dipping my toes in...

bellas mum · 01-09-2011, 12:27 PM

hi,
I got my first much wanted bassett yesterday...shes a 3yr old called bella and is lovely and gently if not slightly neglected by her previous owner in as much as shes underweight and her nails were dreadfully overgrown...i also have a 3yr old choc lab who is of simular temperment to bella so they have been getting along great....am seelking advice and like minded support and more knowledge of the breed and things to expect lol...im aware bassetts are very strong willed and stubborn and bella is proving that....she has recently experienced a phantom pregnancy so any advice with this would be a help...is she likely to have another and if so would getting her sterilized asap be advized.

looking forward to getting to know you all and your bassetts.

sadeyes2 · 01-09-2011, 02:21 PM

Hello Bella's Mum, nice to have you on board. Think the best thing all round is to get her spayed. Great that she now has a loving home. You will find that bassets are real little characters whose antics will have you laughing constantly.

bubbad · 01-09-2011, 03:55 PM

my bitch goes through a false pregnancy EVERY time she has been in heat and she will be four in March. She gets milk in as well. Try feeding her about half the amount of food she would get daily during the duration of a would be pregnancy ,about 2 months.Get her spayed asap. I'm breeding Esa so I just have to put up with it.

bellas mum · 01-09-2011, 05:07 PM

thx peeps....yeh she has some milk still although her previous owner said it is drying up now...dreadfully thin and got bald patches...all been put down to the phantom...eeek...hope she doesnt have another one...she has been here a day and its like she has lived her whole life with us, shes so laid back about everything shes almost in a coma lol...

Mikey T · 01-09-2011, 06:45 PM

Quote:

...im aware bassetts are very strong willed and stubborn

IMHO that is bit misplaced discription of the breed. This comes the do not respond as positively to more traditional training methods. They are not as bidable ( willing to please) as the breeds thought to be easy to train or more intelligent. Neither is really the case it is more about approach. Also it becomes a convient excuse for many why their dogs are out of control.

Hard to Train?

Media Hound, Front and Finish: July 1994

Quote:

Coren's analysis of working or obedience intelligence is by far the weakest link in his book. In attempting to rank the various breeds in terms of working intelligence, Coren found no laboratory research at all,

...Unfortunately, the methodology underlying Coren's conclusions is extremely faulty. All Coren has managed to do is to obtain a rough list of the success of various breeds in the sport of dog obedience in North America; jumping from that to the number of repetitions it took the various dogs to learn commands is impossible. We can even use Coren himself to challenge his own methodology. In his analysis of adaptive intelligence, Coren includes an interesting canine IQ test. The "CIQ" consists of twelve separate tests, designed to assess the dog's learning and problem-solving ability. I tested two dogs: Connie, my own basset hound (a breed ranked in the bottom tier of intelligence) and Dream, a border collie (a member of the top echelon). The results were interesting. Connie scored in the "brilliant" category, a group that fewer than five percent of the dogs in Coren's standardization group reached (no, I didn't skew the results!). Dream, on the other hand, scored in the low average range of intelligence, where, according to Coren, a dog will need to work rather hard to understand what is required of it. Connie has obedience scores which range from a low of 173 to a high of 186; she currently has two legs on her UD (and plenty of NQ's in our quest for that elusive third leg). Dream is an OTCH who has garnered many high in trials and placed at this year's Gaines Classic. Clearly, an obedience judge seeing the two dogs in the ring would conclude that Dream was by far the easier dog to train. Yet such was not the case. Connie is an extremely quick study who retains what she learns. Dream, according to her handler, always has difficulty learning and retaining new behaviors. Obviously, only erroneous conclusions could be drawn from their respective ring performances as to the amount of time and repetition it took them to learn the commands.

The most striking difference between the two dogs is a personality issue, not a matter of anything that can be labeled "intelligence." Although Coren devotes a full chapter to what he terms the "personality factor," he does not seem to realize how critical a role it plays in the obedience ring. Connie is like many bassets: she's bright and happy to learn if you can convince her that the learning was her idea in the first place (i.e., if you train with food). But she doesn't have a strong sense of duty; if she's under stress or a bit distracted, she'd as soon not obey a command as obey it. Let's indulge in speculation and generalization for a moment, dangerous though it might be. Bassets are perfectly capable of shutting down entirely under stress; more than anything else, their tendency toward negative stress management is the reason why judges see so many slow-moving, tail-drooping, lagging bassets in the ring. Border collies are an entirely different story. Once a behavior is learned, most border collies seem to perform regardless of stress; indeed, many respond to stress by getting sharper and sharper. Dream is not such a successful obedience dog because of her learning ability. She has excelled because, quite simply, she loves to perform in the ring in front of a crowd of spectators. It is this showy sparkle--a je ne sais quoi which would never appear on a personality or intelligence test--that makes Dream unusually good; her learning pattern is all but irrelevant. My basset loves to learn new things and loves to practice but gets a bit overwhelmed in stressful situations, freezing and refusing to work at all. Again, her learning pattern would be impossible to predict in an assessment of her ring performance. In both cases, an obedience judge, based on what she sees at a trial, would be unable to make any meaningful statement about these dogs' trainability. In general, the difference between bassets and border collies is far more a difference of intensity, energy level, and desire to obey commands in the face of adversity than it is a difference of trainability or problem-solving aptitude.

a link to a little video of Mariah, finished in the top 10 in the entire country (all breeds) for her class and jump height in 2005.

Grand Prix

01-09-2011, 12:27 PM	#1 (permalink)
bellas mum Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2011 Posts: 2	dipping my toes in... hi, I got my first much wanted bassett yesterday...shes a 3yr old called bella and is lovely and gently if not slightly neglected by her previous owner in as much as shes underweight and her nails were dreadfully overgrown...i also have a 3yr old choc lab who is of simular temperment to bella so they have been getting along great....am seelking advice and like minded support and more knowledge of the breed and things to expect lol...im aware bassetts are very strong willed and stubborn and bella is proving that....she has recently experienced a phantom pregnancy so any advice with this would be a help...is she likely to have another and if so would getting her sterilized asap be advized. looking forward to getting to know you all and your bassetts.

01-09-2011, 02:21 PM	#2 (permalink)
sadeyes2 Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: glasgow Posts: 589	Hello Bella's Mum, nice to have you on board. Think the best thing all round is to get her spayed. Great that she now has a loving home. You will find that bassets are real little characters whose antics will have you laughing constantly.

01-09-2011, 03:55 PM	#3 (permalink)
bubbad Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Boiling Springs,Pa Posts: 1,347	my bitch goes through a false pregnancy EVERY time she has been in heat and she will be four in March. She gets milk in as well. Try feeding her about half the amount of food she would get daily during the duration of a would be pregnancy ,about 2 months.Get her spayed asap. I'm breeding Esa so I just have to put up with it.

01-09-2011, 05:07 PM	#4 (permalink)
bellas mum Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2011 Posts: 2	thx peeps....yeh she has some milk still although her previous owner said it is drying up now...dreadfully thin and got bald patches...all been put down to the phantom...eeek...hope she doesnt have another one...she has been here a day and its like she has lived her whole life with us, shes so laid back about everything shes almost in a coma lol...

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