Dog Behavior | Ruffly Speaking: Railing against idiocy since 2004

Thanks for the comment asking for a discussion on puppy mills–this is maybe a little different than you’d imagined, but I think it’s a very important thing to address.

First, give me a minute to talk about why, in my opinion, this kind of thing even exists. It’s a story that’s riddled with irony, from a show breeder’s point of view.

For most of recorded history, people owned dogs because they needed them. They owned and used whatever dogs did the job the humans could not do themselves. If you didn’t need a dog, you didn’t own one–resources were too scarce to waste on a dog for pleasure.

With the rise of an upper class, and we see this first in Asia, where the very first dogs-only-for-pleasure (Pekingese, Tibetan Spaniel, etc.) are developed, the ownership of purebred dogs (and this means, at that time, very well-bred dogs) becomes something to be desired. So a very small group of people owns true purebreds, a whole bunch own dogs that are a very good and developed “type” but are often bred to other unrelated dogs in order to refine the desired behavior–e.g., if it herds sheep it’s a herder, so even though it doesn’t look like my herding dog I’m going to breed to it–and most people do not own a dog at all.

This continues for probably a thousand years. When the AKC and the KC are founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century, that’s still how it was. Purebreds were the pleasurable hobby of the wealthy, working dogs (meaning guards, herders, hunters, hounds, terriers) were closer to established in purebred lines but were still rather fluid and still entirely governed by their ability to do their jobs correctly, and if you owned a dog purely as a pet you were either buying from one of those two groups or you owned a random-bred dog.

Flash forward to the modern age. Now there is a HUGE middle class that has a lot of disposable income and would like to own a dog purely for the pleasure of its companionship. So most of the dogs in the nation are purely pets. There’s also been the realization that this huge class of jobless dogs are very succeptible to losing their homes, so there’s been a rise in shelters and rescues and a lot of pressure to spay or neuter dogs. This, plus the fact that show dogs are now owned substantially by the middle class and not by the out-of-sight rich, has led to the GOOD idea that you should think about what kind of dog to buy, and should be buying a purebred.

Tragically, we have NOT managed to also give the general public the idea that you have to buy a purebred only from a reputable breeder, and we have done a crappy job defining what a desirable breeder is.

So now we have a VAST market (each year, millions and millions of homes look for a dog) that demands purebred dogs, with very little criteria beyond the purebred label. It is only natural that a vast production machine has risen to meet that need.

That production machine is the puppy mill.

Very kind, well-meaning attempts to help homeless and suffering dogs have done an excellent job on focusing national attention on the existence of puppy mills in the United States. However, and I think unfortunately, the result of this spotlight have been to create in the mind of the public a thing called a “puppy mill” that represents really horrible conditions and welfare, with dogs kept in chicken coops and living in their own filth.

This mental picture, which is fostered by the (again, very well meaning) televised seizures of dogs on the Animal Cop-type shows, has led to a few really tragic consequences.

1) Horrific puppy mills do exist, but they are VERY RARE. There are almost 5,000 USDA-registered commercial breeders (those who produce puppies for money) in the US, and probably an equal number that are not USDA-registered. But we hear of only a handful of large-scale seizures of abused dogs each year.

2) People are now educated enough to realize that they should not buy from a puppy mill. But since puppy mill = filth and abuse, when they walk into a clean commercial facility or the offices of a broker or buncher (more below on those two jobs), they do not identify that as a puppy mill. In fact, they may even congratulate themselves on having made a very good choice.

3) USDA-registered and -inspected breeders are allowed to exempt themselves from the puppy mill definition. They can even join the “fight”! They contrast the horrors of the chicken-coop dead-dogs-in-every-corner puppy mill to their own clean, hygenic, and humane facility, and even more people buy dogs from them.

That’s why we MUST redefine what a puppy mill is, and we MUST educate better about why you should not buy from a puppy mill.

A puppy mill is any facility where dogs are bred mainly for the purposes of profit.

Puppy mills are NOT:

- Large. A puppy mill can be somebody with two breeding bitches and a stud dog, all the way up to the facilities that exist in Arkansas and Pennsylvania where over a thousand dogs are kept in (high-tech, clean, humane) surroundings.

- Dirty. Small ones look like everyone else’s suburban home. Large ones can be pristine. One giant one that I know about in Arkansas is made from a converted pig-breeding facility; the dogs are housed in what were the pig enclosures. The whole thing is on cement, with zero waste visible; there is a very large staff that is dedicated entirely to instantly removing poop or hosing off pee. There are no flies or smell; the dogs are fed and watered, the record-keeping is precise, and they’ve passed every inspection given them both by the USDA and the AKC (somewhat to the chagrin of the AKC inspector who told this story; he didn’t like it, but every possible piece of evidence of care and proper breeding the AKC asked for was immediately given).

- Secretive. They’re not hidden in some back field; they’re not icky farm-like facilities. I have seen the facilities of several puppy mills around here and they are typically quite lovely, well-advertised, almost tourist attractions. One is in a lovely gambrel-roof barn with “puppy showrooms” that demonstrate a budget I certainly don’t have. Another is set up almost like a little park, with a pretty building that works as the reception area and a series of big pens for the dogs to run in. Again, blows my little “kennel” and my fenced yard away.

So if they’re not dirty, not large, don’t abuse the dogs, why shouldn’t we buy from one of these clean and pretty puppy mills?

The reason comes down to exactly what separates them from reputable breeders: the money.

We know, in this country, how to produce goods and services at maximum profit. We do it very, very well. Breeding dogs for profit follows the EXACT same process. Here’s how you do it:

1) Figure out your market and meet it. In dogs, this means small dogs, fluffy dogs, short-nosed breeds, shock-value dogs (biggest, hairiest, weirdest markings, ugliest, newest or most in fashion), and they tend to be household-name dogs. So you don’t breed Saluki (too large, but also not large enough, not enough hair, kinda odd looking). You DO breed a heck of a lot of Shih Tzu, Poodles, Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, English Bulldogs, Pugs, etc. People want those, and so you breed to the market. You do NOT tell people that they shouldn’t own a particular breed or own a dog at all–heavens no. Does the fridge salesmen tell you that this one doesn’t fit in your kitchen, or that the other (cheaper) model does a better job chilling lettuce? Your job is to provide what the market demands.

2) Minimize raw materials costs. You should use the cheapest dog that will fulfill your needs. Many don’t use AKC-registered dogs for this reason (though of course AKC registration is no guarantee of quality, never has been never will be). So if a no-brand long-haired grey dog can be an APRA-registered Lhasa in the time it takes to fill out the paperwork (which is true), then it’s foolish to spend more money on an AKC-registered one. And if your puppy buyers are fine with any purebred, and will pay an identical amount for a cheaply produced one as they’d pay for an expensively produced one, then it is pure stupidity (from the point of view of profit) to start off with a group of $ 1500 dogs instead of a group of $ 300 dogs.

3) Minimize overhead. Some expenses are necessary to bring in customers. A nice facility, pretty plexiglass “showrooms,” well-designed website, “vet checks,” and dog shampoo more than pay for themselves. What DOESN’T pay (doesn’t increase market or raise price) is health testing, showing, rejecting dogs that are unsound or unhealthy, or carefully selecting the right match for each dog. None of those make any difference in purchase price and they cost a heck of a lot of money, so much money that if you do them you end up spending money instead of making it.

4) Get product out the door. You have to hold puppies until 8 weeks in most states, and every day after that costs you money. If you can get every puppy out the door in your own facility, great. If not, find a broker ASAP and sell him the entire litter; he’ll either bring it to his own facility or sell the puppies one more step up the line to the giant broker/transporters like Hunte Corporation. Hunte supplies most of the pet stores. However you do it, you’ve got a very small window. People want to buy a small, cute purebred puppy. So you discount at 12 weeks and you discount further at 16 weeks and you drop the puppies off at some small pet store yourself if they aren’t gone pretty soon thereafter. And, because that’s a sign that you don’t know your market, you go back to step 1 to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

So that’s why you don’t buy from these breeders. Each of these steps takes you further away from what you wanted and thought you were getting, namely a dog who would look and act and live like a purebred whatever is supposed to look and act and live, and it takes you further from the kind of person whose efforts you want to support. You are, in effect, buying a counterfeit purebred. It has the right label and paperwork and markings, but there’s very little chance that it will perform in any way close to the way a well-bred purebred will. And, ironically, you’ve paid the exact same price for it.

Buzzwords to look out for if you think you may be looking at a puppy mill:

- “professional breeder” (good breeders call themselves hobby breeders or show breeders, not professionals)

- “registered breeder” or “inspected breeder” (these usually mean USDA, which means commercial breeder)

- puppies to order; lots of breeds available

- any evidence that the “breeder” location is actually getting puppies from other breeders or facilities

- discounts as the puppies age, or any kind of salesmanship (“I have someone else looking at her, so if you want her I need a check today”)

Now, a special word on designer dogs. Designer dogs are a post-modern purebred. The idea is that we’re so cool and individualistic that even our dogs have to be something that’s never been made before. And mutts aren’t unique. But if we breed something that nobody else has ever seen, and we give it a breed name (remember from above, we know we’re supposed to own purebreds), that’s somehow even better than an actual purebred.

And WOW do puppy mills love this. It allows them to use the absolute cheapest raw materials (there’s pretty much nothing cheaper than a purebred-no-papers beagle or Lab, and a similar pug or poodle is almost as cheap) and then charge fifteen times as much for the offspring. Even those who go so far as to use AKC-registered parents (those are the ones that call themselves elite designer dog breeders) will at least triple the investment when they sell the offspring. It’s like a money machine.

So if you’ve made it to the end of this substantial missive, please take home this one huge message: GOOD BREEDERS DO NOT DO IT FOR MONEY. THEY DO NOT MAKE MONEY. THEY LOSE MONEY. IF SOMEONE ISN’T LOSING MONEY, THEY’RE CUTTING CORNERS. Enough caps lock for you? You should always have the courage to ask any breeder you’re considering if they make any money on this. You should hear incredulous laughter and a tale of exactly how many tens of thousands they’ve lost. If they say yeah, sure, we try to keep our accountant happy, RUN.

Seriously, people, STOP THE MADNESS.

I was having a lovely conversation with a mastiff owner in our local pet supply outlet and was, as I always am, as I was when we had Danes, completely shocked by the people who came over and just spontaneously hugged this dog.

Dudes. No.

Hugging is NOT love, it is NOT affection, it is NOT appropriate for any dog of any size or any temperament. Hugging is a very, very, powerful dominance move on the part of another dog and it is nothing but the miracle of this lovely dog’s perfect temperament that he did not bite five people today. He had every right to.

If you want to hug your own dog, be my guest. But be aware that the dog is not getting out of it what you may think he or she is. But NEVER NEVER do it to another person’s dog. Unless, of course, you have an undying desire to get your face bitten.

Teach it to kids too–no hugging PERIOD.

Did I use enough caps here? I am toad sere, as we used to say in high school. Now go forth, and do not be idiots.

I wrote this on a dog book discussion list I am on; it’s entirely my own wording, so I am reproducing it here as well. The discussion is on one of the several (very good) books out there that are pictorial references for dog behavior; my criticism or at least worry about one of them in particular is that conclusions about the best way to train or the best way to handle dogs have been drawn from the pictures and descriptions; it has moved from a narrative to a prescriptive book. And I am not so sure that’s a good idea, and here’s a VERY long description of why. I would welcome any feedback–I don’t care if you’re reading this six years from now; if you know where I can find my studies let me know.

Transcript begins:

I’ve been following the discussion (and reading the book) with great interest, and as I’ve been reading for the past couple of weeks I’ve been uncomfortable with a sort of “big-picture” problem.

I come from a biology background, then went to grad school in history, helped teach a college communications theory class, and for all those years had “never assume, always support” drummed into me (and drummed it into others). Never use language without a supporting study, never use second-person analysis (always go to first person), insist on statistics rather than assumptions, remove every veil that could possibly be clouding the results. Never make a fact statement without a footnote, and, of course, distrust analysis that has any kind of bias.

So when I look at what we have as dog behavior language and analysis, Handelman’s excellent book, Aloff’s excellent book, Rugaas, etc., I am struck by the fact that we may be making rather sweeping statements based on anecdotes and a very skewed perception.

Let me give you some examples:

Dogs are “meant,” if you can even say such a thing, to live in big fluid blobby packs, with overlap and bitch-stealing and all that, of INTACT animals, over five or more years. But I’ve never seen conclusions coming from long-term studies of large, stable, INTACT (reproductively, meaning no spayed/neutered members and puppies being actively produced) packs under very little physical limitations (on other words, no fences) who have members who all grew up together. We instead almost exclusively draw from small, unstable, castrated packs who are together in short bursts (for example, playgroups, visiting dogs, obedience classes, fights) and who have humans messing with them (putting up fences, putting on leashes, etc.). We’ve also removed the Grand Activity of all packs, which is hunting and territory building, so we’ve effectively removed a huge portion of their vocabulary.

It would be like, if I can make a very clumsy human analogy, throwing twelve eunuchs who don’t speak the same language into an airport lounge with a bunch of deli trays and then trying to make statements about human behavior because we study them for half a day. We’d see in those humans, just as we see in dogs, a huge emphasis on greeting behaviors, conflict avoidance, abortive attempts at communication, misunderstandings, focus on food, stress, and fights. So we could probably get pretty accurate about those behaviors, we would not see what we’d consider mature relationships for months, if ever, because the element of sexuality and education and child-raising would be gone. We wouldn’t see the pursuit of work, development of skill sets, acquisition of property, etc.

Or, drawing from another species, we now know that elephants raised outside the herd are substantially delayed in communication, sometimes irreparably, that they initiate many more conflicts, that they are prone to violence and self-stimulating behaviors.

So I worry, a lot, that instead of seeing years of dog communication, we’re seeing the same first two hours over and over and over again. We don’t see the end of the “conversation.” I know that as my own pack of dogs (all intact) has matured, I have seen an almost total reduction in “broad” movements of greeting or conflict. The group of them has a shorthand of infinitely tiny gestures, eye flicks, head movements, ear posture. The only time they ever move back to the broader movements is when they are either teaching a new puppy or socializing a new adult or, of course, when they play (where they seem to enjoy playing larger-than-life parodies of fight or flight or blocking, etc.).

My big Dane male was particularly adept at this–when he met a new dog he would offer a play behavior (like a bow) and if the other dog didn’t “get it” Mitch would repeat the behavior over and over, going bigger and slower each time; his invitations were like a master oil painter playing pictionary. But in the established group the play bow is “sketched” and only a millisecond in duration. And mine have only been together a few years! I don’t yet have a good stable group from elderlies down to babies.

So that’s my first qualm, that we’re only looking at castrated animals who have major speech impediments (because so few are raised by a big stable pack, so few are exercised properly, so many have humans wrecking normal interactive behaviors, etc.) and who are basically stuck in a loop of broad greeting/new member activities.

My second worry is about language, specifically language without studies. I think we DO have some solid data on how dogs learn command words. I’m satisfied that we’re labeling the simpler broad gestures pretty accurately. But we do NOT have good unbiased data on so much else! This is especially true for the complex chains of behavior. For example, we throw around “bitch wars” a lot. But where’s the group of good studies that actually established that phrase? Do we really know that in a stable, unspayed, multi-age, long-term pack, where humans are not screwing things up, bitches have more long-term resentments, initiate more fights, and will inflict greater harm? PERCEPTION can’t be king (or, in this case, queen).

Or, my least favorite term of all, “fear aggression.” It’s an oxymoron, when you consider the connotation of the word “aggression” in English, and we know almost nothing about it, except that if we push a dog to the point that it fears for its life or health, it will bite us. Why do we call it “fear aggression” instead of “being afraid”?

I can’t tell you how many people have told me in tones of great portent that X dog is (dum dum dum!) “FEAR AGGRESSIVE.” And I go and sit with them, and we approach the dog, and I say “Look how scared your dog is of you.” And they literally don’t connect the two. “Fear aggression” lets them blame the dog; the dog is somehow mentally ill and AGGRESSIVE. But in fact the dog is just terrified, and is behaving the way every dog would behave if terrified. So every single dog on earth is “fear aggressive.” Every single dog is “competitive aggressive.” The only thing that separates them is whether or not they’ve ever felt pushed to the point that they resort to using teeth. The fact that we’re such idiot dog handlers that this is a common phenomenon is nothing but a tragedy, but again, it’s a phrase that gets used fifty times a day by everyone from your vet to your trainer to your neighbor who watched one episode of It’s Me or the Dog.

If, in this country, if there were ten million women who were so terrified of their husbands that each one cowered and tried to hit him if he approached her, no human psychologist would be allowed to say,”Oh, they’re just fear aggressive” and close his notebook. The cowering would be seen as the result of half a hundred things going critically wrong. I would argue that the same is true of dogs, but we have very little handle on the half a hundred things and, as far as I am aware, little reliance on, again, long-term stable intact pack studies on what makes dogs afraid enough to use teeth and why, and at what frequency, and what intensity. I strongly suspect that as you reach years in the same pack, “fear aggression” that actually leads to physical contact is vanishingly rare. So we OUGHT to consider it a sign of huge trust violation and treat it with a lot of importance. But again, since we don’t have those studies and we aren’t able to make those conclusions, millions of dogs get a label pinned to them.

OK, I think I’m done. Does this make sense? Am I just wrong and there really are multiple long-term studies of dog packs? It seems like we should have ethnobiologists studying the New Guinea hunting packs or the Carolina dogs or the dingos, or at the very least (and still not ideally) the big packs of foxhounds that live together for ten or more years, and then we can judge our playgroups or our obedience classes against THEM.

I am often witness to people talking about how wonderful their dogs are with children. This often takes the form of “he lets them crawl all over them, and just loves it.” Far too often, this is followed in six months or a year by the tale of the child being “snapped at” (almost always with zero injury to the child) and the dog is on the chopping block. That’s why it’s so incredibly critical to understand what “good with kids” actually means.

In a healthy dog pack, very young puppies are given what is called “puppy license.” They’re allowed to be rude and silly and do things that are never permitted in the older puppies. Your dog isn’t “loving” what your kids are doing, if they’re climbing all over him–they’re behaving in a very rude way. He’s allowing them to behave like under-age puppies.

The catch here is that the puppy license is always, inevitably, revoked. At some point, as young as two months and pretty much always before four months (in my watching a lot of puppies grow up–this depends very much on the adult, with the dominant adults tolerating crap a lot longer than the middle-rankers), the adults stop smiling indulgently as the puppy bites their ears and they start whipping around and whacking the puppy to the ground with their teeth. The middle-rankers see it as their duty to give the puppy absolute heck until the puppy learns immediate appeasement signals and will drop and roll as soon as an adult enters his or her frame of vision.

Right now in my pack we have two adults, an adolescent, and a baby puppy. Clue, as ranking adult, lets the puppy do all kinds of crazy things to her and in fact “dumbs down” her own play to interact with him. She very gently rolls him and bumps him and then reverses, rolling on her own back to let him pretend to dominate her, and she’s got a relaxed open mouth and smile the whole time. Ginny, second-in-command outside and an agitator for ranking adult inside (most of her time inside is spent trying to dominate Clue) has virtually no play interactions with the puppy. She watches him and leaps to punish him if he makes so much as a feint in her direction. She never puts a mark on him, of course, but she does the doggy equivalent of hand-slapping every time he acts like a big dog (for example, if she sees him walk by with head/tail up). Bronte, who is an adolescent/lower-ranking/the scout and alarm dog, basically ignores the puppy. Her job is patrol and the only ones she plays with are Clue and Sparky (an adolescent visitor, my sister’s dog, who comes over a few times a week; Bronte and Sparky are similar in rank and in role, so they play together well).

So, in my group, Clue still grants puppy license. Ginny has revoked it.

If this were applied to kids, Clue would tolerate them rolling on her, Ginny quite definitely would NOT (and this is in fact true) and Bronte would look at whatever dominant person or dog was around for a signal of what to do.

None of these dogs are unsound or unstable or poorly trained or “bad with kids.” They are acting in ways that make sense in a pack and neither choice is worse or better. In the same way, some dogs grant kids a license that is quite broad, but that does not mean that the license stays there forever. It is NEVER a good idea to let kids interact with a dog unsupervised; all it takes is one action (adding a nose poke to the body pressure, or kicking, or whatever) for the adult to decide that this rude little puppy needs some license removed. I would also say that it’s important to teach kids that crawling all over a dog is exactly like crawling all over a human–it’s actually rude, an invasion of personal space and an inappropriate contact, and there are better and more polite ways of interacting with the dog.

My Danes were always extremely tolerant of pressure too, and of course I smiled as they would roll over and let the baby at the time put her head on them. But I knew I was pushing it, and now, years later, I am not sure I’d tolerate it.

I just had something happen that I think illustrates this very well.

I brought Zuzu, who is now eight months, upstairs to my older girls’ room to ask them to watch her while I went downstairs to make coffee. Ginny (again, social climber, disciplinarian, very intolerant of puppies), who sleeps with them, was up there. She saw me put the baby down on one of our low bed/futons. She immediately jumped off her bed, trotted over, jumped up on the futon, crept on her belly to about six inches away from the baby, and carefully rolled over to expose her belly to the baby, and squeezed her eyes shut. I let the baby touch her chest, and then said “good girl, Ginny.” Ginny immediately rolled back over, stood up, jumped off that bed, and ran back to her own bed.

If you’re not careful, you could interpret that as “Oh, Ginny loves the baby!” Ginny is actually constantly worried that a kid will hurt her, because she’s so tiny, and does NOT love the baby. It was a very ritualistic contact that showed something about Ginny’s relationship with ME, not her relationship with the baby. I am big bad leader bitch; I proudly show off my unweaned milk-smelling puppy, everyone in the pack must show obeisance to me and their tolerance of my unweaned puppy.

When she’s weaned, though, fuggetit. Ginny does not tolerate rough kids; she yelps and tries to run and if prevented from doing so she will whack with her teeth.

The lesson here? ALWAYS SUPERVISE, and PREVENT RUDE CONTACT.

Virtually all dogs are absolutely predictable. There’s not a lot of mystery in terms of what makes a dog use a punishing bite on a child. And kids–even dog-savvy kids–do stupid things. If, while I was away, my children decided to try to clip a dog’s nails, got the clippers and backed her into the corner and grabbed her face to try to hold her still, how is the dog supposed to walk away from that? But that’s exactly the kind of thing that kids do–they practice being vets, or groomers, or trainers. Approximately five gabillion times I’ve taken leashes away from them, or clippers away from them, or rectal thermometers away (my four-year-old really, really thought she was going to take the dog’s temperature), or stopped them from playing “show” in the hallway, etc. Since my entire house is filled with dog stuff, it would take the littler ones about two minutes to drag a chair over, open a cabinet, and grab a stripping knife and try to hand-strip the dog.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that you CAN keep kids and dogs separated if they’re unsupervised. I think of the dogs like I’d think of a bath full of water–great with me there, but I never walk away from it. If I’m going more than a few feet away, I just pop the baby or the dog through a baby gate (they’re installed in basically every room) or take the dog with me, or send the toddler upstairs, etc. It’s not difficult or complex and it doesn’t take up my day. I just don’t leave them alone together.