Life with the dog pups

Diary entry, 25.02.2010, Kurt Kotrschal

Our first dog pups are developing

Pictures of the day (4 images)   

Our first group of hand raised wolves consisted of four individuals and we have now four dog pups in the first group hand raised for comparison. The mongrels from Hungarian shelters develop very well. They are now twelve weeks of age, lively, attached and well behaved at times.

For the sake of comparability, our dogs are raised exactly the same way than the wolf pups. This also means that they are never left alone and one of us spends the night with them. This is a lot less effort in dog pups than wolf pups, because dog pups are distinctly more attentive and turned to humans and considerably less destructive than wolves. Hence, we are living in a normal room opening into a garden enclosure, with a normal fence around (wolf pups would be over such a fence in seconds) and we spend the nights in a normal bed, of course, with the pups. Although science is the reason we do it, its simply very nice to be with pups, no matter whether dogs or wolves.

We try to treat the dog pups the same way as we did the wolf pups. We don’t carry them around, don’t take away items from them and hardly ever say “no” and we certainly never dominate them. But they receive some reward-related training already. And indeed, they are already well behaved and even housebroken, by and large, and without formal training. Wolves never become housebroken, by the way. They seem to like the first tests and are taken out for their first leash walks. Aside of that they mainly do what pups got to do: sleeping, playing, eating.