#tortora
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aiiieee my favorite dog breed book ever got delivered today! The Right Dog For You (Daniel Tortora) is well out of date today, having been published in 1980, but there's a lot to commend it in its approach to breaking down dog breeds that I wish we could update for today. Tortora broke down dog temperament into sixteen different scales and dimensions and then surveyed veterinarians, obedience trainers, groomers, and other animal professionals about their estimations about where each breed fell on each point. The book is full of tables like this one:
The attention to detail is just phenomenal. Every one of those scales comes with operational definitions of each and a description of what each level means, like this one for activity level:
Then each breed has a page where the author shows the range along each behavioral scale that most dogs of that breed fall within, along with some short notes. Some of the more popular breeds, like Toy Poodles, even have distinctions like "puppy mill" vs "well bred," with temperament ranges that vary accordingly. Here's the example for the Brittany:
I can transcribe these at request when I have a keyboard but right now I'm just nattering happily during an enjoyable activity, without much expectation that anyone will much care.
Woefully, 1980 is too early to have caught commentaries on cattle dogs--they wouldn't be recognized until 1985, IIRC--and of course the characters of several breeds have changed quite dramatically in the intervening 40 years. I bought the book more as a historical document than a guide, honestly, but I really wish someone would do something similar for the modern day. There are a few purported "honest guides to dog breeds," but nothing I'm aware of even close to this thorough, honest, and carefully cross checked against as wide a sample of people as possible. I've never seen anything else quite like it.
Anyway, I'm gonna have fun with this one. Let me know if anyone has any breeds they'd like me to hunt for as a sort of snapshot of temperament assessment through the 1970s.
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PRIMA PAGINA Unione Sarda di Oggi venerdì, 18 ottobre 2024
#PrimaPagina#unionesarda quotidiano#giornale#primepagine#frontpage#nazionali#internazionali#news#inedicola#oggi quotidiano#indipendente#fondato#glaucoma#marin#serie#tortora#toro#meglio#carcere#coloniale#quale#temiere#energetica#sulla#tutto#intero#alto#dalla#della#parola
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Home Bar in Florence Family room - large contemporary open concept medium tone wood floor family room idea with a bar, beige walls, a ribbon fireplace, a plaster fireplace and a wall-mounted tv
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#suit#elegant#stripes#tortora#pale#neutral colors#fashion#clothes#style#outfit#outfitoftoday#outfit of the day#ootd#outfit inspo
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#digicam#digital camera#panasonic#digital photography#my photos#lumix#photography#aesthetic#digital photo art#lumixphotography#picoftheday#bird photography#birds#tortora
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Living Room Library Florence
living room library - large contemporary open concept living room library idea with beige flooring, white walls, and a media wall
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Florence Open Closet
An illustration of a medium-sized, modern, gender-neutral walk-in closet with open shelving and beige cabinets.
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Tortora, munisipaliteit in die provinsie Cosenza in die Calabrië-streek. Dit het 'n oppervlakte van 57,88 vierkante kilometer en 5997 inwoners (2011-sensus). Die dorp waar die stadsaal geleë is, het 'n hoogte van 300 meter, die minimum hoogte van die munisipale gebied is 0 meter, terwyl die maksimum 1238 meter is. Die graaddae in hierdie munisipaliteit is 1325, die klimaatsone is C. Die provinsie Cosenza het 'n bevolking van 734652 inwoners en bestaan uit 155 munisipaliteite. Die geografiese koördinate van die Munisipaliteit is 39°56'31"N 15°48'22"O (Google Map).
In Tortora, in hierdie tydperk, kom die son om 5:13 op en sak om 18:45
Tortora, municipium provinciae Cusentiae in regione Calabriae. Area 57,88 chiliometrorum quadratorum et 5997 incolarum habet (2011 census). Oppidum ubi atrium sita est, altitudinem trecentorum metrorum habet, minima altitudo areae municipalis est 0 metra, maxima 1238 metra est. Gradus dies in hoc municipio sunt 1325, clima climatica est C. Provincia Cusentina incolas habet 734652 et ex municipiis 155 constituitur. Coordinatae geographicae municipii sunt 39°56'31"N 15°48'22"E (Google Map).
In Tortora, hoc periodo, sol oritur 5:13 et occidit 18:45 (tempus solaris Dr De Beer
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Transitional Kitchen in Milan With a farmhouse sink, raised-panel cabinets, white cabinets, quartzite countertops, a gray backsplash, stainless steel appliances, and an island, this small transitional galley kitchen is enclosed in terra-cotta tiles.
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I think also, the shift in framing (to "throwing out behaviors and seeing what happens") reminds us that we are in control of what happens, and that by being consistent we can communicate clearly to our dogs what behaviors are rewarded and which ones are not. I've been thinking about this off and on for a few days and I like it more the more angles I consider it from.
Like, I have seen what "pushing boundaries" looks like (in the narrower sense of "I know what the rule is AND I am experimenting to see what happens if I do This in response"). You REALLY have to establish that the first half of that is true first because often it is not. And then you have to establish that the SECOND half is true insofar as the dog is deliberately modifying behavior to explore the consequene space.
(I've mentioned that Matilda struggles hard with dog reactivity? That is not a situation I see her in "experimenting" mode, for example; that's a situation where she is genuinely struggling with her ability to perform behaviors like pausing and engaging with me. "Experimenting" with boundary pushing actually happens most during play time, and a lot of that appears to be about self control, too.)
And... even once you've established all that... frankly, it's still better to frame that internally as "throwing out behaviors and seeing what happens" because it reminds me, the handler, that I am in control of what happens. More importantly, it also reframes the behavior as an attempt to understand the reality of the world around us rather than being about conflict. The lab I'm in right now often thinks explicitly about the importance of exploratory behavior as a strategy to get what you need in a world that doesn't explain itself clearly, and I do think that we systematically under weight the importance for young, growing minds of exploring the world's potential by deliberately changing behavioral responses and observing outcomes when we talk about dogs. Especially for "less biddable" (read: more independently thinking) dogs.
I spend a lot of time right now thinking off and on about reframing the concept of "dominance" from older dog books (i.e. that "updating Tortora" project I'm often muttering about) because I do think there's a baby in that bathwater, I just think that the concept conflates several different things and stops short of describing the actual variable parameters in temperament between dogs. I think "conflict tolerance" might work better: my experience is that some dogs appear to feel really bad about being in conflict with other social entities (other dogs and humans included) while others are more comfortable with the possibility of being in conflict if the outcomes are rewarding to them. We want some of that in all our dogs—a dog that is so terrified of being in conflict is a dog that won't perform any behaviors—but being comfortable with conflict is in no way the same thing as actively desiring it, and I think that's a wrinkle that might create more light than heat for folks.
i never really liked the formulation that puppies and young dogs 'push boundaries' because i feel like it suggests a kind of intent i haven't seen in our dogs, and it kinda feeds into that adversarial relationship that some trainers have been shilling for decades where you're always expecting your dog to challenge your authority or whatever.
my nephew has a puppy rn, and they described it as 'throwing out behaviours and seeing what happens' which i liked a lot better?
because at least it doesn't suggest that this semi-sentient bag of bones and slop has a crystal clear picture of the laws of conduct and is hell-bent on testing them, and it doesn't suggest they already know exactly how their behaviour affects the world. they're just behaving. and learning.
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Dachshund
Ah, there's that learning -- obedience dimension suddenly vanishing again. I do love this little story about Terrence, because it's such a practical, clever fix for the problem. Once you work out that he's scared of the elevator crack, all you have to do is figure out how to teach him how to control and grapple with that fear.
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Living Room - Contemporary Living Room Living room library - mid-sized open concept, contemporary living room library idea with light wood floor, white walls, and a tv stand
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Happy Saint Valentine's ❤️❤️ @justamanwithacamera #canoneos4000d #ef75300mm #sanvalentino #tortora #animali #happysaintvalentin #birdwatching #dove #canon #coupleinlove (presso Italy) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoojD7OscOZ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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Profumatore con cuore @claraluna_official @eventi_e_co_roma_bomboniere @velia.25 #profumatoreambiente #claraluna #tortora #ceramics #live #union #glitter #golden #love #bombonierematrimonio #bomboniereroma #nozzeroma #tuscolana #onlineshopping #store #essence #ciampino #cinecittà #morena #flowers #appiolatinotuscolano #followers #fashionaddict (presso Eventi e Co. Roma di Velia De Cristofaro Bomboniere e Addobbi Floreali) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn9wrxAt-HO/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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Oh yes, that is an inherent tension for any breed! You're walking the line: what is a breed? Is it a snapshot in time, or does it change? If it changes, how many directions can it take? In this case,
What gets me is that you're actually looking at a third problem with temperament: the dogs before the temperament selection in the 80s and 90s were not renowned for temperament quality by people writing for the pet market, either. Here's Tortora, an early behaviorist with a thriving practice in New York City, writing on the breed in 1980:
(Tortora is not a Doberman person particularly; elsewhere in the book, I believe he notes that he is a Mastiff partisan. I suppose everyone is allowed to be wrong sometimes.)
Notably, he mentions the importance of kennels of known temperament in sourcing a Doberman, and his criticism of their range of temperament at the worse end of his experience is one I don't think any PPD enthusiast would have much quarrel with. He particularly complains about shy sharpness, timidity, and fearfulness, because these are the temperament traits that make a Doberman particularly dangerous to own. I cannot imagine that a bitesport enthusiast is deliberately breeding for this temperament, though. So... if no one wants these dogs, why do they exist?
Anyway, my hypothesis is that they arise as a natural byproduct of variational drift in temperament along two broad axes within a population.
It's actually a similar problem to the one I see in ACD temperament issues: because ACDs are supposed to be brave, toothy, independently thinking herding dogs with a fair bit of problem-solving initiative, when their temperaments are bad they get very dangerous very fast. This means that even before I got especially interested in the breed for myself, a) I had noticed that a lot of the human aggression behavioral euthanasia cases in my own circles were cattle dogs, b) these were inevitably rescue cattle dogs without a particularly careful background, c) invariably asking for the shape of the temperament revealed a fearful-aggressive dog.
And the specific thing I see in ACDs driving that temperament fault is that because you are selecting for intensity, the capacity for self control, and bravery, it can be difficult to assess the baseline fearfulness of a brave dog: a brave dog is a dog willing to suppress its fear responses, so it can be hard to distinguish between a dog that is frightened of the world but willing to bravely engage with it and a dog that is naturally confident and engaged without a lot of fear to suppress. Doable, especially in a puppy, but difficult.
If you're working with a breed high strung enough to make rapid decisions based on its threat assessment without having to take any time to adjust, you're looking at a dog with a fairly reactive hypothalamic pituitary axis (HPA) response, and there's going to be some variation in exactly how much. If you're working with a breed expected to have the kind of emotional control it takes to listen in the middle of a highly stressful experience, you're looking at a dog with a learning/motivational system which has big dopaminergic NAc outputs in response to perception of reward. There will be some degree of variation along that axis in your population as well. And that means that they can vary independently from one another.
Anyway, if you ask me, what you want whether you're selecting for pet, (bite)sport, personal protection, or show is to basically decrease the mean anxiety level so you have a dog that is less fearful and reactive to novel stimuli and more self confident. You may get slightly less explosively immediate hypervigilance but if you're training towards a prey drive under human control you don't need that anyway, and in any case a dog that can calmly assess behavior without necessarily reacting emotionally is a dog that is better for literally any purpose, including that of simply enjoying one's dog.
You keep the bravery in your population by asking the dog to maintain control and focus in a pinch, and selecting accordingly. You reduce the anxiety in your population by watching dogs without a particular set of directives respond to their environment, and selecting accordingly: you don't want an incurious animal, but you don't want one who fixates especially or can't adapt to change either. And you get calm, confident, incredibly stubborn dogs that are much harder to bully... which tends to result in a greater degree of total disengagements or handler attacks when you train with very harsh methods that don't emphasize reward. Given advances in dog training and communication with the general public, that is a change that would be safer today than in some previous decades while also not interfering in the dog's motivation to engage in traditional protection dog behaviors.
... The fashions in dog training during the 1970s through 1990s, especially in bitework circles, suddenly make an obnoxious amount of sense in light of the dogs that succeeded in that environment and were selected forward. I'm just saying. That change in training environment would increase the level of pressure on more fearful animals at all times, which tends to help achieve the levels of high obedience praised within the breed. (I am not entirely sure how you create a brain inclined to precise obedience without a certain baseline level of anxiety, in fact; I think there might be a tradeoff there.) That divergence from showline dogs under less chronic exposure to stressful environments manifests in lines of high-fearful, high-self-control dogs and lines of lower-fearful, lower-self-control dogs. When the level of self-control and motivational control slips below the level of anxiety, you wind up with a bitey, suspicious dog with no handles.
Problems in dog breed temperament aren't always relics of selection in the ancient past, you know? You have to think about husbandry and training approaches in your population of interest and how those changes shape the temperament of your dogs in return. ACDs are also a great example of that: a certain degree of their independence (and fearfulness!) is a result of the dingo crosses over the past fifty years conducted by bench breeders concerned about loss of herding ability. Without, er, routinely testing for that or using it day to day in their dogs....
Anyway, my point is that breeding dogs to correct the major temperamental flaws criticized by the pet market is in no way always inherently in conflict with the essential function of the breed... assuming that your function has also changed in the intervening decades in order to absorb changes in training philosophy and advances in knowledge. Which it has! I have watched some of it happen! And that is very worth considering in the context of temperament selection in any working breed.
Is the high level of inbreeding in dobes more because "undesirable" traits are common so those dogs get weeded out (whether actual bad things or just not fitting the breed spec), a small number of breeders having the monopoly, or because they are all related anyway so there's no way of avoiding it without an outcross program? Is something like the Doberman Preservation Project a realistic future for the breed?
The doberman breed is in the current shape its in due to multiple genetic bottlenecks- some simple stupid breeding decisions and others due to active war zones and the consequences of wars- paired with people who are stubbornly refusing to even try to make it better because they have convinced themselves that what they're doing is right.
Fenris is my lowest COI dobe to date [23% iirc] and while not the lowest I've seen in the breed [19%], still a huge improvement over to 50-60% breed average. But people have argued again and again that lowering COI means making breeding decisions that produce inferior dogs, and so many refuse to even consider it as a possibility.
(For non-dog people, COI is coefficient of inbreeding, and it is a look at the numbers behind how inbred a population is. You want as low of a number as possible. 25% is equal to immediate siblings. Ideally we'd want single digit numbers, with anything over 10% being a major problem to fix. To compare, my chihuahuas are something like 6% (Fae) and 0.02% (Tater). Sushi is a direct line breeding aunt-to-nephew so she's up in the 40s.)
(It doesn't necessarily mean a dog is immune to genetic predisposition to bad health, as evidenced by Tater's CM diagnosis, however it does seem to correlate directly with longevity and likelihood of developing these problems, meaning Tater unfortunately just lost the genetic lottery)
In other words, it is certainly possible to reduce the COI of the breed by HALF with smart breeding decisions, and people are plugging their ears going LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU because it means actually going out and looking past the popular sires and taking a chance on a dog that might not be your exact type but will still improve the next generation. This is not just a show line problem because I spend the majority of my time with working line dobes and working dobe people and this is an incredibly annoying problem there too. Fenris himself has popular sires in his pedigree, both the show half and the working half, so it is demonstratably very difficult to avoid.
I do think a well executed outcross project is needed, however... the problem I have is that the current proposed projects all suck. There's not a lot of direction outside of throwing things into the pot and seeing what sticks, and a lot of the resulting dogs quite frankly aren't what doberman people would be looking for anyway. Farm collies? Bulldogs? Bullies? Carolina dogs? Border collies? Pyrs? Why??? None of these are going to make a dog that has the temperament that draws people to this breed.
There are. A bunch of breeders who are waiting for an outcross project that actually makes sense. They've even posted in various outcrops groups that they would support a project if it had certain specifications. Many have said, get yourself a nice female and title her out in a bite sport and do all the doberman health testing even if she's not a doberman and we'd be interested in contributing semen. The response almost invariably has been "but I don't want a protective dog". Then what are you doing in a DOBERMAN project??? So of course the chief complaint is that most of these projects are not looking to make dobermans, they're looking to make their own breed and just have a doberman paint job. Well, sorry, but most involved doberman people want a DOBERMAN, not just a dog that looks like one. This is the only AKC recognized breed with the sole function of personal protection. They are protective dogs. Either accept that, or get interested in a different breed.
I have heard increasingly concerning things regarding the temperament of the doberman diversity project dogs, which does not surprise me unfortunately as none of these dogs are in any way sourced from dogs with verifiable correct temperament. What do you get when you cross a Craigslist Corso with a Craigslist doberman? Well the first generation might be okay for people who want pets but apparently the ones that have worked in protection are awful at it. Same with the malinois crosses- of course, you took a lukewarm malinois and bred it to a z-list doberman and you're surprised that you got a bunch of lukewarm at best pet dogs.
I think the only project I solidly am somewhat interested in is the bandog cross, and that cross works just fine but then of course it does because in that country, bandogs are exclusively military, police, and security dogs, and she bred it to a igp3 doberman. Unfortunately the doberman died before his 10th birthday, so now we're all waiting to see what happens with his progeny.
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