Hi everyone,

I don't post much, but I lurk around, and have read and re-read many of the the articles here on http://www.leerburg.com. I wanted to tell youall about my new puppy. Not only am I interested in what you dog experts think of her temperment, but these dogs are pretty rare and some of the breed descriptions I have seen floating around do not seem to describe my dog (even as a puppy) entirely correctly. So, maybe my description will be a good first-hand source.

The South Russian Ovcharka (SRO) is a herd protection + herding breed. They look nothing like the Caucasian Ovcharka that I've seen talked about somewhere on this board (I think it was this board, anyway). There are two types of SRO's, a working-line and a show-line, the working line is trying to maintain the original SRO working characteristics; at a minimum, the fur is shorter on the working-line, and I don't know about the temperment differences. Googling the breed name will bring up some links, and a direct link to one description is here: http://www.ovcharkainfo.com/srobehavcharac.html . The pictures you see on the internet are of the show-line dogs - the show-line SRO reminds me of a bearded collie in terms of the coat whereas the working line SRO looks like halfway between a bearded collie and a wolfhound. My puppy seems to have a very short coat for her age even compared with pictures of other working-line SRO puppies I have seen.

I got her when she was 13 weeks old, and have had her for about a month. Here is what we have been doing, and what she is like today.

I have been following Ed's groundwork instructions as precisely as I can under my living circumstances, and as a result, I am firmly the Alpha in the puppy's mind. As puppies go she is probably "soft" in terms of corrections, although I am not trying to do any corrections at this stage, this is the sense that I get. I am feeding a raw diet and supplementing Omega-3 fatty acids at 500mg/day. For what it is worth, she is getting along okay with my cat.

My understanding of SRO's from the beginning was that the quality of the adult dog is determined by the extent of it's early socialization. I already know she is sharp, as she made her first defensive bark at 13 weeks, plus her other behaviors cue me off to this. So, I set out to do a ton of socialization from the start. I was (and am) taking her lots of places both indoors and out, and she meets lots of people, sees and hears lots of sounds and strange machinery, rides every form of transportation I can think of except escalators, and generally we do tons of stuff. Someone described SRO's as "nervous" but I don't see where that is coming from, because too many things do NOT bother her, such as:

- Loud tractor trailers driving right past us in an unloading facility parking lot (this was the second day I had her, we weren't even bonded then)
- Loud, high-speed trains that blow past train stations sometimes
-big passenger buses whipping around corners right in front of us
- a street-sidewalk cleaner with noisy, rotating brushes that passed within a few feet of her (she was on my left), and on the right a train was pulling up, effectively sticking us between both ot the machines.

She just doesn't react in a scared way to those kinds of things when we are out together. It's like they don't exist. I went near that street-sidewalk cleaner 3 times trying to see if she gave the slightest shit about it, but she really just didn't care.

She is sort-of interested in getting a sniff in when people are nearby, and sometimes she is interested in approaching them, especially if they are sitting down. She is very sensitive to body language, however, so if she approaches someone who is standing up and the person turns toward her to greet her with a little too much speed, she will stop her approach, or maybe even think about it for a moment and move away. As part of her socialization, if there is a situation like that, I'll stand next to the person and kneel down to get her to come and meet the person. If someone is sitting down and especially if they invite her over, she will walk up directly to them and greet them in a careful kind of way, and be friendly, and then eventually get comfortable enough to just lie down where she is, next to the friendly stranger.

At the train station recently, a guy tried to approach her to pet her without having spoken to me, and she moved away from him, and then after we started talking for a short while, she approached him. With children or smaller people than the guy was, she does not move away when they approach like that.

Something I should mention in regard to that: she doesn't have a need, in many cases, to be right next to me to feel like she is still "with" me. She will lie down in the middle of a room, or on top of a hill, or in a pile of grass, and pretend to be sleeping, but she's really not. If I start walking her head comes right up and she's watching me, and then she will rejoin me right away if I start to pass out of sight (I tested this). I don't believe she's picking herself a new owner when she lies next to someone else, its just an extension of that characteristic. I call this her "Ovcharka Mode", since I've never seen a dog do this before.

In addition to all of the city and crowds and public transportation and offices, we do a lot of country-type walks. She is great when it comes to walking on odd surfaces, she walks on metal grates (platforms and stairs) and sheet metal walkways and unstable wooden boards and slippery rocks on the waterfront and it's like it's no big deal. She likes to stand on top of things such as large rocks and hills, and especially enjoys playing with water, literally playing with it. She can get quite exited and be galloping around, making snarling sounds occasionally (happy snarl though, hard to explain) and be rushing in to attack the water or sometimes the long grass along the side of the water. The other night she met a lit fountain for the first time, there was a few minutes of a more careful approach made to it, and then she built up into going into the water, and at the end she was doing her thing and got in a bite on one of the small water streams.

I'm trying to expose her to as much as I can. She has seen a little bit of livestock but needs to see more, and I need to get her on a boat a few times instead of just on a dock, but otherwise we are doing pretty well. The first time she found horse shit, she gobbled it right down (HECK?!??? I'm going to have a place with horses one day, is this going to be a lifelong thing?).

Overall, she is an independent kind of puppy. She is not overwhelmingly, demonstratively affectionate to anyone (including me). She is a dog that seems to take time to ponder things, for example, during our walks outside, when she sees something approaching from a distance (such as a person walking along), she will sometimes watch it attentively, settling down into a sitting position, and just watch like that as the person walks by, and for a little while as they walk away.

One of the reasons I got her was to train her as a personal protection dog. I really had chosen a malinois at first. Really, I did! But, my life situation changed and my original plans couldn't work for the next few years. I think I would still like to get a working-line malinois or maybe gsd in the future, but for now due to personal reasons, that's out for a few years. I'd been dogless for too long already, and this breed seemed to best fit my new situation. Long story on that, but that really is the case.

This breed is supposed to have strong genetics for protection, and it is an "active" type of protection. When you socialize the heck out of the young dog, supposedly when the dog is an adult, it won't be inclined to view things as threats which are not.

I've read the living heck out of this web site and I think I'm doing the right things so far, to the best of my ability. I have the "bite training puppies" DVD, and have been working through it with her, with the one quirk that I sort-of forgot to introduce the stick (I'll do that soon, though). In the very beginning she didn't seem to have much drive, but I followed the directions on the DVD and actually used a cat play-toy on a stick and string to get her started, and now she has enough drive to do the things shown in the DVD. From a novice perspective, I'll comment that she seems to like to fight, she will jump up and ram me with her shoulder sometimes, and counters/tries-to-kill-through-shaking the bite toys. She is into teething now so I've stopped all the tug-type playing, and just let her have the soft bath towl when she bites it (she is working back-tied). Before we started that, she was countering a LOT, it was like I had to release almost right away because she was rebiting repeatedly, then I started trying to teach her to bite hard when she does bite, and it was working.

You may find a reference on the internet where someone says that this breed should not be trained as a PPD or schutzhund dog, because "they don't need it", and that they would never consider schutzhund as a "game". This same person also said that they must be obedience-trained while young because otherwise, they will be "too big" to succesfully correct. I've come to the conclusion that this person didn't understand what ppd training/schutzhund does, and they are dead wrong on the idea that the dog cannot be "corrected" simply due to its size. If anything, tons of socialization combined with ppd training should make a more predictable and controllable dog, not the other way around (she already OUTs btw, it is a food-rewarded OUT).

When I visited the breeder of these kinds of dogs, the adult SROs, when turned loose around me for the first time, tended to approach me barking, and then accept me as a visitor because the owner was accepting me, and they became reasonably friendly. This leads me to believe that maybe they can do a bark-and-hold as adults, but at the same time, I don't feel sure because I'm way too new at this.

The thing I think may not work well for schutzhund, frankly, is the obedience portion. And once again, I could be totally wrong, but yeah. She just doesn't have an overwhelming, eager will to please, and she'll never, ever look like those bright-eyed, hopping-to-obey malinois I saw at the local malinois schutzhund club. Once again this is still from a novice perspective, but I get the feeling that IF she is obedience-trainable to SCH1 obedience level, it might be based on a food reward and it won't look half as intense as those malinois did, I just know it.

I think she might be good at tracking, I think she follows sent trails during our in-the-country walks (I gotsa LONG flexi-lead for our country walks), and the breed has a rep for being able to track.

I sense that some of the "SRO people" would hate me if they knew I was doing bite training with an SRO, but so far it's working out great. It's a bit early to call this but, so far she's never acted like she wanted to bite strangers for stupid reasons (such as unexpected touching). I saw her turn her head and point her nose briefly in the general direction of a hand that completely unexpectedly touched her back, but there wasn't even the start of a real bite there, hopefully this was a good thing for this learning circumstance she is in. So far, biting is a play-thing that she and I do, and there was one time that a friend of mine who had been thoroughly introduced to her deliberately got her to go into drive, and she did bite his sleeve, and stayed in drive for a while. I was actually quite pleased when that happened, and held her back by her leash (its a wide collar, deliberately chosen because of our bite training) while praising her extensively. It was like I was one of those handlers in Ed's videos!!! hehe. Some of the things people had written about the SRO had made me wonder if she would engage a helper in anything other than defense, and it was great to see that she did. She was totally, unquestionably in prey and not defense during that incident.

For what it's worth, some of the people who write about this breed almost make them sound like fear-biters. I've seen a couple of fear-biters before and my puppy is just not one of them, despite being sharp. I do think that in the wrong hands my puppy could be made into a vicious and unscrupulous dog as an adult, but she doesn't have the mind of a fear biter. Someone also described SRO's as nervous dogs... and that description doesn't match either, at least not with my dog. Very sensitive, yes, absolutely; easily distracted by sights and sounds that stand out if the environment is subdued, yes, but its not the same thing as nervousness. She doesn't look or act nervous or sensorily-overloaded on our city trips and in crowds, etc.

So yeah... this is a really long post. If you read this far, I hope it was interesting!

SROs are one of the livestock guarding breeds (a few others are Great Pyrenees, Maremmas and Anatolian Shepherds). They are not a herding breed.

Reading through your post, your pup sounds like a typical livestock guard breed. They are very independent breeds because their original job was (and is) living with and protecting the livestock without much human intervention.

While they are not good personal protection dogs in the usual sense, when she gets older she will protect whoever and whatever she considers to be her "flock." Her first response will probably be to try to chase the "intruder" away by barking at him/it. Livestock guard dogs rarely attack or need to but will do so if nothing else works to send the intruder away from the "flock." But, the dog generally makes that judgement call if it's one of the livestock guard breeds, which is why the socializing you are doing now is so important.

I worked with a woman several years ago whose Pyr held a burglar in their house and would not allow him to leave or the police to take him out until she and her husband got home and said it was ok. The dog never bit any of the people involved, he just blocked them. Btw, it was the burglar that called the cops when the dog would not allow him to take all the stuff he'd gathered up out of the house. <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Hi Elaine,

Thanks for reading my post and responding. The story about the Great Pyrenees and the burglar is great!

I wanted to add some information in response to your post. My understanding from talking to the breeder about her own research of the breed (which included talking to Russian breeders who had known the breed for a long time), as well as her own experiences, is that the SRO is different from the other livestock breeds in that it is more willing to directly and quickly attack a threat. The working-line was bred by the Russians throughout the breed's relatively short modern history in a way that promoted this kind of behavior and sharpness. The SRO was known during those times by the local Russians for its willingness to quickly attack, specifically moreso than the Caucasian Ovcharka.

In the past they were used as patrol dogs by the Russian military, but I don't have a reference of anyone else having tried to train one as a modern-trained PPD dog. The breed numbers are small, there are somewhere over 2000 of them in the world and not all of them are working-line dogs, this may have contributed to that. It sounded like the breed had some promise for this, so I wanted to try it, at least until I am in a position where I can manage a working-line malinois or GSD in my house (personal reasons that are expected to last a few years).

Laura,

That's very interesting about the SRO's temperament. It sounds like it's closer to the working Anatolian temperament than to the Pyr.

You might want to see if you can locate and correspond or speak with Drs. Raymond and Lorna Coppinger. They did extensive studies into Livestock Guard Dog breeds several years ago.