Staff'n'Toller

I have been at the deckchair cinema a couple of times when it's been a damp night and hearing the frogs all around you at the movies is the most awesome experience (well for froggy people like myself ).

Change his food. You can try another super premium (Royal Canin do one specifically for Labradors) or there are lots of threads here about raw feeding. Are you adding anything? Oats? Pasta? Canned food?? If you change to another super premium and he is still bad then you need some medical investigation. How old is he?

Awesome pics! Do your Red Eyes live in the same tank as your GTF's? Do you find them as handleable as GTF's or flighty?

Have had the best results with Advantix, highly recommend you try it to see if it works.

Hi Daphne, what are the main issues? I work at a clinic in Doncaster, I think our Vets are great, particularly at workups or further referral if needed. Are you unhappy with where you have been going? You may need to PM me.

Panda is very striking! Zara is looking prettier all the time.

As long as you don't have an invermectin sensitive dog then side effects start to happen at about 10 x the dose. My Kelpie x definitely ate 6 heartgard chews once, no problems.

It's not the norm, maybe 15 years ago but not now. The dogs we keep in overnight are generally very ill (but stable) or on heavy painkillers so often aren't aware anyway, but if the anaesthetics used are good then I can't see any conscious young dog being happy about being left alone. There is a clinic up the road from us that still do it for speys and we often have people ringing around to see if it's normal, generally I think they have their animal desexed at another clinic and then go back to the regular one after that.

I have three options for the next dog Aussie, Toller or another Stafford and I change my mind about once a week.

Oh right, is it an open forum? I must wander over sometime. I try to limit my dol and facebook time due to my addictive personality.

Because she'll physically scruff her pup for certain mis-demeanours. That's P+. So the only quadrant she doesn't use is R-. I'll pay that because I forgot about the scruffing. I haven't personally come across any 'worshippers' who make those claims and I agree it seems extremely hard to take on. Maybe I am just sheltered. Perhaps it is all semantics and we are just too caught up in it? Perhaps we are too caught up in giving each training method a label, and maybe it doesn't matter that much anyway. I know with my classes I explain that it's reward based, using food but with a view to be able to remove the food and use other rewards, but that there is a place for corrections in dangerous and/or life threatening situations or in situations where trying to extinguish unwanted behaviours by P- has not been successful. *gasp for breath* I don't feel I can narrow it down any more than that but for the most part my clients are happy with the explanation.

This sort of muck can only come from a PP trainer. Ian Dunbar certainly isn't PP and AFAIK neither is Kelly Gorman, so who wrote the article for dogstardaily? I believe balanced is a smoke screen, I always have thought it was but professionally and personally I'm not interested in starting debates about it here. I wish we could stop using PP here because to date I only know one trainer who is and even then I have my doubts that she is. I would call myself reward based, as would most here and I can't see why we can't leave it at that. I can't see why Corvus can't call herself training in the R+ and P- quadrants only....??

Kivi is one dog.....he is not representative of all dogs, he is not even representative of all dogs of his breed.

If it's the links you use regularly then that's probably your answer. However I remember (more than 10 years ago ) that if it was happening to large dogs wearing the large size, often dropping back to the medium size with more links fixed the problem.

Dogs fed on barf should be easier to train as they are expending energy eating bones, using more energy in digesting raw food, getting regular outlets for their need to chew, and not consuming any extra colours/flavours/preservatives that are not needed.

Awesome!

My Stafford girl was also off her food for a few days but turns out it was a bit of gastro. I did immediately think "here we go" as she was picking up the dry then spitting it out, then eating it rather slowly. 4 Legs is not too bad really, I'm happy to feed mine Tucker Time roll if she goes off the dry, I'm actually happy to cook her food later down the track if that's what she'll eat. I know it's much better if it's all raw but I'm sure cooked mince and vegies is much easier for the oldies to digest.

This is good since I don't do well with repetative training either They won't even do an hours' class, more like 15mins then you need to pull. They can also be really blonde and then suddenly catch on to something you've been trying to teach for ages. ;) I've had it really easy before, I had dogs who loved doing agility for the hell of it, Geordie makes me work very hard as it must be highly motivating for him. As it says on the 'Top 10 reasons' list, if you want the Labrador "I love everyone, everything, want to play with every dog" Tollers are not that sort of dog. Geordie loves to play with the other dogs here at home but out and about he'd prefer to parrallel play and fetch balls etc. They are a great breed though, very quirky. I admire Aussies too, they seem the most similar in size, coat type and temperament with some differences.

I think it's a wait and see thing... I knew a nurse who had a Rotti and at the time he was snorting up clots and worse, it settled down though and then nothing for quite some time.

Do you know if the parents were DNA tested and what the outcome was?

Thanks SNT - as luck would have it, she was at work last week Gave us some great tips, but like I said, looking for more ideas seeing as there have since been two more incidences Got to find out the 'why' and 'when' first before I can come up with a more appropriate plan for the interim No probs, I kind of figured you'd probably already had contact with her. Thought I'd just throw it in there.

You might wanna email Kerry Haynes-Lovell, semi-retired sea world trainer. Runs the clicker training and other species training for the delta course. She has lots of experience teaching very large animals basic care routines etc.

You probably won't need a cue word specifically, otherwise they may not ever ring it unless you tell them to. With your scaredy dog I would try ringing the bells muted by a tea towel and see which of the ones she reacts to the least. Here is a step-by-step for you. Clicker solutions- ring my bell. Where the article says 'click' you could say 'good' or 'yes' in a happy tone, if you want to use a clicker by all means do that but you'd need to do a little session with each dog doing a single click followed by a treat for however many repetitions it takes each dog to look at you expectantly when they hear the clicker. ;)

Ditto.

Original Benadryl is fine also. I would try the manuka honey first though if you can get your hands on it.