How to Care for a Golden Retriever

Video Transcript

"I'm Nancy Frensley and I'm with the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society in Berkeley, California and I'm a training manager. Today we are going to talk a little bit about the Golden Retriever. The Golden Retriever is America's pretty much number one all around great family dog. They started out as being bred to be bird dogs to be retrievers for hunters, whatever, and most of them do retrieve. I think the thing to remember about caring for your Golden is that 1. they're going to be big so you need to give lots of obedience training. You need to start early teaching them to walk beside you and 2. they're going to be using their mouths a lot. A dog that has been bred to be a retriever does a lot of experimenting with its mouth. They like to pick up things. They like to carry things around. Most of them have very gentle soft mouths when they are adults but when you are training and giving them treats they can be real land sharks so you might need to teach your children to give them a treat. I think I have one here, to give them a treat on an open palm like this until they learn to take it gently and that way they won't be scary to your children. Golden Retrievers are generally excellent dogs all around, super friendly with dogs, super friendly with people. It's been rare in my practice of 30 years that I've seen a Golden Retriever that has behavior problems but if you start off right from the very beginning, if you understand they're going to need to use their mouths to learn about their world then you are going to be on the right track."