General Corgi Temperament and Learning Potential
First, to be clear, I am not saying my dog is smarter than any other dog, or at least not smarter than any other corgi, but I really do wonder if dogs really are as smart as it seems. I was very sick this weekend and a neighbor, a wonderful neighbor, offered to take Sully out. Sully almost never asks to go out but I assumed she needed to go out when it was not time to eat and she met me face to face while I as lying down. She didn't make a sound just watched me hopefully. I told her that Dotty was going to take her out and she went to the door and sat there until she came. I know she has a fairly good vocabulary. When I ask her to bring me my shoes and she can't find them she goes right to them if I say "It's on your bed, under the table,"etc. Are they just really good a picking up on cues? If chimps can be taught to communicate in sign language I guess corgis are no different. Actually I use verbal and American Sign Language signs and Sully responds to either/or/both and many dog breeds are rated even higher on the intelligence scale. Blows my mind. Maybe corgis are just more eager to please. Seems odd to me that they are not more popular as pets.
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Jane Christensen on
-
Anna, I certainly understand the "heart dog" Teddy my 11 year old rescue is mine. I rescued him several years ago and he sleeps on the floor beside my bed every night. There was just something when he looked at me that even though I had at one point decided against getting him at the last minute I told them I wanted him too. I feel this special bond and think he "knows" that we were to be together...
Wynn is my 1st Corgi and is what I would call "wise" but picks up on non-verbal ques from me and others. He chose me as a pup!
Sage is so smart and well trained but does what she is asked whether verbally or signs. She is a people pleaser.
All those different personalities and traits are so interesting...
-
Permalink Reply by Linda on
-
When we went to pick up Max we were told he was strongly bonded to his male owner and then bonded with the breeder's husband while there waiting for us to pick him up. My heart knew as soon as I saw him....all 54 lbs overweight, shaved bald fluffy...that there was something special about him. My husband was concerned that Max would bond more with him, not that it was a bad thing but he would have felt bad for me. I rode in the backseat with Max for the 3 hour return trip. Within 24 hours Max was completely bonded to me. He loves my husband, loves our daughter but it's me he follows everywhere. If I go out and hubby is home Max sits in front door until I come home. Katie, bless her heart, will happily go with anyone, she is an equal opportunity love bug.
When we were first married we had our first Irish Wolfhound who we got as a rescue at 6 months of age. She was given up because she was getting too big. Duh. She was 4 when our daughter came from Korea at 6 months old. Tasha adopted Becca as her "puppy". Where that child went so did the dog. When Bec started to stand she would grab a handful of fur and pull herself up. You could see Tasha tighten her muscles so the kid could stand. But Tasha was strongly bonded to me. She was the first dog I trained obedience with and the only one I ever took to trials. Poor dog suffered 2 traumas to the head..she slid down the stairs and went head first into the closet door at the bottom of the stairs. The 2nd she must have been chasing a cat...I came home to find my kitchen table and chairs pushed all over the kitchen and a huge hole in the end of the island with her fur caught on the splinters. She began to have seizures every so often and she knew when she was going to have one. She would search me out and put her head in my lap so I would sit with her, talk to her and calm her until it passed.
-
Permalink Reply by Judith Andre on
-
I didn't think I'd ever get a dog as smart and special as Ringer ( a total character), our first Corgi who my son got custody of when he moved out. Then I got Zac my sweet, wise and beautiful second Corgi. I never thought I could go 3 for 3 and then along came Murray. He's everything I could ever want in a dog...funny and smart, knows how to work a crowd and loves playing agility with me. I have been triple blessed. The best 3 dogs ever. They all had/have huge vocabularies numbering in the hundreds and could understand much of what I say. I got them all as puppies and spent a lot of one on one time with them talking, playing, walking and just "being".
-
Permalink Reply by Anna Morelli on
-
Linda, your story reminded me of another one of our dogs. When my daughter Carla was 18 months old, I found a German Shepherd female, solid black, 27" at the shoulder and dragging six feet of rusty chain. She was standing in the middle of a 5 street intersection with a traffic light, 8:30 in the morning, no one could get through. Everyone was honking at her. I pulled over, walked up to her and everyone was cursing at me, thinking she was my dog. I got her in the back seat, near my daughter who had remained strapped in her car seat. We advertized etc, but no owner showed up. She came to consider my daughter as her charge. As a toddler Carla would open the front door and leave, the whining dog would give her away and I would rush to retrieve her. When Carla was 3 yrs old I got pneumonia and was bed ridden for 16 days. We had recently moved to a new suburban neighborhood and were still working on rules. We lived one house down from the corner. Carla was allowed to ride her tricycle up to the corner in one direction and then two houses down from ours in the other direction, as we knew the people who lived there.. For a week after I got sick Alpha was my only available baby sitter. She would follow Carla to the corner, get in front of her, block the tricycle and remain there, head stubbornly down, until Carla gave up urging her to "Move!". The child would then turn around and go the other direction. When she got two hoses down from ours, Alpha would again block her... and Carla would eventually turn around. This went on repeatedly every day. Sometimes Carla would get off the tricycle and enter the neighbor's back yard. Alpha would sit outside and wait for her. I would try to look out the window over my bed and hope for the best, as I did not even have the strength to stand up.
After a week of this and feeling like a horrible mother, I finally found a baby sitter and was sooooo relieved. The first day the sitter came, she took Carla to the playground. There Carla fell and chipped her tooth, coming home crying and with a swollen mouth.... my appreciation for Alpha skyrocketed that day :-D Alpha lived with us to age 12 and eventually chose to be my husband's dog. Angels come in many clothes.
-
-
We don't want them to be anymore popular than they are now. I believe that some people aren't smart enough or patient enough to own a corgi...corgis need good training to be a good family member and sometimes people don't want to put in the effort:(
Corgis(I believe) have both intuition and smarts...they can pick up on moods and like to learn things. Wynn greats me every time I come home with some item which is usually a shoe, it's funny because he can't wait to give the item to me...he knows when I'm feeling down and will pester me and try to get close to me. The intuition is some of what they might need for also watching a herd and knowing if something is wrong. IMO.
When I raised pups I would also tell the people to watch which one pays attention to them. There were many that came to pick one that ended up with the other sex pup as they wormed their way into the situation and won the persons heart. As Wynn did to me as a pup...I wanted a female till he walked up to me put his tiny head on my foot and fell asleep...that was it I didn't get a female as I had wanted to. Best decision I made:)
Corgis because they can outsmart people also need the rules but a firm but gentle guidance to make them a great dog.
-
Permalink Reply by Vicky Hay on
-
Right on! What's happened to the German shepherd breed is instructive. My first GerShep, Greta, was very much like Anna's Carla, and in fact saved my son's life twice. Since then I've had three others, including one of mostly German breeding. Even if I were still young enough to handle a big, powerful dog, I'd never get another German shepherd. Misguided ideas that the animal is supposed to be fiercely protective have led to genetic predisposition to dangerous behavioral traits, and widespread careless breeding has resulted in health problems that can carry a pup away in the first three years of its life or create lifelong suffering.
It would be a shame if the corgi breed were also harmed in this way.
LOL! We need to get a campaign going: every time someone comes over and dotes on how cute your dog is, COMPLAIN! Whine pathetically about how the dog is three years old and still not house-trained, how it opens the refrigerator and helps itself to the lamb chops, how it will excavate the back yard unless you have a sheep living back there for it to chase around, how much it costs to feed the darn sheep, how the dog (to say nothing of the sheep) is a walking veterinary bill...but then add that there's a silver lining, because hobbyists who buy the sheep's wool to spin yarn will also pay for the dog hair, which amounts to more salable product than the sheep produces in a year....
-
-
Vicky....good idea. I harp on how badly they shed, 24/7/365 and then I tell them about how they blow their full coats twice a year. Most people can't handle any amount of dog/cat fur around so I tell them I get fur bunnies the size of watermelons wafting thru my house. I see more and more corgis..both Pem and Cardis being used in commercials. That scares me.
Anna....not only have they ruined the GSD but they also ruined the Goldens. They are now listed in the top 10 dogs that bite. Makes me sick what they have done to different breeds. I don't like that there are several commercials that feature Irish Wolfhounds. I can see people thinking they want one until they find out they have to feed them special costly food as pups because of their size, there are particular medical problems with them and when they do start to grow they have no idea just how big they are. That's how I got my first one, they gave her up at 6 months because she was getting too big. A 6 month old Irish is bigger than a full grown GSD! The only reason I don't have an Irish along with my corgis is because my heart cannot handle their short life spans. 15 years is not long enough so 7-10 years for an Irish is something I can no longer handle.
Jane...I agree that a good part of them just knowing comes from their herding instinct. Whenever I have gone to look at a dog, be it a puppy or an adult, I just sit on the floor quietly and wait. I do the same thing with cats. I just sit and wait and see what shows up in my lap. I firmly believe they choose us, we don't choose them. And I can tell you when we drove 3 hours one way to look at Max I prayed so hard that it was going to be a match. One look in his eyes and I knew, he had my heart immediately and thankfully he felt the same way.
-
-
Linda...that's what happened with Teddy at the Humane Society. The puppy mill woman had to turn in 30 Corgis and I chose 4...all of them looked me directly in the eye BUT Teddy is still my favorite...he just melts my heart, maybe his sweetness and his ripped up ears also tug on my heart. I do love that every night he sleeps on the floor next to my bed after he says "goodnight" in his doggy way"
-
-
LOL Vicky and Linda, can I borrow some of your lines? I really do worry about their rising popularity. That's never a good thing. For years they were one of the best kept secrets. When we got Ringer about 25 years ago, 9 out of 10 people didn't know what kind of dog he was. Now 9 out of 10 know exactly what he is and many state that they plan on getting one. Yikes!
-
-
LOL! Be my guest.
Once at a German shepherd show I met a woman who really spun yarn and knitted coats, woolly scarves, and sweaters from her dogs' shed hair.
Linda, I'm really sorry to hear that about Goldens, but not surprised. It must be said that Charley, my son's white "English" golden, is a sweet dog with a placid temperament...but my goodness, he's stupid. Truly, I think there's nothing behind those vacant brown eyes but a perfect void. Additionally, he has constant digestive problems -- one vet persuaded my son the dog has IBS, but who knows -- and he was born cryptorchid, requiring lengthy, painful, and expensive surgery.
-
Permalink Reply by Izzy on
-
In my experience, it really feels like our dogs can understand us. 11th smartest or 500th smartest, all dogs have a good feeling about their masters feelings and intentions. Some just don't wanna listenxD
-
-
Jane....Max use to sleep on the bed with us, curled up between our pillows with his head on mine. Mark always grumbled that he got the ass end. I would tell him he was lucky it wasn't Katie....she can be rather "indelicate" at times and can clear a room in 10 seconds flat. He could never jump up on the bed, it's high and he just never was a jumper so he would put his front paws on the bed and I would lift the back end up and I always helped him down. With his neck now it must bother him enough getting up and down even with help. But he sleeps on the rug next to my side of the bed. Tho a real loud thunderstorm will have him asking to come up.
Izzy....I agree, it doesn't matter where they are on the intelligence scale if there is that special bond between human and canine. I've had dogs that were dumb as a box of rocks but could read me like a book, knew my moods...whether I needed cheering up or just someone to watch over me.
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next ›
Rescue Store
Stay Connected
FDA Recall
Canadian Food Inspection Agency Recall
Groups
We support...
Badge
© 2024 Created by Sam Tsang.
Powered by
