Hi folks. I'm new here. I have a beautiful sweet wonderful German Shepherd, Cat-dog (her screenname), who is around 4-6 years old. I adopted her from the local shelter May 2020 after the loss of my two prior dogs (Moose-dog - 15yr shep/poodle/newfie and his sister Bat-dog - 11 yr old shep/beagle/chow/sharpei/corgi/boxer/german shorthair). In February, after months of looking, I adopted an almost 8 week old puppy who was thought to be a border collie mix. I was looking for a young puppy as Cat-dog is fearful of strange dogs and was mothering the cats. Tornado-dog was the "chunkiest" of his litter - 10lbs the day I got him. I had suspicions about his breed mix, so I got his dna tested (I love that we can do this now). He is actually: 40-60% Parson Russell Terrier 10-25% shih tzu 10-25% collie 10-25% pekinese In reality, his personality is 100% jrt and his size will be BIG. He is now 15 weeks and weighs 25lbs. The guesstimate is that he will grow to be about 86lbs unless I can convince him to stop (haha). So, I am here to refresh myself on all things jrt so I can raise Tornado-dog to be a good Giant JRT. Fortunately, his sister Cat-dog loves him and is very patient with him. She's also big enough to handle a growing Giant JRT. Here is a photo of him after the tornado in the living room blew over...
So, as Tornado-dog is growing we are seeing the difficulty of his breed mix. JRTs are well known as being "a big dog in a little body". This usually means they are tough, outgoing, hyper, and tenacious. They are also bouncy, mouthy, and jumpy. With Tornado-dog, he has the "snortimer" behavior where he burrows into you or the furniture or the ground to snuff out smells. With a 10-15lb JRT it's not a big deal. With Tornado-dog it's a big dog doing it and can be overwhelming. The other issue is that his brain thinks like a JRT in that it thinks he has a little body. So when he does stuff like jumping, he miscalculates the amount of spring in his back legs and misses the target. He doesn't nip, but he is mouthy. And he does jump at you to get your attention. It's a fine line between controlling behavior that can be scary in a big dog and not denying him his instinctual behaviors. He gets his last puppy shots on the 20th and then he and his sister will go to obedience school. She is going to work on her dog fear, he's going for the obedience - although he is pretty good already. I suspect he's going to be a bit of a challenge for the instructor. Training a hyped out lab is a lot different that training a giant JRT is going to be.
