Free How to Raise the Perfect Dog by César Millán Page B

might want to ask her if she has the results of these tests for the dog that you are interested in. They may aid you in assessing whether the puppy’s personality is right for your lifestyle.
    However, even those breeders who use these tests religiously will tell you that their results don’t always tell the whole story. When evaluating energy, other factors can make a big difference, such as the dog’s direct bloodline, its birth order, or, more important, its day-today interactions with other dogs. When you are evaluating an adult dog at a shelter, you may find it hard to separate a dog’s true energy from the issues it carries with it from previous life experiences or placements. Happily, with puppies, there are no issues to get in the way of your selection. Puppies are clean slates, born with a certain energy level, and in most cases, that same energy will be with them for the rest of their lives.
    MEET THE PARENTS
    As you’ve already learned, breeders will carefully choose their breeding pairs—both females (dams) and males (sires)—seeking to control and shape the temperament of the offspring. In other words, breeders who want calm, sweet-tempered puppies that will make good pets, therapy dogs, or show dogs will choose sweet, calm-tempered mothers and fathers. Breeders who raise search and rescue dogs or agility dogs may be looking for more active energy in their dam and sire. Those breeding for guard or police dogs may be looking for some territorial traits in their mating pairs, and those who illegally breed pit bulls for fighting unfortunately select the most aggressive, ferocious dogs to mate for the next generation. That’s why it’s important that a breeder be willing to let you meet the parents of your new puppy whenever possible.
    Brooke Walker let me spend a lot of time around Angel’s mom and dad, and they were playful and active yet calm and stable dogs. Mr. President’s parents were both the kind of laid-back, mellow English bulldogs everyone desires as pets. With puppy mill puppies you purchase at a pet shop, you will never be allowed to meet the parents. That’s because they may be in a warehouse hundreds of miles away, crammed among dozens of other dogs in tiny cages. The bitch will probably already have another litter gestating by the time that puppy hits the pet shop. Imagine the effect on the temperament of a dog living in those inhumane conditions. Imagine the stress placed on the mother as she is forced to give birth in a cramped enclosure again and again and again, until her body gives out from the strain. There’s no way that a mother’s experiences don’t have an enormous impact, both on her own temperament and energy and on the lifelong psyches of the puppies she brings into the world.
    LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
    In Marley and Me , there’s a funny scene where, after having selected Marley from a backyard breeder’s litter but before the dog is ready to come home, John Grogan picks up a book about Labrador retrievers and gasps when he learns that a dog’s temperament can often be traced back to its parents. Marley’s breeders had hesitated to let them meet the sire, a dog that turned out to be “a manic dervish tearing blindly through the night as if demons were close on his tail.” Marley’s hyperactive father aside, the Grogans had been exposed to plenty of warning signs that highlighted Marley’s very high energy level. In the book, John humorously recounts what is an all-too-common puppy selection experience.
One of the males seemed particularly smitten with us. He was the goofiest of the group and charged into us, somersaulting into our laps and clawing his way up to lick our faces. He gnawed on our fingers with surprisingly sharp baby teeth and stomped clumsy circles around us on giant tawny paws that were way out of proportion to the rest of his body. …
“I think it’s fate,” Jenny said.
“He certainly seems to like us,” I said.
    Like the Grogans, most people