Training dogs requires a kind heart and a cool head. ...
The master always must be a source of comfort and security.
- Colonel Konrad Most
Gidget now has a litter of four pups born Halloween. They are 3/4 Samoyed, and they are cute! They look like Samoyeds but a little less woolly and not quite so pure white, some of their fur is very light brown. They have been wormed five times. The other day, they got over the Dutch door of their pen and were running around in my nearby woods near their mom. Safely back in the pen, they had to take a nap to rest up.
email: josephkeller100@hotmail.com
or josephckeller@gmail.com
Joseph C. Keller, M.D., 1980, Univ. of Nebraska; B.A., 1977, cum laude, Harvard Univ.
address: 16201 620th Ave
Roland, Iowa 50236 U.S.A.
From a Newsbrief in the journal Archaeology, July/August 2000, by Sandra Olsen Ph.D., of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, USA:
Recent excavations at the Eneolithic (3600-3100 B.C.) settlement of Botai in north-central Kazakhstan have produced the earliest evidence for many ritual practices that are seen thousands of years later in Bronze Age and Iron Age sites on the steppe and documented in religious texts of those periods.
...
Botai dogs had the stature and cranial features of the Samoyed breed, which may have originated in this region...
*********
According to zoologist Stanley J. Olsen, "Origins of the Domestic Dog: the Fossil Record", 1985, p. 92, there is
"swelling of the frontal [brain lobe] area in dogs"
including the orbital and prorean gyri.
(Olsen cites a 1973 article by Radinsky which is included in "Behavior and Evolution" edited by Riss). Olsen also says the dog's larger frontal lobe (more precisely, the fossa of the skull that the lobe fits into) is one of the main ways to tell apart ancient dog and wolf skulls. So the dog seems to have a more primate-like brain, than does the wolf. It does NOT seem to be true that the wolf is more intelligent than the dog. The dog seems to have an enlargement of the brain area that enables him to think more like a human.
The dam KeeKee was bred by White Fire Kennels of Manly, Iowa (parents Sultan and Cattibrie, both full AKC registered Samoyeds). KeeKee has a "limited" AKC registration, i.e. her pups are not AKC registerable.
Diego (both eyes are brown but lighter than KeeKee's).
Diego's a puppy again! Rub his little tummy.
KeeKee's dam Cattibrie (one of several dams at White Fire Kennels of Manly, Iowa, where I purchased KeeKee at age 19 weeks).
site last updated March 5, 2023
Recommended book (one of many good ones):
"Before and After Getting Your Puppy",
by Dr. Ian Dunbar
My genetic lines:
Lando and KeeKee have no two dogs in their AKC pedigrees (back to great-grandparents) the same. However, some of the names indicate a relationship to dogs from the same breeder.
My pedigree on Diego is the longest, because I have the AKC pedigree of his sire and the America's Pet Registry pedigree of his dam. KeeKee's and Diego's pedigrees have no dog in common, but there is one dog found in both Lando's and Diego's pedigree:
Diego's paternal grandsire is Chief Jay Apache. Lando's maternal-maternal great-grandsire is this same Chief Jay Apache. So, Lando and all of KeeKee's Dec 2013 pups, have a great-grandsire in common. However, this amount of inbreeding is rather small compared to the amount of inbreeding already found in most dog breeds due to the limited number of founding animals and also the "popular sire syndrome".
So, those are the facts to the best of my knowledge.
Olga, who will be 9 in Dec, is from KeeKee's first litter, sired by Diego. Olga always is a superb mother, and adopted Marcus, a singleton, when Marcus's mom Marcy was carrying him too much.
Kringa is from Olga's most recent surviving litter; she was 3 in May and has not yet had a litter because of lack of mating opportunities - I've been too busy. Kringa's sire Lando was the most vigorous dog I've ever owned but alas he died of sudden gastric torsion ("bloat") in 2021 at age 7.
The sire of Gidget's litter is Marcus. He is the son of Rover (the most intelligent dog I've every owned; he was Olga's littermate who died of renal complications of leptospirosis at age 5, three years after an 11 day delay in diagnosing his lepto, because Iowa State University's veterinary school refused to see Rover because of a political problem they had with me). Marcus's dam is Marcy, a purebred Ukrainian Samoyed I have. Gidget is Olga's granddaughter by Olga's Samoyed daughter and a "Hanging Tree Cattle Dog" (a new breed derived from Border Collie, Kelpie, Australian Shepherd and Catahoula) who dug under the fence. So Marcus and Gidget are "first cousins once removed", an inbreeding coefficient of only 1/32.
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
- Saint Thomas a Kempis