raineth

What a gorgeous boy!

Taking a rabbit to a dog park is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. It is really very worthy of the head banging emoticon.

Thanks guys :) Zombie bait, he is such a darling we are so lucky to have him :)

They are both such doofuses :D Both going a little grey now! She looks like she's being very submissive to Digby here, but she was actually watching a bird. Anyone who knows Delta knows that submissive is not something she does :laugh:

Clover is gorgeous! All these old dogs look to be in fabulous condition! I'm very impressed with them all :)

Nawww look at that face though, I bet he makes up for all of it :) Oh lord! We had the horse thing happen a couple of weeks ago! There is one lone paddock in our suburb with a horse and Del has been nuts about horses. I desensitised her to the horse in the paddock but when she saw him being ridden out the front of our house it was an entirely different story! She hooowwwled and hooooowled! I worked the photo thing out

oops yes sorry I just realised I made it sound like he passed away young, but I meant to refer to how our dogs are with us for a short time compared to our life span :)

aww he's lovely Pers and I'm really glad you had each other, even if it was just for a short while :)

I really like the way you frame that Hankdog :) A trick I use is to ask myself what the life lesson is that my dog is teaching me. It's often to accept beings for who they are and that nothing is perfect :) Well done to you and Jake doing so well at the garden centre! Sounds like he put all the things you've been teaching him in to practice How long have you had Jake for? I am doing a lot of BAT with dogs behind fences and like you, I've found them to be hugely beneficial. There is one dog who doesn't bark at us from behind the fence - a gorgeous pied Staff and just like Del half his face is black and the other half is white. He doesn't bark at us but I can tell he's not really happy about us being there either so I always keep an eye on when he's had enough and move on. If I see his owners out I'll ask them if they would mind if threw him some treats so he might enjoy it a bit more :)

sorry I know it's a serious subject but must be my bad sense of humour

Thank you. :) A couple of weeks ago OH decided to take us on a walk he had put together from Google maps. He never thinks to check the terrain. His track degraded into a goat track up the side of a steep valley, more climbing with hands and feet than walking. The boys loved it, though. I hauled myself over the last boulders and helped E up, but it was too high for Kivi because he needs more momentum than Erik. So Erik and I wandered around on the ridge until we found Kivi and my OH a marginally more civilised path up. I was crouching there having a breather with the boys when OH got to us and snapped this photo on his phone. I love it. Chicken camp was great fun, despite our chickens being duds. Met some great people, most especially Wobbly. :) Terry Ryan knows everyone who is someone in animal training! She is a great teacher, and very easy on her students. If there's a chaining course next year I'll do it. I am just putting the last touches on my thesis. 245 pages and I'm currently waiting for the 707 references to be formatted. Thank the lord for referencing software. Erik and Kivi are telling me it is time to take them out somewhere. We took them to the beach yesterday and Erik was terrific. Best he's ever been. We even bumped into our retriever friends from the park, who he is completely nuts about chasing, and he managed to leave them be. Once he got the initial chasing frenzy out of his system, that is. We'll keep working on it. ETA Where in NSW are you, Raineth? Maybe we can find someone for you? Grisha Stewart has some kind of social network set up where people who want to do BAT setups can get in contact with other people wanting to do BAT setups. It seems to work well. I wonder if there are enough people here do set something like that up? Glad to hear chicken camp was fun, and sounds like also a good networking opportunity. I just googled it and it sounds like a lot of fun! I bet I could use the help to refine my clicker skills. Maybe one day! I'm in Wagga Corvus. I can always fall back on the dog club here; and I think that's what I'm going to have to do. There are still a couple of other people that I think might agree to a set-up. It's just difficult because 3 of them are old men who are all hard of hearing, it makes it tricky you know? Which is why I haven't asked them yet- because it's a fair amount of effort just asking them how their day has been. One of these guys may also have dementia (well for the last 3 years he's been asking me the same questions and is still surprised at my answers). They all have really relaxed dogs though!

Today was meant to be the day we did a set-up with Del but the people I'd organised to do it with didn't respond to my texts this morning and didn't turn up. Oh well, I'll just keep looking I guess. It's so hard to find people for a set-up because they need to both be willing and have a dog that's calm around other dogs. Apparently people in who meet these criteria are not in proliferation in my area. ETA: Oh forgot to say I'm keen to hear how the chicken campers went!? Hankdog, well Del is actually a bit special looking but we love her I'll see about getting a photo up :)

that sounds really stressful for you and for him Teekay, I really sympathise. Grisha Stewart talks about thresholds and how when there is more than one stressful thing going on in the environment they add up. It was probably both the pain and the different vet that just pushed him over the edge. All the work you've done at the vet still sounds like it helped a lot. I'm interested to get Delta a muzzle too. Although she's only ever reacted in self-defence it worries me if a much smaller dog attacked her that she could do disproportionate amount of damage. I had a look at the local pet stores though and there was nothing that fitted. I might have to check out the K9pro ones too.

I don't really know what you're getting at. Gillespie doesn't appear to have an agenda and scrutinises the quality of research that has been published in journals. He doesn't claim to know everything, and in some of his explanations he points out that not enough is known about certain aspects of nutrition. Just because I live in Tasmania does not mean I live out in the bush... Cooking... preparing... same thing! Either way it takes more time than I already don't have. I may not cook for myself, but I do eat reasonably healthily. Just in regards to Gillespie, have you ever looked at what Dieticians say about his work? I don't know what job you do, but I spend a fair amount of time reading scientific articles. Part of why scientists do research is to build a 'body of knowledge' about a particular phenomenon. Each piece of research fits into this body of knowledge, and there will be variation and sometimes contradictions. That's why it's important to look at the body of knowledge developed from many research reports, and understand how their methods and findings fit into what's known about the phenomenon. Picking a few research reports here and there and interpreting them to suit your argument is not a good way to develop a body of knowledge; yet that is what Gillespie did.

they come from the worst breeders!

That's terrible Nekh I'm just saying that under most western world conditions, there is now way I would judge the merit of a breeder on whether they give their dogs filtered water!

So 13 out of 24 disorders showed similar prevalence in mixed breeds and purebreds. 10 out of 24 disorders showed more prevalence in purebreds than mixed breeds. 1 out of 24 disorders was more prevalent in mixed breeds than purebreds. I find her questionnaire highly dubious. I don't think a breeder who feeds raw and gives their dog anti-oxidants necessarily any better than one who doesn't. And what's with "I provide my dog's with a detoxification protocol" and even more bizarrely "I provide filtered water for my dogs." Due to this nonsense I would want to rad that scientific paper for myself rather than take her/his word for it.

Human's height etc has changed due to better nutrition, no reason animals wouldn't be the same. Times on the racetrack have improved, people have got better at training but the feed has also got better. yes I'm not wondering why they have changed, just responding to the previous posts' discussion about how breeders of giants grew their puppies before good quality kibbles were developed :)

I don't know about other giants but Danes' conformation seems to have changed significantly over the last 150 years or so. Or at least it seems to me to have done so from the searches I've done for historical photos and drawings. Danes seemed to not be nearly as tall as they are now. In fact many of them seemed to look closer to what Dane x mastiffs look like today. Maybe the increased height has means they generally require a more careful puppy diet than they used to?

Fang, If you are really interested in this stuff it would be better to find proper scientific papers and not rely on David Gillespie. Try Artemis if it ticks all the boxes. If it doesn't agree with him then I really think you should look into raw. You don't need time to cook, you don't cook anything - its raw :) Most of the stuff you need (if not all) can be found at your local supermarket. Variety is the key. Things like hearts, liver, kidneys, chicken feet, chicken necks are all good food for dogs and very cheap.

That's a good point Wobbly, I guess I get the impression that you have to do it very much in the exact way. But it makes a lot of sense to focus mainly on whether we are seeing progress or not and change things if we aren't. On another note good luck with your surgery Wobbly. Hopefully the OH won't set things back too far :) its nice she wont just be stuck at home, that's something :) Yes Del is rubbish at that too :laugh: I know what you mean, sometimes it really looks as though she's thinking "there's a thing I'm meant to do in this situation...what is it again..." I know that's anthropomorphising, but its just what it looks like to me! Since Corvus really put me on to this notion of arousal I'm seeing everything in relation to it. It's weird, its not as though I wasn't aware of her being like that, I mean how could I not be, you really notice when your 50kg dog is an excitable doofus. But I just hadn't quite thought of it that way before. I kept thinking of it more in terms of impulsivity I think.

Great set of photos Lisa! I love funny greyhound ears. Nova looks like he's taking it all in his stride gosh he's cute isn't he - just sooo fluffy!

yay! I hope it was a big success? looking forward to photos if you have any :)

oh yay! thought I'd have a stalk in here to see if he'd arrived yet... he has and what a cutie!!!

I'm just not anywhere near knowledgeable enough to get into the more technical discussion that's been going on. But I'd like to give you all an update. Improvements: Delta is way more relaxed out on our walks. She is turning away really nicely in situations where she previously would have planted her bottom and turned into concrete dog. We were surprised by (yet another) offlead dog the other day, we both only became aware when it began barking at us from about 5 metres. Because it was so close and unexpected she did her sit and turn to concrete routine but then I called her and we ran away BAT style. She definitely now thinks that turning away is better than sitting and staring :cool: Other stuff: I looked up BAT set ups on youtube and now I'm uncertain as to whether I have been letting her get to her choice point too late. She hasn't actually had a reaction, but she does seem more aroused than the dogs doing BAT with Grisha. I know Grisha talks about dogs who like to gather information and I always thought that's what was going on. She sees the trigger and becomes alert to it, watches it quite intently for about 5 seconds then she turns away. But all the dogs doing BAT on youtube seem to watch for less than a second. So I spent our walk around the neighbourhood today trying to work out whether I'm doing it correctly or not :S I tried doing the BAT with treats on our walk the other day and we ended up getting further away from all the dogs :laugh: So I'm careful about that now!