did clean the early-stage poop off the floor. Minutes later, he and his sister were both busily engaged in reminding me why we keep these creatures. They really are cute, sweet little bugbears.

The AKC is implementing a new program to include mixed breeds in more of its events.  In October of this year, owners of mixed breeds will be able to enroll their pets for an ID number.  In April 2010, they can then “be eligible to compete in mixed breed classes at stand-alone AKC Agility, Obedience and Rally events.”  At present, the only universal AKC performance program is the Canine Good Citizenship, which may be earned by any dog of any ancestry.  Other programs and competitions are available for dogs with a limited registration (PAL/ILP) — puppies who were evaluated as nonbreedable or rescues who look sufficiently like a single breed to convince the evaluator of the photographs and can show veterinary proof of spay or neuter.

I have to admit that I’m disappointed to see that tracking, formerly classed as a Companion Animal event (a classification which seems to have vanished, in fact), is not on the list for the mixed breeds.  However, I suspect I understand why.  A tracking event is a large-scale production!  Each dog entered for a TD level track needs a 400-500 yard, 1/2 to 2 hour old track, with three to five changes of direction and no ditches, roads or woods, to run.  The TDX calls for 800-1000 yards, 3-5 hours, and five to seven changes of direction, and may include the ditches, roads, and woods along with two sets of cross tracks.  Doing a VST well seems to call for the cooperation of a small town, a college campus, or a large manufacturing center.  Quick, where could you host a tracking event?  How many dogs could you cram on there, and at what level?

In my state, there are six obedience events listed for the month of May and no tracking trials — this year.  If I include neighboring states in the search, the next TD test is Nov 1 and has a maximum entry of twelve dogs.  A different club is offering  the VST on the same day three states away.  The next event is Nov 15, in yet a third state, offering five TD runs and two TDX runs.  Each may well have a waiting list already.

Why so popular?  There used to be even fewer tracking events, but the AKC developed the VCD titles: versatile companion dog.  The titles call for work in obedience, agility (standard and jumps) and tracking.  Lots of dogs have the titles in the first two; naturally, their owners want that last one as well.  Demand has gone up; supply has gone up.  Supply appears not to be going up as fast as demand…  At any rate, adding mixed breeds to the demand would make the occupants of the current waiting lists screech.

Alternately, of course, more clubs could sponsor tracking events.  Even if they can only fit a few dogs in, it would help in the noble cause of working our dogs in “instinct outlets” — those things our dogs love doing and which are hardwired into their brains.  Not to mention that these clubs could make a lot of Border Collie owners very happy to finish their Versatile Companion titles!

* Photo is of rescued shepherd eligible for PAL/ILP and Rally-Ready!

While talking about training the puppies, I wrote yesterday that Wanda had become more comfortable in communicating with me.  This has indeed brought about what I had hoped: turnabout is fair play.

I broke out the cheese and started some lure-label-reward style training.  The Wanda of a few days ago would have lunged, screamed, and done everything she could do to try to fly to reach a treat over her head.  The Wanda of yesterday thought hard, furrowed her forehead, and sat.  On getting the treat, she rejoiced, then furrowed up her forehead again.  The next time I put the treat overhead, she sat straight off.  We had stands, sits, and downs, we had find-it/here.  We have a cooperative thinking puppy!

The first sign of this was actually a few days ago.  I had hoped, wrongly, that Bruce’s down was solid enough to take outdoors and put on a down-on-articles lesson.  Wanda was dinking around the yard on her own and came to see what we were doing, and decided to guess the point of the game and how she could get some cheese too.  She didn’t work out the down.  She did check the second-to-last article (plastic) and earn cheese for investigating it, and that made her check the last article (paper) in a curious sort of way.  That second piece of cheese set her thinking.  Then she boinged off to see if she could find any other non-grass items nearby and hit the flag beyond the end of the track.  She sniffed from bottom to top and top to bottom, put on her thoughtful expression, then bounced back to me to smack me with her paws and say yes, that was a thing like the other two.

She was right — it was a non-yard object which I had handled.  I rewarded her at the flag.  With a more solid down, this dog is a tracker.  The abstraction of similar-because is in there, and so is the desire to share the knowledge of the nose.

 Now if the AKC would only extend its companion-animals program for mixed breeds to include tracking…

Communication isn’t the same as command.  If you want a dog who snaps to it like a good cadet, you aren’t really looking for communication, as that’s a two-way street.  If you want a dog who lets you know someone’s been in your yard, or that it’s dinnertime (useful if you work at home, and if you enforce that not all times are mealtime), or where the search subject is, what you want is communication.

Observing the rescued mix-breed puppies as they get bigger, I notice that one is innately a better communicator than the other.  Bruce likes being told what to do.  He likes knowing what to expect, and he likes knowing what his people expect from him.  He now sits pretty reliably for the hand signal, and he mostly comes when called if he’s not just too terribly distracted. 

Wanda, on the other hand, likes to tell me things.  Yesterday, on discovering that there was food in the crate, she gave me her patented saucy look, then put her nose to the latch and stood there staring hopefully into the crate.  Message clear: “Would you mind opening this door, please?”  She wasn’t being rude; there was no yapping or fussing.  She simply let me know she’d appreciate a bite to eat.  I appreciated her politeness, so I rewarded it before she built to a noisier message.  Later, she tried the same message re: the garbage can in the kitchen cupboard.  This gave me room to say that she would not be getting any salmon bones no matter how hard she asked.  Now we have a division between the acceptable and the unacceptable, and with a fairly mild “Nuh-uh” now instead of a great screaming “NO!!!” fest at some later date.  She trusts that I will be reasonable about feeding her; I trust that she will listen to me at least a little.

Similarly, they don’t have the same approach to cooperative behavior.  Bruce likes grabbing toys and carrying them around.  In fact, he likes grabbing anything and carrying it around, and we’ve been working on such useful words as “Mine!” and “Trade.”  However, if he brings me some thing or other, it’s largely accidental, and it hasn’t yet occured to him that I might throw the thing so he can chase it.  If I call him, he can’t handle two thoughts at once: he either keeps carrying or he comes to me.  At this age, that’s no guarantee he’ll never retrieve.  He just doesn’t yet.

Wanda chased a fuzzy frisbeelike toy this morning, brought it back, soaked up the resulting praise and fuss with great pride, and performed a perfect fetch once more.  While she can handle the bring-it-back concept, she cannot handle a fetch with a jealous brother attached to her head; the game ended after two tosses.  This is a sign that I’ll have to start separating them to get them both to develop to full potential.

Ideally, of course, they’ll be separated into homes.  Someone else’s!  For now, though, it’s time to start training them and playing with them one at a time.

The air scent dog holds her head high, looking for the scent carried on the wind and not trapped in the ambient vegetation:

 (Notice she’s nowhere near a handler and is off leash, the common method for civilian air-scent work.)

The trailing dog’s nose will be lower, but not to the ground, scanning for scent trapped in crannies and pockets:

The tracking dog’s nose will be right to the ground, seeking where a foot has pressed scent particles in:

What’s the secret to teaching anyone anything?  Your dog, your kids, your pet python?  A brain is a brain, and the key is the same for all of them.

Motivation.

Think back to school (if you’re not still in it).  Which class did you do worst in?  Was it, perhaps, the one where you simply could not care and could not pay attention?  The one where you sat there thinking, “I will never need this, I will never use this, and the teacher’s not even nice”?  What were you missing?  Motivation.

Motivation can be negative.  Motivation can be avoiding the yank on the collar, the nagging, or the electic shock.  Motivation can be knowing what your parents are going to think of that grade.  Again, how did it work for you?  Did you grind through, or did you somehow magically promote the Ick subect to Favorite subject?

That’s what I thought.

Motivation can also, of course, be positive.  In the class where you were genuinely interested, where the subject seemed like what you wanted to do for the rest of your life, you paid attention.  You probably did pretty well, even if your natural talents maybe didn’t measure up to some of your classmates’.  In dog training, the parallel is toy and food training — get the dog to do what you want, and he gets what he wants.  If he has an innate love for the subject, or for pleasing you, so much the better, but even if he doesn’t he’ll be willing to make the bargain, just as many of us do to get our paychecks.

However, there is also such a thing as overmotivation.  I’d be willing to bet that a teenage boy who is rewarded for a lesson with sex, for instance, isn’t going to remember much of the lesson by the next day.  Some dogs are overmotivated by the simple tennis ball.  Sure, she wants the ball enough to hover three feet off the ground and scream, but is she thinking?  Sniffing?  Nope.  Training time goes up when motivation is too high.

So here’s the secret: find the motivator that your training subject likes enough to work for, but not so much he or she cannot think.  I’m working on this with Wanda The Puppy.  Scratches?  Nice, but nothing she can’t get by looking cute enough.  Cheese?  Chicken?  Hah — the sharks’ feeding frenzy has nothing on Wanda with a yummy before her nose.  Liver treats?  They’re nice and crunchy and slow her down a little, and since she likes them a little less than the people food but they’re a little more special than just petting, we have a fighting chance of communication here.  You have to know your student. 

A college professor teaching about opera once put down the chalk, waved his arms, and shouted “Sex and death!  It’s all about sex and death!  When you understand that, you understand everything!”  Suddenly he had a roomful of wide-awake college students wondering if they wanted to learn a little Italian.  Make it interesting!

The difference between tracking and trailing is twofold.  Part of the difference is in how soon the tracklayer’s scent stuck to the surface covered.  Most of the difference is in what the primary source of scent is.

A trailing dog works on stuck-down scent sources, skin rafts primarily, from the human (or other scent source) she is following.  She may go up the sides of trees or stones to check for skin rafts caught in bark.  She may work quite far from where the person actually walked, depending on the location of the trail.  Since nobody can avoid shedding skin rafts, this is a highly effective method for the dog in most situations.  However, there’s a big however.

For skin rafts to produce scent, they have to be either extremely fresh from the person or subject to decay from bacterial action.  This is where the “A dog can’t follow a trail more than an hour old” line comes from.  At an hour, the soil bacteria are still in lag phase, not yet responding to the new food supply of the skin rafts, and the skin bacteria have digested all their metabolisms can digest, becoming largely inert.  The trail scent isn’t altogether gone, but it’s at its lowest ebb and will stay low for quite some time.

The tracking dog has a different tool in the toolbox.  She’s trained to follow the line of crushed vegetation left by the person walking.  Now, this has limitations; the person she’s following may not stay on the grass, for a start.  On a newly-mown lot, she may have trouble telling the crushed from the cut.  In a heavily-trafficked area, she’s going to need some trailing skills in her tool set to sort out the exact crush pattern of her target.  However, the track scent of crushed vegetation is strongest in that one-to-four hour window where the bacteria needed for trailing are least active.  Some rafts will be stuck into the footprint for clearer identity of the tracklayer, but primarily what the dog is smelling is plant-based.

The dog who learns to trail first may hit a problem when she first discovers that window.  She stops, looks up, looks around, and says to her handler, “Sorry, but I think this person flew away.”  In warm weather, when the skin bacteria work fast and fade fast, this moment can be quite dramatic.  Dogs who are started on track scent first, on the other hand, tend to get overenthusiastic on their first trailing problems, apparently drunk on this overwhelming quantity of human scent.  Once they’re over the first hurrah, though, they become pretty steady workers, and when the trail scent becomes thin, their first impulse is to shove their noses deep in the grass to look for trapped scent there instead of casting about with their heads high.  Since skin rafts can blow an amazing distance (which is how air scent dogs are so effective for searching large areas) this is more likely to keep the dog near the trail’s actual line.

Working with Dustin on tracking, I’ve learned a great deal about the plants in my yard.  Crushed old pine needles tend to put him off track altogether.  Crushed grass, he says, is not at all the same as crushed flowering plant.  It’s an imperfect lawn, to understate wildly, and he’s learning a great deal about different scents under the same feet.  Going from shade to sun, he sometimes loses focus where the faint residual trail scent is baked away.  He’s also beginning to notice the difference in remaining trail scent when the grass is taller or shorter; skin rafts trapped in tall grass can keep smelling fresh for quite some time.  At those places, his tail goes higher and his focus improves.  The grass smells more like the articles there, and he hopes for more cheese soon.  In future, this communication from my dog will be handy on harder tracks, where I may have to help him solve the problem of just where exactly the elusive person might have gone.

Today at Sniffydog, we’re looking at positive training again.

I’ve started Dustin working in the harness, as he’s probably as big as he’s going to get. I start puppies in their collars, because collars are cheap and harnesses are not. Luckily, he’s smallish for a male and Sunny was largish for a female, so with minor adjustments he can wear hers. Today I put it on him for the third time.

He tried to jump into it as I sorted out the neck from the leg openings. In fact, he’s developing a lot of the funny little habits that I’d thought were unique to Sunny. He whoops with joy when I get out training equipment. He starts sniffing out the start of the track when he sees the flag, which will be great if we get to TDX level. He’s also taken to snuggling on the bed in the morning. Since they aren’t particularly related (not within 20 generations, most likely) I’ll have to put it down to environment. My dogs like to work with me.

A police-dog training friend once took on a Schutzhund reject: great bitework, decent obedience, lousy tracker. The dog worked well enough on a track as far as what the nose was doing, but everything behind the nose cringed, tail tucked right to the ribcage. This tends not to impress judges. It turned out the dog had been trained to track with a shock collar, zapped if his nose left the footprints. Since police dogs should follow suspects, and the suspect should be impressed with what he sees following him, this was a potential problem. However, once the dog learned that he was no longer wearing the collar, and that at the end of the track there was someone in a big padded suit for him to bite, he was a happy, jolly, eager tracker.

Since I started with more interest in search and rescue, naturally a bite at the end of the track isn’t something I’m looking for my dog to expect. So — cheese. Cheese at every piece of evidence along the way, and nowhere else, so my dog doesn’t turn into one of those who blasts past evidence and exhausts himself before he gets to the end. You want the evidence AND the end, and a rest point for both handler and dog does save the back and feet some pounding. If you want titles, the evidence IS the end, and you don’t get the titles if your dog misses the bitsies.

There is one side effect of the cheese, though. I dropped the cheese as I picked up the article, and Sunny took to tossing the article aside to see if the cheese might be hiding under there. She learned fast that it wasn’t, but did tend to lift the article in this “You saw this, right?” sort of way. Now, though Dustin knows full well where the cheese comes from and watches it through the whole trip from pocket to ground, he often presents the article with a nose-nudge or a lift too. We’ll have to work on that.  Though probably not, we might actually need a DNA sample off something he’s found someday, and I doubt dog spit is beloved of lab technicians.

What can you train a sniffer dog to find?

Well, does your target release any chemical footprint into the air at all?  Yes?  The dog can learn to find it.

I just ran across a wonderful article from the BBC, 2007, on two labradors trained to detect the chemicals used to make optical disks.  Trained by a Northern Ireland handler who usually trains explosive detectors, the dogs find all the disks — CD, DVD, legit, not — by smell for customs officers to sort out.  They were deployed to Malaysia, a hotbed of movie piracy, and are getting movie-star treatment themselves.

If you want to train a tracking dog who performs consistently and well, it isn’t enough to plonk him on a track and hope.  You need to have an idea what you have, what you need, and what steps (no pun intended unless you like puns) will take you from one to the other.

 With Dustin, I have a dog who has learned to down on the articles with a matching scent imprint.  Unlike Sunny at the same stage, he’s not lying down on anything and everything that looks like it might be an article, which I think is an interesting personal difference.  He’s just about figured out that there’s a line of footprints between those articles, with a little help from some snowy days and some muddy ones. 

What I want by the time I’m too pregnant to bend over, pick up articles, and drop cheese is a dog who can track up to a quarter mile without an article along the way.  That’s enough for the tracking certificate and TD.  What I want in the long haul is a tracking champion — TD, TDX, and VST.  If I try to jump straight to that, though, I’ll only frustrate myself and the dog.

Today we have a nice little track laid out.  It’s a straight line — by which I mean I sighted on the notch atop one of my shrubs and a flagpole behind it and walked a line where the flagpole stayed in the notch.  In SAR, I learned, “a straight line” could mean a great many things, very few of which you learned in geometry class.  This track has several articles on it, mostly leather and plastic, as leather and plastic are weak points of his.  Until the VST he won’t see plastic as a formal article, but I don’t like to set up expectations and then train the dog back out of them.  Too, if we do SAR sometime down the road, very few people walk along dropping leather rectangles, but lots of them drop plastic water or soda bottles.  If they have a strong brand loyalty, in fact, those dropped bottles can be significant clues for the search.

Today’s track also runs across the driveway, which is elderly asphalt, at a point which will be in the sun.  We don’t have hot weather yet, but this should give me a hint about whether my dog is asphalt sensitive or not.  Some dogs utterly lose their scenting ability around hot asphalt, some around any petroleum product.  Some don’t.  It’s a good thing to know of yours.  Sunny picked up scent on asphalt with no difficulties at all, but a bloodhound buddy of ours — normally a dog with an excellent nose — couldn’t work for half an hour if he snoodled some up.

If today’s track goes well, tomorrow’s will add distance between articles.  When twenty paces goes well, then we’ll add a turn or two again.  I hope that by the end of this month we’ll be working up to 50 paces or so with turns between articles.  I hope that by the end of next month we’ll be up to that quarter-mile with just a few articles — and hope that I can find somewhere to put it.  We may have to go variable-surface early, just to have somewhere to work!

I also hope to have a post of this nature available frequently over the next month or two.  It’ll mean I’m spending more time training and less time writing about it.

ETA:  Nailed it!  He worked on a harness for the first time, which seemed to make him feel official.  At the driveway, he put his head up, crossed on the shortest line, then cast along the edge until he found the track again, all by himself.  Smart boy!  Tomorrow we’ll try twenty steps.

Some trainers like to insist that what we know of human pedagogy has nothing to do with training dogs.  “Dogs aren’t people,” they say.  “You don’t do them any favors by thinking they’re like people.”

Imagine my amusement when I found Science News: Dogs Studied to Learn About Human Behavior.

Temple Grandin in Animals In Translation, at the end of Chapter 4, suggests that dogs helped shape human evolution by allowing our ancestors into the canine social structure.  Those who were more doglike and could cooperate with dogs had a hunting advantage.

 No, dogs aren’t humans.  The question is, are we dogs?

(Hat-tip to http://doglinksworldnews.blogspot.com for providing the inspirational link)

I just ran across an interesting article on a Korean scientist cloning a successful drug-sniffing dog to make more like him.  Apparently the clones all passed the initial tests, while normally there is a 15% pass rate.  This raises lots of questions, such as what the training methods are and where they’re getting the dogs they start with.  It also seems very discouraging to those of us who get one dog at a time and keep it for years — “What if mine can’t do what I want him to do?”

One initial-training method for puppies can be found at Working Dogs Cyberzine.  This apparently improves the odds of having the puppies grow into deployable scenting dogs — as does the selection process to sort the pups by likely success in particular forms of scentwork.  The writer doesn’t give percentages, but it may be that only around 15% of her puppies go into narcotics detection specifically.  Too, her pups are not cloned, but are still products of selective breeding for the traits desired.

I didn’t find anything about how the Korean dogs are trained, but could the method make a difference in the success rate?  Cheap as they claim the cloning is relative to their current plan, adjusting the protocol in light of behavioral studies is usually cheaper than biochemical laboratories.  Behavioral studies indicate that a play-driven brain tends to lose information more than a calmer brain — for instance, that children retain less of the information they get right before recess.  They also indicate that a dog retains best what he learns through scent and taste.

I’ve encountered several ways to train a drug-sniffing dog, or detection dogs in general.  The first is to pair the scent with a tennis ball reward or other thrown fetchable.  The dog is taught that scratching at the source of scent will earn him a tennis ball; therefore, he is required to have a strong drive for the ball.  This can be enhanced with how the puppy has been raised, as in the Working Dogs article, but not every dog cares for tennis balls.  The problem is, most dogs who evaluate well in early training are VERY keyed up about the prospect of the ball.  A riled-up dog is a panting dog, and a panting dog’s air supply is largely bypassing his nose.  Too, some of them will become frustrated and alert on a place that contains no drugs, and if the handler ever rewards this behavior without checking first, the lesson is entrenched: lying gets the ball.

The second way trains the dog to scratch at a particular scent to get a particular toy, one that is interactive with the handler instead of bouncing away, and proofs against a collection of tennis balls in early training.  This appears to give a steadier worker, and also gets the message across — no drugs, no tug.  It still requires a dog with a high play/prey drive, but develops a better association between showing the handler the source and getting the reward.  It’s also the common method for disaster-search dogs, as bouncy things are not safe on rubble piles.

Some bomb dogs are trained with a clicker-based system.  This seems a sensible choice — the dog still has to be highly motivated and reliable, but you really really don’t want a scratch alert on the object!  You want a sit and stare or something equally quiet.  This also transfers the drive to food/praise instead of play/prey, which makes a calmer worker, who in turn is less likely to overheat and pant.  It seems a sensible course for a drug dog as well, but I haven’t come across it myself.

What I have encountered, thanks to the oft-mentioned Mary Adelman, is detection training with food (no clicker involved).  Pairing the scent with a command, then a treat, turns the detection into another obedience activity.  If a hand signal means sit, and the word “sit” means sit, and the handler coming to a halt with no other command means sit, then why not make the smell of marijuana also mean sit?  The treat can be phased out by random reinforcement to make the behavior reliable — random reinforcement, in fact, produces the most reliable results of any reward pattern.  She’s used this method to train police dogs with good records.

I’ve used the same system to train cadaver dogs.  Sunny went from utter disinterest in human-remains detection to reliably alerting with a bark-to-handler, down-on-article alert.  This was an alert of her own devising, by the way.  She returned to me and barked to indicate a human find; she downed on articles.  Cadaver was a personarticle to her.  To test the method I also trained Tasha (innately interested in cadaver) and McCoy (worried by the scent and somewhat hard to train).  Both went to being able to work 20′x20′ areas in the yard with crossbreezes and distraction scents in about fifteen short training sessions, and dear McCoy even tried to alert on an article I’d hidden outside the area especially for nimble Sunny.  I could see the old fellow trying to figure out how to do a sit alert under dense low shrubbery, and after he’d made it quite clear what he was after, I rewarded him.  None of them falsely indicated on anything, including crickets, cat tracks, and each other’s scent all over the area.  Neither of the pet testing dogs was bred specially for detection work or would have passed an evaluation test — for one thing, they would have been considered too old to be any good in any sort of reasonable time frame.  A toy-based method for cadaver tends to need to teach the dog NOT to fetch the cadaver, and that was a step we bypassed utterly. 

That three-dog test is a small sample for any statistical means, but suggests that if you want your dog to find the remote, or dead mice, or your daughter’s secret stash (in that last case I suggest you never tell your daughter how you do it, as Magic Mom is better than Sibling Rivalry), that would be a good choice of training method.  When Nature is not on your side, food can be, and a bit of cheese can sometimes counterbalance quite a lot of genetics.

Wilma galloped back to me, danced, wiggled, sat, climbed, and generally tried to figure out what would cause cheese since I hadn’t had a crumb handy for her immediately.  I think this clicker training thing just might work on her.  I started clicking when she sat and telling her that’s what she was doing.

Of course, the other definition of “clicker training” is “getting the human in the habit of keeping the clicker in a place it can always be found.”  This may be a situation where the puppy learns faster than the human.

The Portuguese Water Dog has enjoyed a good deal of press lately since the Obamas have announced plans to bring one to the White House.  Lucky dogs!  Hopefully…

 I met a couple of these when doing AKC Agility with Sunny.  They were solid performers and very active — their person said she had to do lots of training with them to keep them manageable and happy.  Sunny being Sunny, I could relate.  A clever, high-energy dog can be great company if you, too, are clever and high-energy, but if the dog is running circles around you literally or otherwise, you will not have a happy household.  A bored dog is a redecorating dog, a barking dog, a hyperactive dog, a nuisance!

The Portuguese Water Dog Club of America, PWDCA, has lots of breed information — and a nice little writeup of how to interpret it.  Their approach seems to be that if they cannot talk you out of owning a PWD, then perhaps you’re really the right person for one.  The site includes pictures of PWDs tracking, doing water trials specially designed for the breed, and busy with other activities.  If you want to see these dogs in action, you can find local events at the searchable AKC listings, UKC listings or the website of the main registries for your country.

Whether these suit the needs of the President, I’m not so certain about.  The PWD is a nice dog and highly trainable, but enthusiastic.  They’re less likely to shed on a visiting dignitary than many, and no more likely than any other dog to throw up into a prime minister’s lap, but they are enthusiastic greeters and high-energy house dogs. 

However, the pound pooch that so many people endorsed would have been a gigantic gamble.  Many of them (and this is personal experience speaking) come out with issues both medical and psychological.  The leader of the free world and his family may not have the extra time demanded for all-too-common heartworm treatments; the girls may not want to keep the dog quiet for the next couple of months once they finally have him.  Another common disease in pound adoptions, especially in puppies, is distemper, which is often fatal and in survivors frequently leaves a parting gift of seizures.  A pound pooch does not come from a known ancestry, so both his long-term temperment and hypoallergenic tendencies may be in doubt.  The sniff test is a start, but only counts if the dog hasn’t just had a bath — a good scrubbing renders any pooch temporarily dander-free.

I’m not sure when getting a dog came to be a public decision instead of a private choice for anyone.  If you told a friend you were trying to get pregnant, and the friend answered, “Why, when there are so many desperate war orphans in the world?” you might feel both distressed and put-upon.  Yes, there are orphans, but many of them have severe physical and emotional problems that you, personally, don’t feel able to handle.  You might be sufficiently unable that attempting to do so is a disservice to the adopted child, and to the rest of your household.  You might only barely feel up to taking the chance of getting an Uncle Harry, Jr., never mind the great unknown of an adopted child from another country.  Why should you feel bad for knowing your limits?  Many pound pooches are shell-shocked, mistrained, undersocialized, or otherwise in need of a great deal of extra help that not everyone is qualified to give, and noble intentions often lead to second surrenders.  That’s not a good setup for the White House Dog either, and if the Obamas don’t feel up to taking a chance on an adoption, that’s their business.  How they run the country outside their house is our business.

On the flip side, if the PWD is the ideal dog for the First Family, I hope the rest of the country doesn’t suddenly decide it’s the perfect dog for everyone who wishes they’d been born an Obama.  Breeds suffer when they become popular and puppies start being cranked out by people who have never heard of health testing, or who have but want no truck with it, or who don’t believe genetics is a real science.  When breeds suffer, individual puppies suffer — hip problems, bleeding diseases, or just plain bad owners.  Myself, I hope that my Dustin becomes the proud father of sons and daughters one day, but hope will not be sufficient.  He also has to come up clear with the OFA H&E, the CERF, the Degenerative Myelopathy DNA test, possibly the BAER (not likely to be a problem, but nothing makes a cleaner health record than not looking for problems), the cardiac test which has no collection of letters, and any other alphabet soup that comes along. 

If you want a purebred puppy yourself, research the breed and know what parts of the alphabet should show up alongside the parents’ names.  If you can find the parents in the OFA database, wonderful.  If you can’t, find out why not.  This is a little like going to Consumer Reports before you buy a car, and you’re looking for something likely to be with you longer than the vehicle.  You’re hoping it will be with you longer than that. 

To bring us back around to the PWD, their breed club addresses nine aspects of health.  If you choose to add a PWD to your home, these are the main concerns to research before deciding on a rescue or on a puppy or adult from a breeder.  Adults do have the large advantage of having probably presented early symptoms of anything they’re going to have and the large drawback of having been integrated into a family not yours for some part of their lives.  You have to ask yourself — and anyone else who might know — why that adult dog is available.  Puppies are, well, puppies, and worth at least fifteen posts all of their own.

 I have posted before about puppies Bruce and Wilma.  They’ve come a long way from the foundlings under the rack of fence rolls.  Bruce is learning to sit and down for hand signals and treats, is coming when called, and acts as though he’d be a wonderful search dog or gregarious family pet.  Wilma is a little trickier.  She’s an utter charmer and quite clever, and she has several mannerisms that would make lovely tricks.  For instance, she likes to pop into the air facing east and land facing west.  However, she can do this faster than I can say Good (possibly I have been living in the South too long?) and forgets the universe if I offer her a treat.  It might, in her case, be best to pair treat to click, then reward with clicks.  Clicks are fast and flavorless.  Once she’s onto a clicker, she just might make it onto Pet Star someday.  Or just be someone’s absolutely adorable little Chunkybutt.

I shall try this and report back.