Understanding Weimaraners: Intelligence, Energy, and Commitment
My first Weimaraner ate my couch in three hours. Not like ripped it up, ate it. Cushions, everything, scratch to the gizmos, and he was only 8 months old.
I’ve trained dogs before. Labs, a German shepherd, even a stubborn beagle. I thought I knew what I was doing.
That dog made me feel like I didn’t know what I was doing. That was the point I realized that everything I’d read about this breed had undersold the reality by about 300%. These dogs are smarter than you are ready for, which in itself is part of the problem.
People say Weimaraners are smarter than other dogs, like it’s a positive. It’s not. Or at least, not the way you think.
Intelligence Without Obedience
A very intelligent dog is not one that learns one command on the first, two on the second, three on the third day, and then obeys it seemingly without thinking, forever. A true intelligent dog is one that can sense what you want it to do, determine whether that is acceptable according to what it wants, and then make a decision. Usually the wrong one.
My Weim grasped “sit” in about four repetitions. Wonderful, right?
Next three weeks he would decide about when he would consider a sit necessary. Food in hand? He’d take a sit before you even completed the sit command. Nothing in it for him? He’d look at you like you’d grown an extra eye in your forehead. This is where most dog owners fail. They assume the dog doesn’t understand.
The dog does. The dog just doesn’t care. This is a very different training issue, and most of the standard advice doesn’t help much.
Exercise is Non-Negotiable
Exercise isn’t optional, and you’ve probably not done enough. I know you’ve heard it: “Weimaraners are very energetic.” You’re nodding along, thinking that your more-than-a-weekday-hour walk and a game of fetch is probably fine. It isn’t.
They were developed to search out prey all day long. Not for an hour. All day, every day.
Their natural energy level is about the equivalent of eating three cups of caffeine and seeing a squirrel. When I tell people their Weim is “untrainable” or “won’t focus,” my first question is always about their dog’s exercising routine. More often than not, the dog is a whirling dervish because they have that amount of energy to burn, and it has to go somewhere.
You can’t instruct a dog vibrating from unspent energy. Their mind just cannot focus. It would be as though you were to try and teach someone calculus, but they urgently needed to pee.
Of course you could do it—it’s just hard to concentrate if you can feel your bladder pulsing at the backs of your knees. I’m not saying you need to run a marathon every day. I am saying that a minimum of an hour’s worth of actual exercise every day—running, swimming, driving fast across the lawn in a little red wagon—is essential, and not a stroll in the park, not time in the lead while playing gentle fetch, not passively strolling across campus an hour before dinner for the second time this week, not that.
You also need time for them to think. Crossword puzzles, jack pitting, nose work, agility—anything that challenges them intellectually counts here. Weimaraners are so smart that a tired Weimaraner is a trainable Weimaraner.
An under-exercised Weimaraner is a side-eyed, furry expletive.
Separation Anxiety and the Velcro Dog
Separation anxiety isn’t a bad thing—it’s a defining feature of the breed. Here’s my opinion I will defend to the death: if you work away from the home for eight or more hours daily and live solitary in your apartment, a Weimaraner could honestly be classified as battery acid.
I’m not trying to keep you from owning one, but I have seen, too often, these dogs ending up in pounds because people just didn’t know what they were signing on for. Weimaraners form very tight bonds. Like, alarmingly tight bonds.
They were selectively bred not to function as strong, independent working dogs, but rather alongside hunters, not as lone operators like the beagle. They crave your constant proximity, and that is why they earned the nicknames “Velcro dogs” and why that couch of which I spoke earlier was masticated so thoroughly—I left him alone too long too early without proper separation resistance training.
You can train separation issues but you can’t stop. Gradual departures, proper crate work, using training techniques to promote cohabitation, not abandonment, are the necessary tools here. You will always be leading and managing the trait, never eliminating it. Occasionally Weimaraners can be a little bit better than other individuals here and there, but I honestly can’t tell you why some seem perfectly fine to go into a crate multiple times a day, while others just cry the moment you leave the room.
Managing Rather Than Training
It is always observed that an exceptional Weimaraner owner is going to have a bunch of various extreme behaviors, when compared to the dog in traditional levels of training. That’s because you enable the dog to push way past the normal limits, like with the solid, sensible motorist who finds that her high performance car is about equal to the speed she can go on this road comfortably.
Your average Weimaraner wants to test every boundary and reach each limit; not out of malice but simply because they want to see what has changed and what hasn’t. It’s not “bad,” per se, but it means that you’re living and working in ways not in usual terms. That means that even if you get a “bad” Weim, you can’t treat it that way.
Managing rather than training. That means dealing with some social problems with an adult differently than you would a younger dog. It also means that if you have a “bad” Weim, it is possible to work with them, but there needs to be more adaptation on your part.
Think about it like a question of calculations; it would involve a different set of variables for certain breeds rather than simple equations. The fact is, their intelligence means that they are always challenging the limits of expectations, even when you already think you’ve got it right. Not that they are bad.
They just want to push past what you think you want out of them. That eventually turns them into phenomenal dogs, if you adjust to what they need while they are still a damn handful before they’ve even become a noteworthy handful.
Is a Weimaraner Right for You?
The bottom line is this:
- Can you keep up with this dog?
- Do you have the time and energy to take said dog where it needs to go mentally and physically?
- Are you prepared to remain patient for its improvement even when it may seem there isn’t any?
- Do you enjoy dog training or is it an obligation?
If you’re answering no to any of those questions, I suggest you look at all your other options. I’m not saying it to try and critique you. I just really really love this breed, and after what that Weimaraner did to my house, I was determined to get a second one.
This was not so easy, and it only succeeded because I changed everything about my approach to training and about my time commitments. It must be said that the Weimaraner did not meet me halfway. I had to go to them.