Yesterday in the frigid, blustery winds outside, I was playing ball with the Germans. As is its unfortunate habit, the noggin was churning involuntarily as I did so, pulling in material to ponder, and post upon.
You see, I have two Germans. They are vastly different. One is from working German lines, a stellar pedigree in the Schutzhund world and Police dog world. The second is my "12th Step" German, a rescue puppy I took in "to give back to the breed" after decades of hoity-toity Germans in my household.
W is the patriarch, the true German German. He has nerves of steel - nothing phases him - and he's just a great guy. He's calm, doesn't worry about anything, and sometimes I think if I could turn him in to a human I'd discard the rest of the human race and be satisfied, forever.
A is the American-bred neurotic. Don't EVEN get me started on the difference between what the Germans put out, and what the Americans put out. Yeah, I'd like to put them American "breeders" out, alright. But I digress.
W is a gentleman. He could lord it over A, but finds such attitudes tiresome and not relevant. And so he puts up with a lot of shit from A just because he doesn't care. He does not feel the need to prove anything.
A is powerfully neurotic. So neurotic, in fact, that if you look at him wrong, he pees on the spot. On the carpet, that is. Very annoying. Now grant it, A has never seen a spanking or heard an abusive harsh word from me, and I have had him from 5 months of age.
When I evaluated A as a rescue puppy, I determined that he likely was not abused or neglected. His rescue story is that his owner was diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer and had to place the pets due to basically going into terminal treatment, hospice care. There was no whiff in the story or the behavior of A that indicated he had been maltreated.
So I attribute the behaviors of W and A largely to their genetics - their hard wiring. And the differences between them have taught me a lot, the past two years.
Prior to my magnanimity of taking in what I jokingly refer to as my Piece-O-Junk shepherd, all the shepherds I had lived with had come from working German or East German lines. So, while they were all individuals, they were really much more similar than I realized, when it came to working with them. I just needed to tweak an approach to teach them a thing or elicit a behavior I wanted. But in the end, they were similar.
Not so with A. He has proven to be from another planet, and it has taken stubborn me two years and the remark from a casual observer to shake me free from my usual paradigm in order to begin to make progress with him in training.
You see, A is just plain wired differently upstairs than the German Germans. LOL, maybe "wired" isn't the right description, but rather "haywired." And, there ain't NO technique that will make him like them. (Yes, I know that's a double negative when I really need a single negative there, but I'm having a bit of fun here, folks...)
When I play ball with the Germans, it's like playing with two different beasts entirely. One is so like a normie, and one so like an addict. They both have these funny ways of believing things, of making their reality fit their beliefs. But we'll get to that, the next entry or so. Gotta run for now, a busy day ahead...
-The Traveler
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