The Humans
What causes urine marking?
The most likely cause of urine marking or urine spraying is to assert dominance.
Your Labrador may be marking in the house because he feels the need to take on an alpha role – Urine marking is a way to stake out his territory and assert his dominance within his pack. He could also be asserting his dominance over potential intruders.
If you aren’t taking the role of the Alpha dog, your Labrador puppy will start taking on that role at the age of about 8 months or so when they start becoming aware of the hierarchy.
In some cases, Labradors will even pee on their owners beds. This is because the bed is the safest and most important place. Thus, if they mark that, they don’t need to mark the entire territory.
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The Humans
Some of the once popular methods for Labrador training (or any other dogs really) were quite frankly abhorrent: physical pain and intimidation (such as grabbing your puppy by the scruff of the neck and holding her down until she goes limp), or other inhumane methods like shock or pronged collars has fortunately fallen out of favor now that we know a bit more about dog psychology.
It’s now widely accepted among the vast majority of dog training experts that the most effective and humane way to train your dog is through positive reinforcement.
This is just a fancy phrase for what is actually a very simple theory: You simply reward good behavior and ignore behavior that you don’t want repeated.
While this is effective with just about any dog, a Labrador’s desire to please and above average intelligence makes this the perfect training method.
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The Humans
This is a very common question, but it is luckily easily answered. We have to answer another (much more) important question first though:
At what age can my Labrador puppy be taken from his mother?
And the simple answer to that one is: Not before 8 weeks of age. There is usually a lot of debate over this, and essentially it is because on the one hand, if you take your puppy at 6 weeks of age, she will probably bond better with the human family. On the other hand, leaving her with her littermates and mother for 8 weeks means that she will probably be better socialized with other dogs. Also however, during that last 2 weeks, she will learn bite inhibition, which will make things easier when you get her.
Another factor is that a lot of puppies that get taken away from their mother before at least 7 weeks of age seems to be more prone to separation anxiety.
So, in a nutshell, provided the breeder is interacting with the puppies, you won’t actually get any benefits from taking the puppies before 8 weeks of age. And if the breeder isn’t interacting with the puppies, you should seriously reconsider taking a puppy from him.
Very few reputable breeders will actually let you take a puppy from them before 8 weeks in any case.
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The Humans
Labrador Retrievers are considered the world’s most popular dog. The Labrador Retriever has been the AKC’s most popular dog breed for the last 18 years running. Unfortunately the popularity has become a draw back. Because of the fact that so many people own Labradors, there are a lot of unscrupulous breeders.
Chocolate Labradors are fairly rare for a couple of reasons. The first reason is genetics, Only a couple of different pairings in adults will produce chocolate colored Labrador puppies.
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Echo & Fudge
We love going for walks, but we don’t like on leash walking… The humans are just so slow.
There’s all these lovely smells and big open spaces. It’s so fun! We just want to explore everything all at once. Sometimes we get so excited we don’t even know which way to go. The humans won’t let us lead though, they always show us where to go. We guess that’s ok though, since they are the alpha and they know the way.
Sometimes we just wish they can walk in a straight line… Every time we think we know where the humans are heading, they turn and go somewhere else. It’s so difficult to keep up with which way they want to go. Sometimes we think they might be lost.
At least the humans did let us of the leash for a bit. That was so awesome. We ran and ran until we found some cow manure. That was so yummy! Our humans were so nice, they let us have it all. They didn’t even want any! We think it was because they must have had supper already.
The humans were a bit silly as well. They kept letting us run and play, and then they would call us back and give us a few treats. Then they’d let us run and play again and call us back for one or two treats. Don’t they know that it would be so much easier to just give it all to us at the same time? Sometimes we just don’t understand humans. We know they aren’t as clever as us though, so we try to be patient with them.
Well, anyway, we have some playing to get done, so we’ll chat later.
photo credit: ZeePack
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