Why Maltese is more expensive than Shih Tzu?

Maltese are far more popular. They are one of the most intelligent breeds, very active and playful, love everyone, and are generally happy and enthusiastic. They love to learn tricks and play games, and before they were shrunk to their current ridiculous small size they were commonly used as circus performers. Having a Maltese in the house is like having a little ray of sunshine that never goes out. There is no sweeter dog than a Maltese.

We used to have a Maltese, an "older, larger model" who weighed 14lb/6kg. She died in 2005 at age 14. We decided we love Lhasa Apsos more so now all of our dogs are Lhasas, but we still miss little Valentine. She was better behaved, happier and more civilized than the Lhasas, but also much more social and energetic and she drove them crazy with her games and antics.

Maltese are great for families with children.

We had a rubber ring that she'd play "fetch" with, until we got tired and had to stop. One day, somehow, it got lost. We bought her a new one but she said, "No, that's not my ringie," and she never played that game again. Then five years later our gardener found it when he was tearing out a bunch of foliage in the front yard where the dogs never went; apparently it had bounced out somehow. She was so happy, and she played with that ring until she died.

Mrs. Fraggle used to take her around to the hospitals and nursing homes, and she would do tricks and play with the people.

Then they started breeding these "teacup" Maltese, and Elizabeth Taylor made them fashionable by carrying one around peeking up out of her purse. Now everybody wants them tiny. Instead of playing with real balls, they chase golf balls. I suppose they're easier to deal with; a real Maltese can be exhausting.

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You couldn't have a Maltese. You don't spend enough time with your dogs and you leave them locked up so they can't run around all day long. You need a Lhasa Apso. They don't do anything except bark at intruders and they don't mind being alone.

 

That's a myth. Dogs were the first domesticated animal and they domesticated themselves, attracted by the bounty of perfectly delicious food in our Neolithic middens (trash dumps) 12,000 years ago. Since then they have been bred (first by natural selection and then by selective breeding) to adapt to civilization. Because during that time they've gone through twenty thousand generations, compared to our five hundred, their adaptation has been much more complete than ours.

Within every human there still lurks a caveman who is frustrated by the regimentation of daily life, uncomfortable with the need to cooperate with strangers, and yearning for a simple life sleeping on the ground, picking berries, and hanging out with the same couple of dozen tribe-mates he's known since birth.

The dog, on the other hand, has evolved into a distinct subspecies of wolf. They have become scavengers rather than full-time hunters, with the smaller brain that a lower-protein diet requires. They have teeth that are better suited for chewing carrots than for ripping the flesh off of a kill. But the biggest evolution has been psychological. Unlike wolves, whose packs rarely have more than ten members or else two would always be fighting for dominance, feral dogs gather in huge packs until eventually one shows up with a strong enough alpha instinct to be the leader. Dogs tolerate and even welcome the companionship of strangers, even members of other species. They even readily accept another species as pack leader: the Master Hunter who hauls home an entire dead cow every month.

Sure, they'll walk around outside, but so would you on a nice day. But with few exceptions, dogs prefer to be wherever we are.

Dogs are not wild animals. They are, arguably, more civilized than we are.

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Not exactly. My point is that dogs' instincts and other psychology have completely adapted to life within civilization, because they've gone through about twenty thousand generations of natural or human-directed selection since they volunteered to become the first domesticated species.

• Almost all dogs are at least comfortable with strangers, most are friendly toward them, and many treat them like family on first contact.
• Most dogs are content to have a relatively small "home" territory and will return to it if they wander off on an adventure.
• Almost all dogs accept members of other species (at least species that are too large to be considered food) as pack-mates, and virtually all of them accept humans as pack leaders.
• Many if not most dogs will protect their human family, and any human child.
• Virtually all dogs will remain loyal to their human family despite considerable mistreatment--although some may regard it as a challenge to do battle and see who is toughest.

In contrast, with our longer breeding cycle we've only gone through a few hundred generations in that time, which has not been long enough for our instincts to completely adapt to the world we have created for ourselves. A caveman still lives inside each of us, and occasionally he feels like rejecting civilization and going back to his old ways, treating anyone outside his family as a hated and feared competitor for scarce resources, and rejecting the "comforts" of civilized life which constrain his Paleolithic behavior--everything from his job to his toilet.

How many humans do you know who fulfill all the canine characteristics I listed above, as reliably and enthusiastically as the average dog?

Humans have the same pack-social instinct that dogs have, because our species also evolved to hunt in family groups, caring for and depending on a couple of dozen people we've known intimately since birth. Our problem is that by inventing civilization we imposed on ourselves the requirement to redefine our "pack" to include first, people who lived in our little village whom we knew but not as well as our family, second, anonymous strangers who lived in our city working together for the common good, third, anonymous citizens of the same nation whom we would never meet in person, and now, people on the other side of the planet who are nothing more than abstractions to us. Our Inner Caveman has a lot of trouble with that. (And I have to add that giving those "abstractions" names and faces and voices and families and hopes and dreams has really helped us regard them as real pack-mates, e.g., the way Americans wept over the real-time cell phone videos of Neda dying in Tehran.)

Dogs, on the other hand, have completely adapted to civilization, because they've had longer to do it. You occasionally hear about an uncivilized dog, but more often than not it's one whose ancestors were deliberately bred for fighting.

I was waiting for this part. Children are not as civilized as adults and they often do things to dogs that an adult wouldn't do. The dog reacts the way he would react to another dog doing the same thing: "Hey okay, you've challenged me to ritual combat to see which one of us is higher in the pack hierarchy. Bring it on, little dude! I'll tear your head off and cram it up your butt! Yeah, do your worst! And when it's over we'll be pals again." That's a really good lesson for children: "It is possible to make someone so angry that they'll hit you--or bite you or whatever." If a child grows up believing that no one will ever hit him no matter how badly he behaves, I think that is a dangerous lesson. As a society we've decided that adults should never discipline children physically, and it's probably too early to know whether this experiment is a success. But it may be just as well that we haven't been able to get our dogs to go along with it.

In a nation with a population of 300,000,000 people, I'm hardly impressed by that statistic. That's a couple bucks a year out of our homeowners' insurance premium. And considering the kinds of dollar awards people get over stuff like this, it probably represents about ten thousand claims maximum.

To put that in context, three times that number are killed by bees, and almost five times as many are killed by lightning, neither of which are considered important risks.

One can't help wondering how many of those dog-bite injuries, fatal or not, were criminals trying to break into an establishment after it closed for the night, without realizing they were about to encounter two Doberman pinschers with spike collars? Or simply some guy trying to get somewhere with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, and her German shepherd comes running when he hears her scream?

Hell, our tiny Lhasa Apsos have bitten people we didn't like, because the Buddhist monks in Tibet bred them to be watchdogs and keep burglars from stealing the treasures in their monasteries. As pets most of them have been bred to have an underbite so they can't really do any harm, but they still have the sensitivity to know when we don't think somebody should be in our house.

So I'd like to know how many of those dogs were simply doing their job!

 

BTW, here's more information on the Maltese. As I already noted, Maltese have been bred down to be very small. Breeders want small puppies because they're more popular, so they choose the smallest females to breed. Tiny dogs are rather difficult to breed. The females often cannot carry four puppies in their uterus like dogs that are merely small, much less six like a larger breed. This reduces supply so the price increases.

In addition, the size of the breed has not been standardized so some of the puppies may be larger. This will greatly complicate the whelping process.

Some tiny breeds have other problems. Yorkshire terriers often have great difficulties whelping their puppies; all the Yorkie breeders I know take them to the hospital and have caesarian sections performed, to make sure the bitch does not die from complications. This is very hard on them so they usually only allow them to have two litters in their whole life, versus the four to six litters that most dogs can safely have. And a Yorkie "litter" may be just a single puppy.

These are some of the factors behind the high price of tiny dogs.

 

Not as much difficulty as a Yorkie; their heads are too big. But still, problems do occur. Most Maltese breeders have preparations in place to drive quickly to a veterinary hospital when their bitches are getting ready to whelp.

("Maltese" is capitalized since it is a nationality: the people, language and culture of Malta.) How big is she? I don't know if the miniaturization fad is strictly American or worldwide. Americans want Maltese that weight 4lb/2kg. When we bought one in 1990 she grew to 12lb/5kg. In earlier times, when they performed in the circus, they weighed as much as 30lb/14kg.

It would be unusual for a two-kilo Maltese to have five puppies.

In the USA they were selling for $500 in 1990. Today you would pay twice that much.

Take the advice of an experienced breeder: Raising dogs is hard work and takes a lot of time. You earn some extra income but your hourly wage is not very high. You should not breed a female more than once a year. But she comes into estrus ("heat") twice a year so you have to be organized enough and observant enough to know when it's going to happen, and separate her from the male. If you have multiple dogs you have to make sure your female only breeds with one male, or you won't know the parentage of the puppies and you won't be able to register them.

When she is pregnant you have to be able to accurately estimate the birth date (it varies among breeds, small dogs have longer gestation because it's not as hard on them). When it's coming in the next two or three days you have to take her body temperature every six hours, and when it drops to about 99F/37C it means whelping will begin within the next twelve hours. You have to be there and AWAKE until it happens, so you can help if anything goes wrong. Once the puppies start coming, there may be two or three hours between them, so the whelping could take as long as twelve hours. It takes two people to do this.

Once the puppies are born you have to tie off the umbilical cords and make sure the placenta has been discharged. This is messy work. Some females will eat the placentas and that's okay, a good source of protein.

Then you have to make sure they're all nursing well. There's always one who's a little stupid or confused or small, who has to be aggressively placed on a nipple. Sometimes you have one that just isn't doing it so you have to feed him with a baby bottle every couple of hours. You have to confine the mother with the puppies and keep them warm. Even in a warm climate they may need a heating pad to maintain their body temperature. You have to clean up their urine and feces rather frequently, and you have to let the mother out regularly. You can't let other females in with them, because they might kill them out of competition. Even a male might do it if he's not the father. This is why, in nature, a female will copulate with every male in the pack, that way they all think at least one puppy is theirs so they will protect them.

You need to weigh them every day to make sure they're eating enough. When their eyes open and their legs start to function you have to start letting them out to get exercise, and to become housebroken. Then eventually you have four to six dogs that are large enough to be a major responsibility. Then you have to invite strangers into your house to see if they want to buy one. Then you have to say goodbye to them, now that they feel like your own babies. This is not easy, and it's why we now have ten dogs.

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Then you ask yourself if the money was worth it. It's not. You have to enjoy it.