Originally posted by VanCamp:
Nice posts John.

If the dog is very hard and also has some other issues, like rank, then you shouldn't be messing around with them as a beginer. Just my, hard learned, opinion. Yes and no. My first dog was very hard and dominant. I was 13 when I got him as a 8 week old puppy. I was a tough kid and we had our fights. The point i'm trying to make is that getting this type of a dog at young age and growing up with it, you will not be as intiminated by it as you would if the dog came to you as a mature adult.Does that make sense?

Milt did you need stitches when your little fights were over? How about surgery to repair nerve, muscle , and joint tissues. I think we may be talking about a different kind of dog here.

I'm smiling with good memories.

Can you always pick out through puppy selection testing a dog that is going to be handler hard or have rank issues? At what age are these traits
going to become detectable or most evident?

I can't, but I'm sure some folks can. Ed has seen quite a few litters and he has some selection test stuff on his Bite Training Puppies video, I think. There are about a million puppy selection tests out there. I like the KNPV one I saw, although I don't have a link--sorry.

I've had very good success with puppy testing. Most of the puppy tests assess the same things (prey, social, pain threshold etc.) using slightly different approaches.

However, the most important aspect is being able to compare the pup in front of you to others around the globe... VanCamp is correct... this takes experience.

Example: Rag on a string... pup waits 2 seconds then prances over and grabs it... is this low, medium, high prey?... it all depends on your expereince.

I know people that think this is "high prey drive" but I would rate it as low.

No link...........Uhhhhhhhh what good are you anyway? In so far as what kind of dog to have around children; it's fairly simple. None. Until the kids are ABSOLUTELY clear on what "hurt" really means. The breed most commonly associated with biting children is the ST Bernard ( my data might be old) because they are left unsupervised with the presumption that "nothing can happen".

My daughter is 9 years and has just been allowed unsupervised time with our 10 year old Sch1 female (High lines and medium on hardness). Brianna, the child, knows that if she plays with a stick for too long, Tina, the dog, will make it a memorable experience. That has happened only once and both walked away unscathed, Brianna knows that Tina's prey drive goes from 0 to 100 in the blink of an eye and knows that the lack of forethought on her behalf has been a scary thing.

As far as hardness and level of training experience, I have always held that, working with Ed's definition of hardness, the harder the better for this reason; mistakes in timing and other applications will be easier forgiven. Maybe a bit of leash climber might bring the learning curve down a little

Trying to look at one chacteristic in selection of a dog is not very much help. There is so much interaction with all of the chasteristics that makes the dogs personality either good or bad with children.

The first thing I always consider is size. With children under 10, I believe that the dog should be large enough that the child can not pick the dog up. Small dogs ar not good for children because their bones are often fairly brittle and they often don't heal broken bones well.

The second thing I look for is hardness. I want a dog that will accept punishment from the child with little or no concern. If the dog is capable of taking this type of punishment with little or no reaction they will usually tolerate a child and just move if the kid gets too rough. Combined with that I like to see a dog that has little in the way of rank issues. A hard dog with high rank is a problem with kids. The primary reason for this is that the dog will take the punishment and also dish it out to try and increase their status in the family. The one exception to this rule from my experience has been the Giant Schnauzer. The reason I say this is that even though the Giant tends to have rank issues, it always seems to be directed at the primary handler. They don't seem to direct it at other family members.

The other thing with some of these types of breeds is that they are often so hard that you can't hit one hard enough to hurt them. They are often somewhat sensitve to verbal corrections.

The other thing is activity level. The dog needs to be active enough to keep up with the children, but not so active that they won't leave them alone.

The breeds I tend to recomend with people with children are the herding breeds, the Retrievers, and then some of the scent hounds. These breeds tend to have most of these chacteristics. I would be a little concerned with some of the working dogs that have been bred for extreamly high prey drive. This type of prey drive is a problem with children because the dog is often "nippy" when the child is running around.