Why Do Some Puppies Go Limp When You Lift Them Up?

I was recently looking at a litter of Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppies when the 10-year-old daughter of the breeder came into the room with a friend of hers. Her friend was fascinated by the pups and politely asked if she could pick one them up. The breeder looked at the four puppies who were busily scampering around the floor and said, "Sure, just catch one and lift it gently with your hand under its belly."

The little girl excitedly moved toward one of the males and scooped it up in her arms. Within moments, however, her smile turned to a worried frown. She looked at the breeder in dismay, and then looked at the unmoving puppy in her arms, with its legs drooping like a plush toy whose stuffing has been removed.

"I think I broke it," she said with a voice that was quavering, and she looked down at the floppy and flaccid little package of fur in her arms and tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.

In reality, this child was just encountering a bit of canine behavior which occassionally puzzles people when they are dealing with young pups. One of the oddities of puppy behavior is their response when they are picked up. You look at them bouncing around the floor, playing and tousling with their littermates, running with that exuberant but still slightly uncoordinated energy and then lift one in your arms and it is as though you have turned off an electric toy. Inexplicably the puppy goes as limp as an overcooked piece of spaghetti, its muscles slack and it may even close its eyes (as happened in this case).

One of the things that psychologists and behavioral biologists have learned over the years is that strange or unusual behaviors that consistently appear in any animal species usually have, or at least had over the distant past of the species, some functional value. The argument is that no behavior can ever be fully understood without some reference to evolution. The same is the case for this bit of puppy behavior which so worried the little girl.

What she was seeing was a response that has been carried over through evolution and passed on to our pet dogs even though it is now not of much survival value. In the wild, canines, such as wolves and the other ancestors of our domestic dogs, kept their puppies safe by keeping them in their den. This is especially important if there was potential danger nearby. When such danger was detected it became a maternal imperative to get the puppies out of the open where they were most vulnerable and back to the relative safety of the burrow. If you watch a mother retrieving her pups you will see her grab them by the scruff of their necks. She will then lift and carry each one back to the safety of the den. The moment that the pup feels the support of the ground fall away, it goes limp. The reason for this is that struggling would only potentially hurt it or raise the anger of its mother. Furthermore there is a survival issue involved here. Pups who struggle might even be left behind where danger lurks, while those who do not are quickly brought out of harm's way. Given the way that evolution works, more of the pups that submit and do not struggle will survive and so the behavior becomes fixed in future generations of puppies. That genetically programmed bit of action has persisted and it remains in our domestic dogs even though they spend their puppyhood in our homes or in kennels, rather than in dens dug into the ground.

This behavior does not persist forever. Over time, the likelihood that the pup will go limp when lifted diminishes. Once the puppies enter the equivalent of adolescence, like all teenagers they will begin to actively resist attempts to control their behavior. Once they reach that phase, lifting the young dog is more like trying to hold a whirling dervish rather than a limp dish cloth.

Stanley Coren is the author of many books including: Born to Bark, The Modern Dog, Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? The Pawprints of History, How Dogs Think, How To Speak Dog, Why We Love the Dogs We Do, What Do Dogs Know? The Intelligence of Dogs, Why Does My Dog Act That Way? Understanding Dogs for Dummies, Sleep Thieves, The Left-hander Syndrome

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