saram

Our pups love chewing on wood! Branches, furniture, pencils, wooden toys - it's driving me bonkers. I'm concerned about splinters particularly if they swallow the wood, is this a problem or will it break down in their gut. Are there safe wooden chews? Thanks

If you go to one of the online pet stores they will have all the wormers there that you can compare. We were tossing up between revolution (put on the back of the neck) and sentinal (chewable tablet) It's hard as neither of them cover everything. Our vet gave us a sample pack of the revolution when we brought our puppies home? Maybe you could ask if they have any samples?

Thanks!

Oh I would love to join in. I have just registered on flickr, how do I find DOL?

Thinking about this all the time, as obviously in the end a lot of the behaviours I'm working on I want to be habits and not rewarded. I tend to use the similar tact to what I have been told to do with kids praise always - reward at a high rate in the beginning but then come down to random reward rate, so you are offering rewards at random (obviously when the behaviour is beening performed) This has been shown to have good rates of retention with humans so hoping it works on dogs too :-)

thinking of you! Hope you have some good news tomorrow

We are going through similar issues with our boys but they tend to only "fight" over high value items - raw meat, treat ball etc regular dinner is fine. We have always fed them together - as small pups they would often happily switch bowls but we have always redirected them back to their original bowl to make sure one doesn't eat the others etc. Now they are quite happy to eat togethr out of their own bowl. We have done TOT with each seperately. I take turns in who goes out first as we are not setting dominence. One of the pups carries on a bit when I take the other out and we pop him in his crate for some time out if he doesn't settle after being told no. Basically what I have leanrt from this forum and reading else where is that dogs will fight when dominence is unsettled which causes stress so we have taken the stand that we are the dominent dog and they are both on equal footing and it is working very well. We are also getting a trainer out in the next week to give us some more long term suggestions to help keep them friendly so I will pass on any interesting tidbits. all the best

Not necessarily, our vet wormed our cat twice before we picked her up and we had to worm her again 2 days later??? She was a stray

One of our pups had very runny poos on and off for the first week or two - we did try and use the same food as where we got them from and then slowly change over to what we wanted to use. We also found out he was eating eggplant from our vege garden which I think is what was causing the runny poos. Our vet also mentioned introducing "human" food could cause the runs if they weren't mature enough for it

Yep we are in QLD and just checked the website and it doesn't say anything about having to be registered before starting :-) So looking forward to getting out of the house with the pups

Our pups love them and at 16wks those bones don't last long at all. I'm pretty sure raw chicken bones are easily digested so there isn't the same danger of damage to the intestines from spurs and such but I'm guessing pups like kids digestive systems work faster than adults so sometimes the food comes out looking similar to what it went in looking like IYKWIM

I think that could be messy I believe the idea if you want to lead them to a particular area is to keep them on lead only in that area - not sure haven't tried it myself

Oh that's easy done they've both already been castrated. I wonder if I have to register them before we go to obedience classes??? Hope not, as it is we have been told we might have to wait a month for a place in the classes

We just say toilet for everything and have also found that by poopa scooping the messes and taking them to a particualr area of the yard they always go to that area. We do have a high rainfall and very active dung beetles so it's not an issue for us to have an area of grass to dump doggy doo-doo.

Oh really - What sorts of things? Is this the "register" you have to belong to before you can participate? Would love to hear about the red tape so to speak before we get our hopes up

We do the same with the splitting the amount of dry food but I put in half a cup less at each meal and top it with some raw food (they aren't very interested in just dry food) I haven't really looked into how much - it is usually just 2-3 tablespoons but what your doing sounds very well reasoned out.

Good to hear your seeing improvents! Fingers crossed for more positives!

He is GORGEOUS! Hope everything is going well. With our pups the only time they have had an accident in their crate was when we were out a bit longer than we expected and one of them had runny poos :-( and that has been it. We did as others have suggested with timing after meals etc and the pups would tell us at night when they needed to go out - basically attention seeking whinging would settle down after a few minutes toilet whinging would escalate. Also we took our out on a lead for the first few weeks, toilet and straight back to bed, otherwise they would be running around the yard and me with my bed hair and jimmie jammies running after them

I found this very interesting as I was only sying to my OH why on earth do we have to vax the animals yearly when as people we only need it in early childhood. I was thinking at the time that I wondered if it was due to vax companies coming up with a sales gimmick a while a go and now no-one can remember why it was recommended it's just what you do. We have recently stopped vax our youngest child after our eldest was diagnoised with autism and even our dr would not be willing to risk it??? Our pups were also very under the weather after their vax, generally off their food, drowsey, diahorrea etc so I'm thinking we won't be getting yearly vax anymore!

Just had to pop in and say we were working on come yesterday with Dyson (who is being the rebellious one) and he wasn't interested so I did the look at something and pretend it's interesting and I got the funniest look It honestly said "what are you doing you crazy lady - I know there is nothing there, how stupid do you think I am" We have a lot more work to do

Thank you so much for all the ideas! It's good to know I'm not the only one with this struggle :-) Looks like I have my focus for the week - get puppies to drop on hand signal and voice command alone. I'm sure I'll be back with more questions as we practice. Again help much appreciated

Alrighty will try that! Thanks again

OK pups have got drop and have been pretty relaible for a few weeks now but will only "drop" if I touch the ground. How do I get around this? Thanks in advance

Our classes specified one person per dog so I am taking one dog each week and then doing "homework" with them both during the week.

Thanks Kritta - yes the idea is growing on actually training our boys for it - the obedience club here actually structures all it's classes around training for the trials (I don't know - maybe all clubs do ) so we shall se how they go at training