Clean Run Magazine - January 2007 - 42

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Slate Spy Kids By Nancy Gyes, photos by Marci Mantell Photography As I
stare at the blank screen of my laptop trying to form the words to start
at least a year’s worth of articles focused on training an Agility Dog
from puppyhood, I find a lot of similarity with this empty screen and the
new Border Collie puppy my husband and I will choose in the coming weeks.
Today our pups are just 24 days old. Their eyes are open, and they are
beginning to hear my voice. They are changing not just every day, but in
short moments of time as brief as one hour. I was there with them when
they slipped from the womb, and I was there when the first pups climbed
out of the whelping box when they were just two weeks old. I noticed the
difference from one hour to the next when they could hear me enter the
room and call out the traditional I haven’t been alone with these pups;
my husband has spent as many hours caring for them as I have, and the pup
we choose will be his next Agility Dog, not mine. We whelped five male
pups from a lovely, athletic, and sweet Border Collie bitch named Wyn.
They are fat and healthy and handsomely marked with white in all the right
and none of the wrong places. We won’t have to make the choice between
girls or boys in this litter, since that was decided for us. We will base
our opinions and selection on structure and character instead of sex or
color. We love Jim’s seven-year-old dog Spy who fathered this litter. If
this litter is reasonably equal in structure, movement, and personality
then we will probably lean toward taking a pup that favors the look of the
father, hoping that the genetics that are visible to us through body
coloring and structure will also follow the genetics that are inside. We
hope those tendencies will give Jim a dog that has a lot of similarity to
Spy. We want the same characteristics in this dog that you probably want
in your next puppy. No one we know ever looks for an ill-tempered or
poorly built puppy. Prospective BC owners talk about wanting a dog that
has drive but with an off switch, and many other specifics, too. We want
“puppy, puppy, puppy” instead of just lying quietly in their nest. One
moment they were just little black and white nursing machines, and now they
play and interact with each other and their environment—all in the space
of just 24 days. What will they become? Their genetics predisposes much of
what they will be, and the rest will be created by our training and care of
this dog. My computer screen was blank moments ago, but already I have 200
words on this page. Our puppy is growing and changing just as fast. 42
what you want, an absolutely perfect dog that loves us and is completely
sound of mind and body! Right now the pups are just beginning to show
their personalities. One of them is vocal, another is a cuddler, and the
big one seems pushier than the rest. We will do what all prospective
owners do. We will watch them for hours and days and weeks, hoping that we
can identify specific puppy-hood traits that will carry on to adulthood and
also give us an insight into the adult dogs these puppies will become. In
our preparation for the litter’s arrival we did research on what kinds
of advances breeders are making in helping create a healthy environment
for puppies to develop. We know about the principal stages in neurologic
and behavioral development, and we have read about what our job is in
preparing these pups for a balanced development in this juvenile stage of
their life. We decided to follow a process called “early neurological
stimulation” that we read about in an article by Carmen L. Battaglia
titled “Developing High Achievers” www.
breedingbetterdogs.com/achiever.html . The theories were based on studies
done by the U.S. military in an attempt to improve their working dogs. The
program was Clean Run | January 07 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
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Clean Run Magazine - January 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - January 2007