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Temperament, Puppy Culture & Selection
Is your puppy shy, active, spirited, or just an easy going kind of pup? At Flying Feather Farm, it's an important part of our breeding program to identify and place the best fit pup to welcoming homes. In the past, we used temperament testing as a tool to help determine puppy personalities. We soon learned puppy after puppy, litter after litter, all of our pups scored within the same range using the Volhard Testing method.
Why is this? Several factors exist for the explanation. First and foremost, our parent dogs pass on stable foundational temperaments to their puppies. Each parent dog in our breeding program is sound in their physical and dispositional well-being, which aids in their puppy's stable health and personality. Secondly, by implementing Puppy Culture Protocols such as Early Neurological Stimulation (ENS), research shows that tiny struggles and stresses in appropriate small doses are actually good for puppies and will help them grow into strong, stable, healthy well-adjusted adults. There are 5 short modalities that are performed on each puppy, days 3-16, which benefit them with greater tolerance to stress, greater resistance to disease, faster adrenal system, stronger heart rate and stronger heartbeat. This is a gift a breeder can only give to their puppies during the window of days 3-16 days.
Our goal is to raise dogs that have the emotional intelligence to connect with you. Emotional intelligence can be taught to young puppies. The Puppy Culture Program teaches us breeders how to do this through 7 keys things that will nurture emotional intelligence of a puppy:
1. Communication-giving a puppy his own voice.
2. Emotional Stability-the ability to recover easily from fear as well as stress.
3. Habituation-familiarity with the maximum number of things.
4. Enrichment-the view that novelty and challenges are opportunities for enrichment rather than things to be feared or avoided.
5. Health-physical wellness and motor skills that will allow the puppy to develop in a neurologically and physically sound way.
6. Skills-learned behaviors which allow puppy to function in human society.
7. Love-the desire to seek out the company of both dogs and humans as emotionally positive experiences.
We desire to work with each new puppy owner to help select the best fit puppy for your home and the puppy's new environment. Flying Feather Farm wants to know what you want to share with your puppy, what is your lifestyle, and what characteristics you desire in a puppy. We hope that each family will be fully open on all physical traits and gender, so that we don't have any obstacles in our way when deciding which puppy will be the best match. At about 6 weeks, when it's time for selection, we'll schedule a FaceTime session with a couple of puppy choices that we've noted to fit your desires and "wish list". There are plenty of breeders who don't care about how you feel about your dog after you take it home or even how well the dog is doing a year from now. Flying Feather Farm cares ... we want the best for your family and the puppies too. We ask families to trust us and this customized selection process. It's important that you are 100% comfortable with our process before you move forward with us as breeders.