PUPPIES

CAUTION!

Like any commodity where there is more demand than there is product, there will be people selling Small Munsterlander puppies that are not SMCNA registered or have breeding dogs that are not approved by the SMCNA.  We feel that only by careful breeding and controlling litters will the Small Munsterlander breed continue to thrive as high-caliber versatile hunting dogs so we are strong supporters of the SMCNA and other SMCNA breeders.

What is the Small Munsterlander Club of North America (SMCNA)? The SMCNA is the founding Club for Small Munsterlanders in North America whose purpose is to promote the responsible ownership of these dogs. From the beginning, its members chose to follow a path apart from that laid out by the AKC. Instead, the SMCNA adopted the philosophy of the German Club that only healthy dogs, that have a good temperament, that have demonstrated good fundamental hunting abilities and that within the FCI Standard for our dogs should be allowed to breed. The Breed Counsel examines each dog for conformity and proven excellent traits before allowing them to be certified to breed, in order to pass on the high quality traits that makes this breed healthy and outstanding hunting companions.

Our kennel is listed as a Cooperating Breeder on the SMCNA website, which is also a good source of information when selecting a puppy from an approved SMCNA breeder.  We are also members and our kennel is registered with the North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association (NAVHDA).

So we began our search with questions such as why is there such a difference in intelligence between dog breeds or even within the same breed?  Is it all genetic or do environmental factors weigh in?  Our interest was piqued when we began to read of new research that showed hip dysplasia in dogs was not genetic as was commonly thought, but rather due to the puppies environment the first few weeks of life.  So we began to look for more information on the proper configurations of whelping boxes and how we can ensure our puppies did not develop hip dysplasia and found research that had been done by Dr. Carmen L. Battaglia on early neurological stimulation for puppies to maximize health and performance, also done in the first few weeks of a puppy’s life.  One particular item of his research mentioned that the exercises were done during the 3^rd-16^th days of a puppy’s life due to that being a “rapid neurological growth and development period.”  So that opened up more questions for us – what was this rapid development stage about and could it apply to other areas of the brain and specifically increasing intelligence?

This led to other tremendous resources and information, particularly a book by Dr. Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human, which followed her research into brain development and emotional enrichment.  Dr. Grandin discussed previous research done by Dr. Donald Hebb in the 1940s, a Canadian psychologist who had raised some rats in his home instead of a laboratory cage, and then later on when he tested them, his home-raised rats had higher intelligence and better problem-solving skills.  Then in the 1960s another research phycologist Mark Rosenweig did further work with rats and enriched environments and found that adults as well as juvenile brains could expand and grow new cells, which was contrary at the time to what neuroscientists believed!  Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s Dr. Bill Greenough, a professor at the University of Illinois, did work on how the brain changes in response to the environment, especially during learning.  Dr. Greenough put a control group of rats in an enriched cage with toys and other stimulation and put the other group in the normal laboratory cages with no toys and just shavings on the floor.  Dr. Greenough found that the rats in the enriched environment had more dendritic brain growth (dendrites are tiny little threads that branch out from brain cells and conduct electrical impulses into the cell body), and especially in the visual cortex of the brain.

In Dr. Grandin’s own research, she studied pigs and put her control group in the normal farm baby pig pens with plastic floors and not much to do except play with each other.  The other group was put in a “Disneyland for pigs” pen with lots of straw to root in and different types of toys to play with.  Everyday Dr. Grandin would take out the old toys and put new ones in along with fresh, new straw.  Dr. Grandin had hoped to find the same results of the researchers before her, but what she did find was surprising – at the conclusion of her testing she found that the enriched environment pigs did not have any greater dendrite growth than the pigs in the barren cage!  Dr. Grandin had tested 2 parts of the pig’s brains, the visual cortex which was where Dr. Greenough had tested, and also the somatosensory cortex, which receives information from the pig’s snout.  Dr. Grandin found that not only did the pigs from both environments have dendritic growth, but in some cases the pigs from the non-enriched environment had more growth.  How could that be?

Dr. Grandin repeated her testing with a new group of pigs and installed cameras so that she could watch the behavior in both environments when she wasn’t present.  What she found was that the pigs in the non-enriched environment had more brain growth in their somatosensory cortex than in their visual cortex, so they were getting stimulation from their snouts instead of visual stimulation like the environment-enriched pigs.  However, she discovered from watching the cameras of the pigs at night, that her enriched environment pigs slept soundly and were very calm with her during the day when she cleaned their pen.  The pigs from the non-enriched environment were hyper and instead of sleeping during the night they would root around the pen, bumping into each other and their watering devices looking for stimulation.  During the day, Dr. Grandin found that they were starved for attention and would surround her and bite at her hands when she was cleaning the cage.  So although both sets of pigs were getting stimulation and developing brain growth during the critical periods of time, the type of stimulation created either pathological behavior (non-enriched environment) or desirable, calm behavior (enriched environment).