Diana  Offline
Dual Personality
Joined: May 30, 2006
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Posts: 19447
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128369 LabPounds
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No.of Labs: 5+
Lab Names: Mallie, Fish, Tom, Bondy, Mia, Ruby & Otter!
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Location: West Sussex
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 Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 3:14 pm Post subject: |
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" also over the few days he had started showing dominance against the other male dogs in the house "
Denise, play carefully here. To a certain extent, the male dogs in a household need to sort things out amongst themselves. If you try and force a pack heirachy upon them you can create very bad problems.
Wealways like to think the dogs in situ already will be boss. They won't, not always. The youngster *may* be testing his luck, but that is a very natural thing to do. Whilst one does not want all out fights of course, castration shouldn't instantly be thougt of as the answer to this. Indeed, if it IS considered, the LESS dominant dog should be castrated not the more dominant one. If you castrate the more dominant one (and therefore the one who appears to be causing all the trouble by his challenges to the established dogs) firstly you do not immediately remove his status (only his balls - grin), secondly you do not always or even often removehis desire andnatural positioning as the 'guv'. The lessdomijnant dog will settle s the underling very happily. A dominant dog who should of been the boss but you tampered with him (grin) will not settle as an underling for the loss of his undercarriage. His nature is unaffected.
Living with several entire males can be quite complicated. The relationships need a lot of thinking about. Most livein total harmony but if we tamper too much with males challenging each other in the pack we tamper with nature and that is very dangerous when we don't know enough about it to really know the in's and out's from a dogs point of view.
Does that make sense. As jill pointed out, anytime is better than never to castrate, but to be frank, if you are going to do any dog, do the underling, but you must know your dogs andyour pack well enough to know who that is or is likely to be at maturity if you hadn't castrated.
Di
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Shona  Offline
puppy walker
Joined: Jul 25, 2006
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Posts: 695
Posts Left: 0
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3939 LabPounds
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No.of Labs: 1
Lab Names: bob (dob 13/04/05)
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Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 8:51 pm Post subject: |
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bob was done at 18 months
he certainly doesnt stop and mark every single thing when we are walking now
he never humped anything except his blanket in his bed
so i havent really noticed a huge difference in him at all regarding this
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