“Adopt from a shelter - don’t buy!” This call is familiar to everyone who one day decided to give up on everything and get a dog.
Recently, a friend told me that she was also ready. “What breed?” - I asked, believing that now I, as an experienced dog lover, would have to give consultations, and preparing to lobby for my long-standing but secret love - bull terriers. “I want to adopt from the shelter,” she answered. - Yard. I feel so sorry for them." Instead of talking about breeds, I had to give her a short tour of the dark side of Moscow dog breeding.
The fact is that we are a little greedy when it comes to dogs. Blood breeding in our country is on such a grand scale and is so uncontrolled that this market is, to put it mildly, overstocked. Simply put, we have too many purebred dogs and they are too cheap. At the slightest problem, they are put out on the street and go to the breeder for the next ones, because they can afford it. So Moscow shelters are filled with not only mongrels, but also excellent purebred dogs. And no one needs them except the volunteers of the breed teams involved in their rescue. The worst thing is that the activities of these people are doomed to forever remain in the shadow of an advertising billboard, from which another lop-eared “ball” looks with sad eyes, simply because he has better PR. In the shadows remains the dedicated work of volunteers of teams - a special type of shelters involved in the rescue and rehabilitation of one specific breed.
So in Moscow you really don’t have to buy a purebred dog. To understand this, just search for “help team” plus the name of the breed you are interested in, and a brave new world will open up to you. It is only important to understand that this path is by no means strewn with roses, that you will most likely get an animal that has managed to survive psychological or even physical trauma, which means you will need all the reserves of patience and love that only you have. But you wanted to do a good deed, didn’t you?
Alabai
Bella, white as snow, was bought from a gypsy camp where she was beaten. When volunteers came for her, she crawled towards them on her belly, closing her eyes and pressing her whole body to the ground. She was trembling with fear, she thought that now she would be hit again just like that, for no reason. She even cried quite humanly, with squeaks and tears, but these new people did not beat her, but began to stroke her, called her a smart girl and a beauty, and then loaded her into a car and drove her somewhere. As a result of the bullying Bella suffered, she lost an eye, but this did not stop her from settling into a new family in less than a year. She became a happy Alabai, a guardian of her own yard, a friend to a mongrel terrier and an angry white cat.
Tatyana Chertovitskaya,
coordinator of the Alabai Help team
“We have an overproduction of Asians,” sighs Tatyana Chertovitskaya, coordinator of the Alabai Help team. — Keep your fingers crossed: they are the first in the number of litter activations in the Russian Cynological Federation, and in addition to the RKF, we also have SCOR (Union of Cynological Organizations of Russia) and “Kind World”, and there is also wild breeding, and “aboriginals” are also brought here from the mountains and from Central Asia. Here they actively reproduce without any accounting. Moreover, everyone in the know understands that breeding Alabais does not bring profit - they cost five rubles a bunch on Avito. But citizens see a puppy on the Internet for 45 thousand and think: “Yeah, now I’m going to get rich.” And they breed just anyone with anyone from the back alley, without receiving an assessment at the show, without doing genetic tests, and when it turns out that no one will take such puppies for even an A, and they demand to eat every day, they are put out on the street.
As a result, we see more and more sick dogs every year. We recently had a puppy on our team, 9 months old, branded - and he has dysplasia in the last stage! How is this possible if, according to the current rules, both parents had to pass tests for dysplasia to be allowed to breed? And like this. There are a lot of dogs with cancer, and this didn’t happen until 2022, but now there are more and more of them.
At the moment, “Alabai Help” has around 80 dogs under its supervision, but we are not the only team in Moscow that deals with CAO, so you can assess the scale of the tragedy yourself. And we also had to reduce the number of possible “incoming” ones, otherwise we had 110 or 115. By the way, we had to, precisely because of the abundance of sick dogs, there is not enough money for treatment. Sometimes we receive from 10 to 20 dogs a month.
We collect most of the dogs, of course, from the region, where they are bred in huge quantities to protect industrial zones, parking lots and summer cottages. In Moscow itself, they come across much less often - over the past two months, only one male dog was taken from Leninsky Prospekt. In such cases, we always cover the entire area with advertisements, but the owners rarely respond. Even less common are breeders who are ready to take their “babies” back.
Before giving a dog away, we always check the living conditions. We won’t let you put it on a chain, in an area with a flimsy picket fence, or in an open field. Then, of course, there is an interview: how ready a person is for just such a dog and what is on his mind. Those who have serious intentions are ready to listen to advice, come several times to see one dog, and in general their attitude is immediately visible. And then a citizen declares: “Give me a bigger breed, a fatter one and a stronger one,” and it immediately becomes clear that he needs the Alabai in order to assert himself at his expense. However, he has neither experience in keeping this breed nor understanding of it. One of them told me for a long time that a dog is an inanimate object, because scientists, you see, have proven that it does not have a soul. I listened to him and calmly said: “The exit is there, and forget about our existence.” A separate task is how to weed out those who take dogs for fighting, zoo sadists and outright crazy people. For this, we have a double interview system, there are inter-team blacklists with addresses, phone numbers and photographs.
Older dogs - in the case of Alabais this is over six years old - almost never leave us. As far as I can remember, I managed to find only three people in the entire time. This is probably a manifestation of human selfishness: “She won’t live with me for long, 4-5 years, and then I’ll lose her, and it will hurt me again.” The fact that after five years an Alabai cannot be taught anything is a myth; I myself had an age-related refusal, so I know. There are also outright spiteful people who attack everyone except the volunteers they know. I will give such a dog either to a serious and proven security company, or to a truly professional dog handler. In general, when I show dogs, the first thing I do is talk about all their shortcomings, draw the worst scenarios so that the applicant understands what he will encounter and is prepared for anything in advance. It’s easier for me, I don’t want our charges to come back in two months. It’s better for the applicant to be scared, honestly admit to himself that he won’t be able to cope with this dog, and take something simpler or without alabai at all - it will be better for everyone.”
Getting Some Skills
One of the first skills to teach your Cane Corso puppy is toilet training.
It is too early to accustom a small pet to the outdoor toilet, and therefore he settles down at home.
To do this, you can use a tray with filler, newspapers or a disposable diaper. They should always be located in one place, and the puppy should do “his business” only here.
In order to toilet train your pet, you need to be patient - this process is quite long . First of all, in the apartment where the puppy has settled, it is better to remove carpets and rugs from the floor - they attract the pet and retain the smell for a long time.
When he relieves himself, he is guided by instincts, and therefore he usually chooses a certain place. This is where the toilet should be placed.
It will be much easier to accustom the animal to such a place.
As a rule, such places are located next to the door, under the window, in the corner or on the balcony . It should be provided with free access at any time and not frighten the pet while relieving itself.
If the puppy has chosen an unsuitable place, then it must be weaned from it. To do this, substances are used that repel the dog.
You can use the Antipis tool . A dog will never defecate where food is located. This option can also be used.
Dobermans
Marley was found in the courtyard of a private house in Saratov. What sat there, tied to a pipe with a short steel cable, in truth, did not resemble a Doberman, but its skeleton. According to neighbors, the dog’s owners had not been home for several weeks, but tied him up so that he “would not run around the yard and would not bother anyone.” Volunteers went to the police, where they wrote a statement about finding the animal’s owners, left a notice of forced seizure, and took Marley to Moscow. There, the veterinarians threw up their hands: the dog is old, and he also has nephritis, chronic prostatitis, a bad heart and a whole bunch of other diagnoses. It's easier to put him to sleep. But Marley ended up with people who were not used to giving up. They announced a fundraiser and by some miracle got the dog back on his feet. And then they found him a new home, where he lived happily for the rest of his Doberman life. Recently, his former new owners took the dog back from Dober Help.
Valentina Zaporova,
organizer of the Dober Help team
Elena Ivanova,
curator of the Dober Help team
“Now we have 20 dogs, and we can’t take more yet,” Valentina Zaporova, organizer of the Dober Help team, and curator Elena Ivanova tell me. — Both places and financial possibilities have been exhausted. At the same time, in Moscow alone every week at least one Doberman appears on the street, and here we have two women and one car. We do all this volunteer work in addition to our main job, which means that everyone’s phone rings for 6-8 hours without stopping, then at night we have to find time to answer all the messages on social networks... Well, that leaves two or three hours for sleep.
Who are we? Just two caring Dobermans, fans of the breed, who one day realized that they couldn’t pass by. As a result, the Moscow team “Dober Help” has existed for seven and a half years. During this time, we were able to pick up more than 150 Dobermans from the street and place them.
We find money in the same place as everyone else - we collect donations on the Internet. 90% of our sponsors are other Doberman owners, and simply caring people who saw, got involved and help. Every day at least some amount falls on the card, and in principle we have enough. On average, food costs around 7 thousand per dog, renting a warm enclosure for a foster home costs 9 thousand per month, treatment costs are unpredictable: some need 3 thousand per month for tablets, while others need 80 thousand for a complex operation. Or, for example, a cardiac examination now costs around 10 thousand, and Dobermans from a certain age need to have their heart checked every year. So our dogs are almost golden.
The Doberman is a beautiful picture that many people fall for, forgetting that this is an extremely active dog that requires a lot of walks, regular visits to the dog handler, and preferably also engage in some kind of sports discipline such as search or agility. When reality no longer matches the picture from the Internet, the dog flies out into the street. Over the past two years, we have developed a very bad trend: they began to throw away teenage puppies, including three-month-old ones, and some came across dogs from very good nurseries, which were obviously bought for a lot of money. And this miracle runs around on the street without a collar.”
“I personally had such a case in my practice,” adds Elena. — A woman came to see the dog, we seemed to have met, and then she asked me a sacramental question: “Can a Doberman wear a diaper?” That is, she did not understand at all what the difference was between a Doberman, a Yorkie and a Chihuahua, that this was not a decorative breed!”
Cane Corso
Roy has had bad luck since childhood. The genes played a cruel joke on the puppy, giving him a harelip. As soon as he grew up, it became clear that he could give up on exhibitions; he wouldn’t be invited to breed, but why would the owner need a dog of a fashionable breed that doesn’t bring in money? Having barely grown up, he immediately began to live out his life - in the yard, on a rope, eating slop, thin as a skeleton, he was hungry, freezing and waiting. Luck smiled on him twice. First they found out about him in Moscow, bought him for pennies and brought him to the Corso Team for foster care. And then a girl who had recently lost two old Corsos came there, saw Roy and shouted “Oh my God!” rushed to hug him. Roy has been living at home for three years now, and as for his lip, the new owner thinks that she even decorates it.
“To the question “Why?” “I answer everyone that the Cane Corso is not a dog, it is a disease,” says the head of the Moscow “Corso Team” Yulia Maslennikova. “Our family has kept poodles all our lives, but when I first saw a picture of a Cane Corso, I cut it out of a magazine, ran around with it and shouted: “Look how beautiful it is!” And they told me: “What are you talking about, it’s a monster!” - “No, you don’t understand, this is a divinely beautiful animal! I will definitely have a dog like this!” As soon as they appeared in Russia, I immediately ran after the puppy.
We currently have about 20 dogs in our care. Most often we collect them in the Moscow region. Previously, the city of Chekhov and its surroundings was in first place, now Dmitrov is overtaking it. In Moscow itself there are also a lot of them, but here they react more quickly, some are taken away out of pity, others are found by their owners in time, but outside the city the situation is more complicated.
They used to call me: “Oh, we have a Cane Corso running next to the site.” You arrive and the neighbor’s goat has gotten loose. Now it is possible to take and send photographs, and we, accordingly, can make sure that this is our client. Next we decide what actions to take depending on what kind of dog it is and what condition it is in. It happens that you come across not even lost dogs, but simply dogs of irresponsible owners on a self-walk. As a result, a whole frightened village calls us, because even if the dog does not show aggression, the mere sight of an ownerless Corso, you must admit, is extremely annoying.
It is important to understand who “team people” are - these are people who are ready to spend all their free time on animals. At the same time, they also work somewhere, but only after work they still need to have time to go to the dogs for foster care, and take them to the clinic, and do some PR on the Internet. These people are capable of performing real miracles, because in their hands are dogs that, by all indications, should not live, but get up and live on. We received a male dog with epilepsy, who very quickly fell into a coma. Almost all the doctors told us: “That’s it, put us to sleep, there’s porridge instead of a brain.” But we found the only neurologist in all of Moscow who took it, the best rehabilitation specialists, and this seemingly hopeless dog got up, began to eat on its own, relieve itself normally and hear its name. Moreover, she has since had another coma, from which she also recovered, but she is unlikely to recover from the third. Now this case is being studied in veterinary academies.
Many people want to adopt a dog from us, but we are not very ready to give them away, because there is a difference between “I want” and “I can”. You often hear this: “Yes, I know how to handle dogs, my previous dog ate cabbage and potatoes and was happy.” Such an applicant never interests me at all; that’s not why we collected our Corsicas from the ditches and treated them. Or, say, an intelligent woman of about 50 comes and points her finger at a gorgeous one-year-old male dog: “I want him.” And I understand that if he pulls it while walking, he will drop it and injure it. Or a young girl: “I want to give my friend a dog for her birthday.” Yeah, a Cane Corso for a friend, yes, yes, of course, now I’ll just tie it with a ribbon! And here is my favorite pearl: “I have a five-year-old child, and I heard that the Cane Corso is a nanny dog, I will go to work, and he will sit at home with the child instead of me.” Tell me, can a person be called adequate who is capable of leaving his child locked up with a huge dog all day?”
Training rules
How to raise a Cane Corso puppy? Dog training is more than just teaching tricks, it stimulates the animal's brain and promotes coexistence and behavior in public. It is important to be patient and get started as early as possible to strengthen the bond and improve the quality of life for both owner and pet.
- Training should be short and sweet. Small puppies lose concentration easily; it is better to do six five-minute sessions rather than one half-hour session.
- You need to train in a good mood. Animals are sensitive to human emotions, so they will be able to determine that the owner is nervous or irritated.
- The training should be completed with an exercise that the pet can perform easily so that the finale is crowned with success.
- Initially, it is better to train without distractions. Once you've learned the basics in a quiet environment, you can add distractions to get your dog accustomed to a variety of environments.
- Training should be reward based. Negative or punitive techniques are cruel and do not work.
Voice and tone
Sound commands must be pronounced clearly, loudly enough, using different intonations. Words of praise are pronounced expressively so that the dog feels joy upon hearing them. The utterance of executive commands should have an affirmative connotation. It is better to give the first command loudly, mobilizing the dog for active actions, stimulating its nervous system. If the requirements are not met, a repeated command is given in a threatening intonation.
Punishment and reward
Punishment is the use of a stimulus that reduces the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated. As practice shows, it is better to use methods without the use of force, otherwise it can lead to fear or increased aggression.
Instead of yelling or hitting the animal, it is better to use more effective punishments, such as ignoring or distracting the animal. Positive reinforcement is the best way to learn.
Labradors
Dani was an excellent club dog from a good couple from a good kennel. A rich family from Rublyovka bought him for a lot of money, and it seemed that in the future only downy beds and the best toys in the world awaited him. And then his owners decided to get a divorce, and it turned out that none of them needed the dog. The breeder promised to take the dog, but then decided that he didn’t need Dani either. He ended up on the street and wandered around rich mansions for several months. And some local residents have discovered a penchant for unconventional entertainment. Dani was saved literally at the last moment - the affectionate dog, who approached people at the first whistle, was about to be used as a live target for shooting hunting rifles. When the dog was taken by volunteers, his emaciated body was riddled with knife cuts. When his new owner took him to the clinic to have an X-ray of his abdomen, the picture showed a curved piece of an awl stuck between his ribs.
Anna Rudnichenko,
curator of the Moscow Fund for Helping Retrievers
“Problems for Labradors began from the moment the whole country learned that our president had such a dog,” says curator of the Moscow Fund for Helping Retrievers Anna Rudnichenko. — The breed immediately became popular and sold. At the same time, this very stereotype arose about “a problem-free family dog with no aggression,” but due to the fact that tens of thousands of them began to be produced, these qualities have already been partially lost. People take a puppy at a price cheaper than the breeder, and end up running into problems, and the animal ends up on the street.
According to our data, ten homeless retrievers appear every week in Moscow alone. Of course, we don’t have time to pick them all up, so some end up with regular animal rights activists, while others end up in municipal catchment and shelters. We are at war with shelters, because they categorically do not want to give the pedigree dogs that come to them to the team volunteers. At the same time, they treat Labradors like all other dogs, that is, they put them in enclosures among hundreds of barking brothers in misfortune, where their psyche finally breaks down due to the lack of contact with humans. Ten days in the shelter and the dog is sick.
I usually have five or six dogs under my supervision, and right now I have two Labradors and a Golden. So it makes sense to talk not only about me, but also about all the curators from the labrador.ru forum, there are about ten of them working there, you can safely write about “several dozen dogs” and you won’t be mistaken. Yes, our “family-friendly” and “problem-free” ones are actually a completely unlucky breed.
Like other team members, I try to combine caring for dogs with my work, and I work on Channel One. Many of us, because of their volunteer activities, try to find work with a shift schedule. The thing is that you simply cannot pass by a dog in trouble. By the way, we collect dogs not only from Moscow and the region, we also have Cyprus and Turkey, where caring Russian-speaking women live who married locals, they also cannot pass by and send their dogs to us.
Who is our ideal applicant? This is a complete family, with children and an active lifestyle, that is, people who are able to devote time to the dog. A retriever is like another child or like your second shadow. He will walk around the apartment with you, lie down and sit next to you, constant contact is important to him.”
Brief history of origin
Italy is officially considered the birthplace of this dog. The distant ancestors of the Cane Corso - Molossian dogs - lived in Ancient Rome. They had many functions: guard (protection of the owner’s property and himself) and military service, participation in gladiatorial battles and hunting, even monitoring children. Therefore, their main qualities were large size, fearlessness, and devotion to man.
Over the thousand years of its existence, the breed has undergone some changes, and yet the appearance of the dog has changed slightly. The number of Cane Corsos decreased by almost half during the First World War. The breed was on the verge of extinction during World War II - these dogs were poorly fed due to lack of food.
Despite all the difficulties, today the Cane Corso is one of the most beautiful and popular breeds not only in Italy, but throughout the world. Much credit goes to Giovanni Nizzo for this. This Italian, together with like-minded people, gathered representatives of the breed from all over the country in the early 80s of the last century and created a nursery.
For the first time, Cane Corso breeding began there on a professional level.
Already in the 90s, the FCI established standards that today are met by more than 3,000 representatives of the Italian Mastiff (the second name of the breed) around the world. Changes were made to them in 2016. In the new version, the approach to docking the Cane Corso's ears and tail has changed.
Shepherd dogs
Digger had everything a good dog should have: a home, a rug, a full bowl and an owner who loved, pampered and exercised. But one day the woman died, and the dog was left at the mercy of her son, who suffered from a whole bunch of mental disorders. Digger was beaten daily, cigarette butts were put out on him, and knitting needles were stuck into him. The dog was literally rotting alive and waiting to die. Fortunately, there were people who scoured the Internet and came across the “Ovcharka.Life” team. With the help of the police, Digger was taken away; he, barely alive, was loaded into a car and immediately taken to the clinic. When the doctors who treated him left the operating room, they cried. Digger was treated, fattened, rehoused, and now he is doing well.
Lyubov Lebedeva,
leader of the Ovcharka.Life team
“I have been rescuing shepherd dogs for seven years now,” says Lyubov Lebedeva, leader of the Ovcharka.Life team. “At first I came to help another breed team, and then I spun around and ran off on my own, along with a group of girls. Strength and opportunities appeared, the first volunteers came, and this is how “Ovcharka.Life” was formed. We have a wide variety of people, mostly those who helped shepherds as part of other breed teams. We are primarily engaged in rescuing German and East European shepherds, but in general we have an unspoken rule that if a shepherd and a non-shepherd are running nearby on the street, then we take both. No matter how much we are fans of shepherd dogs, if there is a Labrador mix or an old Alabaika with a bleeding wound on the street, they will still go to the team. We currently have about 115 dogs under our care. We don’t have our own foster care; we rent enclosures at five points in different parts of the Moscow region.
A shepherd can end up on the street in a variety of ways. Mostly, their owners abandon them: some are unable to feed them, others have failed to raise them. It happens that people get divorced, and neither of them needs a dog; there are cases of outright canine stupidity. Or here’s another option for you: buy a puppy and play with it. Since the beginning of January, we already have two such grown-up puppies - one was dropped out of the car on the highway, and the second was simply taken to the village. For many people this is normal now.
The pandemic also played a role - when self-isolation began, they started calling us and asking for a dog so that they could leave the house. To the question “What will happen to her later?” These “kind hands”, as a rule, answered: “Well, we’ll leave it at the dacha or somewhere else in the afternoon.” In addition, many have lost their jobs. Now all the breed teams are working hard because people are going crazy. Yorkshiremen began to be thrown out onto the street with the words “We have nothing to feed him” - how does that even happen? Hey, people, this is a Yorkie, he eats no more than a cat! Dogs with scalped wounds and other traces of sadistic violence came in a shoal. Or they call us: “So, you have three hours to pick him up, time has run out, otherwise we will put him to sleep. Would you like us to send you a video of how we will kill him?” So now we are trying to respond as quickly as possible.
Our work scheme is very simple: we receive a message about a dog and pick it up from the street. We don’t have our own catchers, except that sometimes we hire outsiders for money if the dog is aggressive or timid. Some are brought and given to us by the owners themselves, sometimes we take those who were brought to the veterinary clinic for euthanasia, it happens that dogs are written off from service, and these are not always older dogs; among today’s “Germans” the loss of working qualities can occur in at any age."
Husky
Volunteers gave him the name Joe, but hardly anyone will recognize his first nickname. A handsome red male showed up in a village near Dmitrov and wandered around the local trash heaps for several months. It was impossible to catch him - the dog always ran away, and when trying to catch him, he attacked furiously, which is uncharacteristic for a husky. Finally, professional catchers called by the Husky Help team were able to capture Joe, and it turned out that the dog was not squinting one eye, as it seemed at first, and that he had no eyeball at all. His entire face was covered with some small marks. When the clinic did an X-ray, the volunteers were horrified - the dog’s head was literally filled with shot, apparently they had been shot at point-blank range. Most of the pellets were removed during the operation, but some went so deep that they had to be left behind. Joe lived in foster care for a year, and then he was adopted by a family from Chelyabinsk, and now he is not just a happy family dog, but also a TikTok star with 84 thousand subscribers.
Ekaterina Kosykh,
Husky Help Foundation
“Our breed has been at the peak of popularity for many years now,” says Ekaterina Kosykh from the Husky Help Foundation. — A year ago the Disney film “Togo” was released, before that there was “Game of Thrones”, before that there was “White Captivity”, “Snow Dogs”, and huskies regularly appear in advertising. And after each such film we are faced with a new wave of dogs on the streets.
We have already stopped directly accepting refuseniks, except in cases where there is a complete emergency, and have focused on picking up dogs from the street. Moscow, Moscow region, all of Central Russia, the South - Kabardino-Balkaria, Kislovodsk, Pyatigorsk, Abkhazia, Sochi - dogs come to us from everywhere. By the way, for some reason the southern regions have the largest concentration of abandoned huskies. There they wander around in the local heat, become skinny and pick up a whole bunch of diseases. Specifically in Moscow and the Moscow region, we have several calls every day. Not after every one of them the dog comes to us, but two in a week is the norm. We currently have about 120 huskies under our care.
We spend more than 120 thousand every month on food alone, plus vaccinations, sterilizations, paying for utilities at the foster home, and medicine - if a dog, for example, comes to us with a broken paw, then the operation to collect the limb costs sixty thousand. This, by the way, is a very common story, since, once on the street, huskies, as a rule, quickly get hit by a car, and we either have a broken limb or spine. We often have to deal with gunshot wounds, especially in the regions. There they are mistaken for wolves, or they try to destroy village chicken coops. Many dogs came to us with bullets in their bodies or with pellets.
Ten years ago there was no such excitement. We found a dog, put it in order, and there was already a queue for it, and we chose the best. But every year the situation gets worse. Like-minded people began to join me - mainly from the “Husky Forum”, known to all breeds, where, on the basis of the “Lost/Found” section, “Khas-MCS”, a large and friendly family of volunteers, was formed. For more than six years we existed as a section on the forum, but then this platform became not enough for us, and there were more dogs, and Instagram husky_help appeared, from where we moved across all social networks, right up to Odnoklassniki.
I wouldn’t say that we had a blockage during the pandemic. At the very beginning, they really tried to hand over the dogs to us more often - “we can’t cope,” “we have nothing to feed,” etc. But then, on the contrary, they began to sort it out. There were days when five or six dogs went home; at one time, some of our enclosures were even empty. Of course, we understood and foresaw everything, therefore, with each person who took a husky from us, we entered into a responsible maintenance agreement. In total, during the pandemic we have adopted about 30 dogs, we are tracking them, they are now with families, and they are doing well, no one was returned.
80% of our volunteers, as in other breed teams, are women of all ages. This is probably inherent in nature - hyper-care for animals becomes a continuation of the natural female function, aimed at procreation and raising children. I know that many volunteers or curators do not have children, and they transfer all this unspent love to animals. But in fact, I don’t have any exact social portrait of a typical animal volunteer. Sometimes children of 15–16 years old, schoolchildren, whose parents do not allow them to take a dog, come to us. And there are very adults, even elderly people, there are simple hard workers who tear off crumbs from their small salary to help dogs, and there are also quite wealthy ones.
A separate topic is help from celebrities, which comes in very handy, because all our activities are nothing without PR. For example, Alena Doletskaya, former editor-in-chief of Vogue Russia, is actively involved in our work. She herself took the dog, and there was a funny story there, it was a grown-up puppy, which she first wanted to give to some friend of hers, but it didn’t work out. Alena cared so much for her that she eventually took her for herself, although she already had two huskies at that time. The singer Asti adopted a dog from us, Nastasya Samburskaya came to us and then wrote about our shelter on her page. And such broad gestures from media persons are a huge help for any team. After the same Asti took our dog, five more of her subscribers came in her footsteps and did the same.”
Features of executing various commands
When training a puppy, it is important to teach a few basic commands.:
- "To me" . This is a basic command that a puppy learns to use immediately after learning its name. To present it, the dog’s name is clearly stated, and then pronounced in a demanding tone, “Come to me.” At the beginning of training, you should show your pet a treat, which will make him want to follow the command.
- "Ugh" . The command prohibits lifting anything. When teaching, a mechanical method is used. Food is placed on the ground (floor), but when the dog tries to pick it up, a command is pronounced and a prohibiting action is carried out - a tug on the leash, tightening the collar loop, a light slap on the face with a newspaper or a fly swatter on the head. The action must indicate the existence of danger posed by the object.
- "Near" . With this command, the puppy must stand close to the owner on the left. When training the puppy, the correct execution of the command is indicated with the help of a leash, and after its execution, he is rewarded with a treat.
- "Sit" . This command is duplicated by raising the palm to chest level, while the arm is moved to the left side. When training with your fingers, the dog's pelvic area (lower back) is pressed. With such pressure, the animal’s instinct is triggered, and it sits down. Don't forget about encouragement.
- "Lie" . For a guard dog, this command is important. In order for the puppy to comply with the command, you need to press with your hand in the area between the shoulder blades. After execution - an incentive.
- "Exposure" or "Wait" . The command can be performed while standing, lying down or sitting. In the first case, the dog must remain in a given position for at least 10-15 seconds, and in the second - up to 0.5 hours. Compliance is achieved by rewarding with a treat. At first, the owner does not leave the dog’s visibility, but gradually disappears as the interval of absence lengthens.
- "Give" . Initial exercises are carried out with a puppy toy. After pronouncing the command, the toy is taken from the puppy’s mouth, and his attention is diverted to another object. Action is encouraged. Skills are reinforced with food (a bowl of food, a bone). If the puppy shows aggression, it is recommended to apply pressure with your hand in the area between the shoulder blades, forcing him to lie down. With such training, it is important that the dog understands who is “boss” in the house. She must give away any item.
- "Aport" . Classes to master this command are held outside the home. During the first “lessons,” a favorite dog toy is used. She rushes, then the puppy runs and grabs her. Next the command “Come to me” sounds, and after its execution - “Give”. In subsequent classes, you can use any other items. Usually dogs engage in such training with pleasure, because... it's very game-like.
- "Face" . This team should be the final one in training. It is only permissible for an obedient dog, because... can teach unexpected aggression. For training, an assistant with protective clothing is required. Training is carried out when the dog reaches one year of age.
The listed commands can be attributed to the basic set. Training is carried out alternately.
Some of them are impossible without mastering other skills.
In general, the duration of training for puppies should not exceed 45-60 minutes with rest breaks.
