I had the pleasure this past weekend of attneding the Avidog Advanced Transformational Dog Breeding seminar hosted by the Ottawa Valley Golden Retriever Club at the Kemptville Campus of the University of Guelph.
This was a weekend packed with great info, lots of wonderful ideas, and super tips to help me (and all the attendees!) improve our breeding programs. Over the next while I plan to implement many of these ideas.
Most immediately important, and the main reason I wanted to attend, was the Advanced Puppy Evaluation Test (APET). This is a method Gayle developed to assess puppy temperament. To date the most common method is the Volhard method, which asseses a range of behaviours in response to various stimuli. The APET goes even further, assessing more traits (32 to be precise!) using a longer and different type of process.
APET divides the traits being assessed between stable traits and changeable traits. Stable traits are those that essentially do not change over the lifetime of the dog. These include energy level, environmental and people focus, pain threshold, forgiveness, hand shyness, and 3-D awareness. These traits can be worked with with and influenced, but not changed. Changeable traits are those that can be changed with training. They include problem-solving and learning, patience, confience, and courage, among others.
The types of traits that are valued in a puppy will depend on what that puppy's job witll be (hunting, retrieving, herding, pet), the type of home to which that puppy will be going, and the amount of experience with dogs that the owners have. A puppy that will do well with a retired couple whose kids have grown up and who live quiet lives might well be totally misplaced in a young family with three noisy, active kids under the age of six. While that seems obvious, the APET provides a tool to specifically identify which temperament traits each puppy exhibits and to what degree, which is extremely useful in assessing which puppy will best suit which home situation.
It is our goal to implement the APET with our spring litters. We'll still be in learning mode with the first few litters, but this should help us to identify more precisely which puppy we recommend to you. This also means that we may be less willing to accept firm "criteria" from puppies in relation to colour and sex, as the oartucular cream female puppy we have might be best suited for the family that has indicated a preference for a chocolate male, for example. But in all cases we would tell you why we think a given puppy is right for you, and to give you a choice between at least two different pups that we think would suit your home situation.
My daughter attended the second day with me so she could also learn about APET and, I hope, help with puppy evaluation, as she has a good eye and feel for puppy behaviour.
The seminar also provided an introduction into the fascintating world of epigenetics - how the environment can change the way a gene works without changing the gene itself - and population genetics - how breeding choices can influence the overall gene pool of a given dog breed. But more of that in a future post, I hope!
No comments:
Post a Comment