Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

265 Pages·2018·13.52 MB·English

by  Kim Brophey

1 MEET YOUR DOG
2
3 MEET YOUR DOG

MEET
MEET
MMEEEETT
MEET
YOUR
YOUR
YYOOUURR
YOUR
DOG
DOG
DDOOGG
DOG
the GAME-CHANGING GUIDE to
UNDERSTANDING YOUR DOG’S BEHAVIOR
BY KIM BROPHEY, CDBC, CPDT-KA
FOREWORD BY RAYMOND COPPINGER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON HEWITT
Dedicated to the late Raymond Coppinger—the father of the modern canine
science movement, whose life’s work revolutionized our understanding of dogs.
Your honesty, humor, and friendship were never lost
on those of us lucky enough to know you.
Copyright © 2018 by Kim Brophey
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Raymond Coppinger
Photographs copyright © 2018 by Jason Hewitt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4521-4899-1 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4521-4930-1 (epub, mobi)
Design by Hillary Caudle
Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 6
INTRODUCTION 8
Chapter One: The Four Dog L.E.G.S.® 18
Chapter Two: Learning 26
Chapter Three: Environment 58
Chapter Four: Genetics 78
Natural Dog 84
Key Concept: Ritualized Signaling and Communication 97
Sight Hound 100
Key Concept: Good Management 112
Guardian 114
Key Concept: Dominance and Resource Guarding 129
Toy Dog 132
Key Concept: Oxytocin’s Hook 145
Scent Hound 148
Key Concept: Impulse Control 162
Gun Dog 164
Key Concept: Biting 177
Terrier 181
Key Concept: The Premack Principle 190
Bull Dog 194
Key Concept: The Arousal-Aggression Continuum 208
Herding Dog 212
Key Concept: Sudden Environmental Contrasts 228
World Dog 230
Key Concept: Choice 235
Chapter Five: Self 240
CONCLUSION 247
SOURCES 250
IMAGE CREDITS 252
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 254
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 256
FOREWORD
Raymond Coppinger
Professor Emeritus of Biology, Hampshire College
I wish I had read this book fifty years ago when I first started to train dogs.
Back then I was a college professor with a team of sled dogs, which were
part of my professional academic research. I published dozens of scientific
papers, often with my students, about the neurophysiology and anatomy that
help make a successful sled dog.
Toward the end of the 1970s, my wife Lorna and I started the Livestock
Guarding Dog Project at Hampshire College, where we raised and trained
pups to protect American sheep from predation. Eventually we had records on
over 1,500 dogs, most of them descendants of the original imports that we had
collected in Eurasia as breeding and working stock. We placed them on farms
and ranches where they did a brilliant job defending livestock.
In those early days of introducing this relatively unknown type of sheep
dog to Americans, people would ask if you could train a dog to both herd and
guard sheep. Could one dog do both jobs? We didn’t know the answer. So
Lorna and I went to Scotland on our way home from a field trip with a pile
of puppies from Italy and Yugoslavia, and bought ourselves six border col-
lies. Many of the pups were born on the same day. Thus, we had a controlled
experiment going where we raised those pups in a large pen for almost a year
and watched their behavioral development. What we found was that each
breed was different in the timing of their development. They also acquired very
different kinds of behaviors.
So, we got our answer: No—dogs did not develop with joint guarding and
herding abilities.
It was during that experiment that I acquired the most difficult dog of
my life—Jane, one of the six Scottish border collies. She was an intense drov-
er’s dog, so when I put her on a mountain road behind 3,000 sheep, she would
work all day long pushing them up the mountain. We herding guys would sit