Anyone who has owned a dog for any length of time understands well enough that ‘training’ them is an ongoing process. New situations and experiences will usually require some adjustment time, but a well trained dog can be expected to cope with most things, and knowing their character or nature can help predict how they will respond.

It’s widely understood that a young dog’s early experiences will have a disproportionate influence on their later behaviour and while the adage that “you can’t teach and old dog new tricks” is profoundly incorrect, the conditioning that takes place in their early years will tend to shape their future responses. KiKi came to us at a little over two and a half years of age and from our past experience with Dalmatians we knew we could expect her to be fairly ‘set’ in her behaviour. By observation it became clear that KiKi had learned pretty much all of the usual stuff and some other, to us strange, things too. While we found it surprising that she will clear a work surface of anything edible and forage in the bin if given the opportunity, her general behaviour has been really pretty good. All the expected responses to “paw”, “bed”, “sit” and so on were well established and she is perfectly clean around the house. Unlike our other two, she will also “sit/stay” when asked, even when a biscuit is placed on the floor for her, only moving on command. She does, or did have, an inclination to lie spread-eagled when asked to lie down at times, a behaviour which I found a little disconcerting, suggesting an unnecessary degree of submissiveness.

Her interaction with Leica has been without fault, which suggests quite strongly in my opinion that her inclination then, when she first came to us, to rush angrily towards other dogs and snap at their hindquarters seems a learned response rather than innate one. As part of a litter, she would have learned about bite inhibition and all sorts of canine social interaction and non verbal communication would have been imprinted in her first 10 or 12 weeks of life. In the rough and tumble of her infancy her siblings and her mother would have helped her understand what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. Whether by accident, design, or lack of attention KiKi had come to imagine that to chase off other dogs was expected or at least accepted if not actively encouraged. Such social failings are extremely unlikely to have developed naturally, and there are some indications that she doesn’t speak ‘dog’ terribly well. Her first encounter with Leica being a case in point. The expected behaviour, and one which almost always occurs, is one where two dogs greet and inspect each other beginning at the back end. As humans we are sometimes inclined to turn up our noses at this process although to dogs the information which is made available by this is far more complex than our sensory abilities are capable of interpreting. For dogs there is an almost ritualistic overtone to this behaviour. Assuming no negative reaction from either party, dogs will usually then move towards sniffing the mid-section before finally coming face to face. Getting in an unfamiliar dogs face immediately is usually indicative of a more combative or challenging intent. For whatever reason, KiKi seems to struggle with such etiquette. Seeing Leica for the first time she immediately tried to sniff and lick her face, wagging her tail vigorously while Leica shied away and gave a low grumble. Moreover, as Leica grumbled under her breath, KiKi seemed not to notice or care that she was being told, politely, to step back a little. In subsequent encounters with other dogs she seems almost entirely unable to ‘read’ their body language as they approach, often reacting even when it’s clear to us that the oncoming dogs mean no harm. That being said, she has now made friends with a number of dogs, large and small, including a pair of enormous male Boxer / Rottweiler crosses with whom she will happily chase a ball or stick. Once the initial unfamiliarity has been dealt with she seems perfectly capable of playful interaction and far from those early days when her responses were almost out of control, she has made huge strides towards being a more confident and sociable creature. She continues her process of ‘unlearning’.