Jenya and Gamma
After my boy Laszlo died I knew I wanted a working puppy. After spending so many years looking at dog training through the lens of behavioral and emotional rehab, I wanted to experience a different angle: un-stoppered flow of drive; an un-kinked hose, so to speak. I wanted to expand my learning horizons and grow as a trainer through protection sports. While I considered other breeds such as GSD or Dutch Shepherd, in the end the heart wants what it wants, and my heart pictured another Doberman. After over a year of searching, the puppy that landed in my arms was a little female from German working lines I called Gamma in honor of the high energy wave (oh yeah, be careful what you name your dog)!
Starting from scratch was a new experience and a new challenge for me. In Natural Dog Training, after we build trust with a dog we’re rehabilitating, we generally have to invest a lot of time and energy getting access to what the dog is holding back; getting the dog to trust you with its drive, bringing the charge up to the surface so we can resolve it. But a puppy, with its developing nervous system, is totally different. Everything is already right there at the surface. If a puppy is nervous or spooky, there’s no convenient backstory about abuse or trauma in its history. There’s just pure genetics. A puppy has pure drive, but has not yet developed the emotional capacity and resilience to sustain and ground it.
Early on, my pup was an often-demonic little perpetual motion machine that wanted nothing more than to gnaw on my flesh. She left me literally bloody, scarred, and sleep deprived for months—as working puppies will! She was a paradoxical mix of nervous sensitivity and relentlessness; my resolve to keep her bite and her temperament intact was tested on a daily basis. I all-too-well now understood why Kevin and many of the other working dog people I knew kept their puppies in outdoor kennels for their first year—not just to get some respite from their sharkiness, but to protect their vulnerable temperament from the damage inevitably caused by our tired-human reaction to their wackadoo antics. A puppy is like a powerful magnet you have to protect from collecting detritus, while at the same time standing back and letting things happen organically when that’s what’s needed. You have to control everything, yet retain trust by not being perceived as a source of pressure. Calibrated as I’d become to less responsive dogs; with this little sponge who feels and remembers everything, I’ve had to backpedal over and over; readjust, slow down, start over. Try over and over again to tune into intuition, trust my gut, try to feel which advice to heed and which to discard.
I plan to train this puppy in IGP (Schutzhund), but even more I hope to end up with a balanced dog who can self-regulate, whose nervous system has not been fried by too much too soon. It’s a dialing-in process I’m fine-tuning all the time, balancing the need to smooth out the rough edges without going too fast. At eight months, my little Gamma ray makes me laugh every day and astounds me with her energy, fire and abilities. I thought my rescue Doberman was a fast study: I was wrong. I can tell already that my own learning curve is going to be her only limitation. But that we just might make a pretty good team.
Story by Jenya Chernoff
Photos by Jenya Chernoff, Annie Kaplan and Marie Miller-Anderson