In connection with my breeding of bullmastiffs, I have chosen to focus quite a lot at their mentality, and therefore will all puppies have been tested by an approved mental describer before they “leave the nest”. This is done to help the future owners of the puppy, and to choose the right owners for the puppy. Very often, the interested buyers forgets to look at what the puppy holds inside their head, and focus to much on the puppy’s look. The colour, the head, a unique look ore a cute little detail, as they saw the first time they saw the litter, can be the reason why they choose an speticular puppy.
The puppytest will guide the interested buyers, in what kind of a puppy they’ll get, and how to emboss the puppy they want, from the beginning – you will get a bigger insight in you puppy’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can help and support it at the right time, and cushion some other areas of the puppy’s psyche.
The puppytest will be made when the puppy is 7 weeks old, and it will be made by an independent person.
It is a requirement, when buying a puppy, hat this puppy participates to a mental description for young dogs (U.H.M) when it is between 14-24 months. If you are not willing to do that, unfortunately you can not buy a puppy from me. It isn’t good enough for me to know, that the new owners think their dog are mentally healthy, I want to see concrete evidences.
To get as clear picture as possible, all the puppies/young dogs needs to be tested. You test the dog’s genetic properties, and have chosen the functions that is important in the human’s interaction with the dog: flock function, hunt function, defend function and the investigative function.
During the mental description for young dogs, the dog proceeds a number of moments, that increase the dog’s stress level. In that way, you can describe the dog’s ability to focus and it’s ability to abreact to what it is exposed for. Every dogs has different limits for when an action releases, and that’s what is used to test the dogs. We are actually describing the dogs limits, of how it deals with the different moments.
You describe the dog’s contact with strangers, its ability to get examined and handled by a stranger. The desire to engage in play with the testmanager and the owner. Pull-game with a cloth, desire for hunting and prey catching, activity level, surprises with visual-moment and noise-moment, district defends and its reaction on gun shots. It sounds like an awful lot of things, but non of the things are something you can or should train the dog to.
When participating to such kind of test, the only thing that’s demanded is that the dog is held in a leash, and that it are being unleashed during some of the moments. The results won’t be worse if the dog “only” has lived as a regular family-dog and never have been at a training field.
The results can be used both by the breeder and the owner.
If you have plans of puppies, you can look at the result and use it to choose a breed partner, and even though you aren’t thinking about breeding, it is always nice to know how the dog react to some of the things it are exposed to in the everyday life.
In the Danish Bullmastiff Club there is a certain ideal profile of how we think the race should be. Of course, all dogs can’t be perfectly identical with the ideal profile, but in the breedingplans you can strive to set a certain standard, just as we want our dogs to fit the standart that describes the bullmastiffs look.
