Greytmate

Is Peter Singer a special hero of yours? Will you please stop making this thread personal? What Corvus explained is how it has been explained to me by various professionals who have nothing to do with Corvus or anyone else.

Yes, it was a knee-jerk response to you talking about which people you think are helpful and which you think are not. Nice try at silencing anyone who isn't going along with the crowd. I insist that any worthwhile dog trainer should be able to set a date in order to quantify any progress. The method is not the trainer, it is just the method the trainer is undertaking. Let's take the personal out of this. Serious problems call for serious methods and rigorous application. I can read the title. It also says "last chance'. I want to remind people of what Jelly has lost because of this dog. So this is what Jelly's life is. Her life is on hold because of this dog. And in the mean time the dog keeps hurting itself, still destroys things, and still is in danger of escaping. And nobody here wants to hear of a dog being PTS, but nobody here is in a virtual prison like Jelly is either. And nobody here feels the pain that Roo feels when she has calmed down and the nerve damage from broken teeth and skin start to be felt. I am all for all possible methods being tried for this dog. But they need to be tried 100%. If they don't work, a new method can be tried, and no good trainer should be given up on until they have had a chance to properly assess the dog and try an alternative method if known. But unless somebody is prepared to put that method on paper with a time frame to judge success, I can't see how it can be assessed. I don't always agree with the general 'two steps forward one step back' line of thinking about dog behaviour. Every regression can reinforce undesirable behaviour. As long as this dog is alive there will be people offering suggestions and coming up with new ideas. Only Jelly has the power to stop the suffering.

So you think this is about people? I thought we were talking about a particular method being used to overcome a particularly serious problem, and the effectiveness of that method. It is not about people. Please don't try to make it about that. Poor Jelly has been through enough without anyone making this personal.

Only an owner can decide. But owners should be fully informed about the possible consequences for their type of dog if they want to take up a particular dog sport . Breeds vary widely by conformation, and some are much more suited to particular tasks than others. People training others in dog sports have a responsibility to pass on information that handlers should take into account when deciding whether to take up a particular dog sport not.

Haven't paid much attention to collars but they are GAP dogs and go out in public without muzzles. What makes them have unsuitable conformation? I know they compete overseas, never seen one here and I don't study Greys so wouldn't know what makes Aussie ones different :) Racing greyhounds in Australia have been selectively bred for their ability to run fast on a course with only gentle turns. Last time I let my girl off lead she snapped her dew claw in half doing a sharp turn. This is typical of the injuries that can occur at the time, but there is also the damage being done over time to joints and ligaments that were not designed for this repeated action at high speed. The speed and the high prey drive of the greyhound multiplies the stress on the joints, even if their conformation was more rugged. If you look at the bodies of dogs overseas that are selective bred for live coursing or other activities, they are more solidly built to allow for the repeated stress of sharp turns. There are better things to be doing with a retired greyhound that don't have the potential for so much harm.

When you say sanctioned do you mean just ANKC or can it be another organisation? So they can compete but not train offlead? Unless on private land? Just curious as we have a greyhound starting flyball training and is going great but I've always been curious as too whether he could legally compete or not as flyball isn't an ANKC sport. No, unless the dog has a green collar, it is not allowed to have a muzzle off at Flyball. Australian ex-racing greyhounds have an unsuitable conformation for flyball. It is very dangerous to get them to U-turn at high speed, and injury will eventually result. A greyhound that has been trained for racing will have been trained to turn on it's natural instinct on certain cues. To train them to recall, you would need to simulate all the cues that they have been trained with and train to overcome them. Most greyhound owners don't even know what the cues are, let alone be able to set up a realistic simulation to work with. It just takes work, but the work is beyond the capability of many.

There may not be an answer. Some people have psychological problems that can't be cured, so it would be unrealistic to think that there is a cure for every dog. The only way you will know for sure whether Nek's method works on your dog is to follow the method to the letter, and reassess Roo's progress at the time interval you have chosen. Not mostly follow the method, but completely 100% follow it every single day. Nek needs to give you a time frame so you can determine the success of this method, instead of just allowing things to drag on forever with no end in sight. Have you got a written training program to follow yet? If you give this method a go and there is still no improvement, you will know whether the method is the answer for Roo or not. Nobody could say you are not making a huge effort for Roo, but not all methods are successful for all people and dogs. I really hope this method works for you.

If you listened to what she said in the first place others wouldn't have had to spell it out. I wouldn't dream of giving somebody else's pet a shock. This isn't a very nice thread.

You set up any electric device to shock domestic animals and you risk being charged with cruelty and getting a criminal record. How would you feel about somebody doing that to your cat? For the last twenty years it has been socially unacceptable to allow a cat to wander. Keeping them confined is the best way to keep them regardless of what the cat thinks it wants.

Yes. But first you have to work out what you are capable of doing. When I ran GAP Q I used to have a requirement that I was always contacted before any vet bill was approved at all. But this meant I was tied to my phone 24/7 to be able to do this. My other option would have been leave ourselves open to the adopter deciding what is an emergency and what is not, which vet they go to, and what treatment options are taken up, and just accepting that this would have a cost. You can give people all the guidelines in the world, but when they are worried about their dog they will want reassurance and help. And if you don't give it to them, you risk them consulting the most entrepreneurial vet in town to get that help. Knowing that they don't have to pay, they will have no reason to use budget as a limit to the care they want their dog to have.

Nobody here says it's well deserved? I would say that RSPCA intervention is a likely consequence of failing to manage a kennel. Worse things have happened in kennels that do not manage their intake of animals. Regardless of what anyone here suspects, Lola has made a statement about the trouble she has had in managing intake, and the changes she is making now. If she had made those sort of changes years ago, perhaps she would not have consequently had any dogs removed from her. It's not like Lola has been closed down or charged with crimes. No need to be up in arms about anything, but worth discussing how kennel management and intake policy can help avoid situations like these. Thanks Nic B and SSM for the design examples. I saw photos of a great rescue shelter in America that not only had great dog environment, but also was designed for the needs of adopters and volunteers. It all contributes to the dogs having the best possible chance for adoption, which I think is a greater goal than just to have a place where it is safe and handy to keep the dogs. :)

Yes, that's fine to save it. Feel free to fix up grammatical errors. I could have also mentioned drainage, ventilation, etc about kennels. I would like to design some kennels one day. :)

Maybe, but dog standards and pedigrees as we know them today really stem from 19th century thinking. This was a time when documenting history and scientific knowledge became really important. The pointer standard that this thread is about is interesting, because of the way it tries to rationally and objectively describe the dog and give it a score, unlike the old proverbial dog standards from an earlier era. When you think about who used dogs and what they were used for, it is likely that before this era most breed information was passed down verbally through the generations. Genetics was not understood well. There are examples of where modern historians have been able to construct some old pedigrees from their research, but I'm not sure that people actually kept records of their dog's lineage before the 19th century. Are there any primary sources of older pedigrees being kept for dogs?

This is the earliest reference I can find to a greyhound type. Although it's not strictly a standard.

Let's look closely at what it means to care for dogs correctly in a shelter. Dogs living in a shelter are a bit like humans living in an institution. Both dogs and humans thrive in a domestic environment, this is how we like to live, and how we do best. In an institution, there are factors that can contribute to a less than healthy environment that have to be dealt with. Living in close confines with a changing series of new dogs means that the environment has to be constructed in a way that doesn't harbour bacteria, viruses or parasites. The surfaces need to be very easy to clean and need to be robust as well. This applies to human institutions and to kennels, and there are codes of practice that can be followed to achieve this aim as closely as possible. If this isn't done, then there is a risk of a sudden serious disease outbreak or parasite infestation going through the whole place. It isn't about how it looks (especially not in kennels), but how the place is constructed. The resources have to be there to do this, it is not good enough to use sub-quality salvaged materials. It's a huge risk of sudden catastrophe, and therefore a welfare concern. Living in a kennel is like living in an institution in other ways. Enough mental stimulation must be provided for well-being, and this is known as 'enrichment'. Without enrichment in a person or a dog's life, their psychological health will deteriorate, and the effects can be permanent. So if somebody is managing a shelter or kennel, and has enough money to maintain the physical environment and also to sufficiently enrich the lives of their kennel dogs, they are running the place correctly. The dogs will be healthy and happy. Same as people can be healthy and happy if they are living in a very well run institution. Much easier to run a dog kennel though I think. This forum is full of breeders and others who keep dogs in kennels and who devote the time to enriching the lives of those dogs so that they are well-adjusted and happy dogs. So, another part of running a kennel or a shelter or an institution for people is having the ability to control how many are admitted in the first place. Knowing what resources are available and matching that to the numbers taken in. But the problem with dogs is that we are not able to control the numbers of irresponsible people who dump their animals. So it requires shelter people to make hard decisions about which dogs are allowed in or which ones can continue to stay there. They need to make a rational decision based on the resources available to them, because if they don't do that they cannot provide for the needs of each dog they take in. This is where the label "No Kill" can be a big problem. Nobody in any rehoming shelter wants dogs killed. But well-run shelters ensure that they never have more dogs than they do resources to care for them and that involves either turning some dogs away and/or euthanising those that have little prospect of being rehomed successfully. Lola didn't turn dogs away and didn't euthanise dogs who could not be rehomed and did not have enough resources to sustain the number of animals she was accepting. This would indicate that she was failing to manage her shelter. Be very wary of organisations that claim to be No Kill. Either they are turning many dogs away, which is fine, or they are hoarding them. If they are turning dogs away at the door, they are using the term No Kill to give themselves a marketing advantage over shelters that have a council contract to take all surrenders. This marketing advantage is based purely on manipulating emotions and disparaging other shelters, and so I regard it as an unethical management practice. A good shelter should be able to describe what they do without having a go at what other shelters do. There is never a good reason for using the term No Kill.