my beagle puppy

Question
I read that beagle puppies should be kept with their litter for 12 weeks. What is your opinion about this? The reason I ask is because my wife and I rescued a beagle puppy from the side of the road and have no idea about his history, and after reading that I was worried we may have more problems than normal trying to train him. We have only had him for 2 days now, and so far we haven't seen anything that would indicate abnormal behavior. He loves to play, has tons of energy, and seems physically healthy.

Answer
There are more fairy tales than facts published about animals.

Different breeds mature at slightly different rates. There is general agreement about when whelping should occur, typically 6 weeks to 8 weeks. The purpose of keeping the litter with the mother is for neutrition, early learning to find food, pecking order establishment, determine who is alpha, peer play and body language, scent differentiation and a host of other good things. The mother and peers are in a group learning environment, even touching and companionship play a major role. Typically the mother dog will ween the pups off and make them forage for food on their own. That is the point where the pups can be removed to a new home.

If the dogs are going to be field trained (tracking, sight, scent hounds) the pack is kept together so they learn field work (retreivers, scent or sight tracking) from the older dogs. The fancy work is alliamental learning, monkey see monkey do. This natural learning ability is why domestication is easy and dogs know to "work" for humans. This is where obedience training should begin, name reocgnition, simple commands and associations (sit = food, outside = potty) followed by more cognitive and problem solving learning. If the puppy yawns when you yawn, it means they have learned to read your facial expressions. Dogs learn what we are asking mainly by body language and watching our faces, especially our eyes. The pinch or prong collar works as the mother dog does by putting slight pressure on the dogs neck [it should be firm when fully pulled closed, test with your finger under a prong, it should feel presssure but not painful] when properly fit it cannot hurt the dog. A choke chain should be longer than the prong collar (both for training periods only, never leave these on the dog when alone) as a safety only should the prong pop apart. The tag collar is decoration.

Having had over 30 beagles, I can say they are a wide variety of personalities and abilities but all have been fun to own.

Regards,
Henry Ruhwiedel
Westwind Kennels LLC