Doodle Doings

well, not really. But it did occur to me that was what happened when I awoke to this last week:

I have two litters of puppies right now. They are both in my puppy area, affectionately known as ‘Puppyland’, which consists of two rooms with a hallway in between. Each mom and litter has its own room, with dutch doors leading to the hallway from each room. I installed dutch doors so I can step over the lower halves to get in and out of the rooms, rather than opening the doors. This is much simpler than trying to slip through an open door faster than a litter of quicksilver puppies. And getting over those doors a hundred or so times every day helps keep me flexible for martial arts!

About a week ago Rouge started acting restless, and I thought maybe she was just getting ‘cabin fever’. She would act like she wanted to follow me around as I did my chores throughout the house and yard, but as soon as she was away from her puppies she would ask to go back to Puppyland. It seemed she just couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted.

One evening it occurred to me that maybe she just wanted more options, needed a little more ‘space’ from the puppies. So even though the puppies are in a whelping pen that Rouge hops in and out of, so she is not in contact with them unless she chooses it, I decided to leave both dutch doors from her room open to the hall. I closed both dutch doors leading to Reese and her puppies, as I never let dogs have access to another mom’s puppies. I know two breeders that have lost whole litters when moms fought over their puppies. So even though Rouge and Reese are good friends, and wander in and out of both rooms, checking on each other’s puppies when I am there, I would never risk having them near each other’s litters unsupervised.

I came down in the morning to the scene pictured above. Both of those dutch doors had been closed and latched; Rouge destroyed the lower door trying to get IN to Reese’s puppies. I realized at that moment why Rouge had been so restless. The sound of puppies triggered in her the need to care for them, and she couldn’t reach them. It didn’t matter that they were not her puppies, that they were being cared for by Reese, or that she had her own litter to care for. She could hear puppies and NEEDED to take care of them. Hormonal Destructodog.

It brought home for me once again how powerfully hormones will drive a dog. It is something new breeders usually find out the hard way. Female dogs are called ‘bitches’ for a reason, and the reason is how they can behave towards other intact females when they are in season. Even girls that have been raised as littermates and friends will fight bitterly when they are in season. Their hormones tell them that they need to drive away all other females to compete for the best mate, and they will do that. Intact males will do anything, and I do mean anything, to get to a female in season. I know one boy who went through a second story window, twice, to get out of the house to a female in season. And the window was closed both times.

So it is one of the wonders of breeding to see how much behavior is influenced by reproductive hormones. And it makes me wonder how much of human behavior is driven similarly without our realizing it!