mumof3

People rarely appreciate it when some well meaning person comes up and tells them they are wrong and about to contribute cruelty to animals. In her head it is a wonderful idea to breed her bitch, and normally only experience will turn most people's opinions around. She would probably write you off as some sort of self important opinionated tool. If you want to remain friendly, I'd drop it if I were you. There are other, more sneaky things you can do, like report her to the local council for having an entire bitch or something like that. Unfortunately we can't always turn everyone else around to our way of thinking.

In QLD, local governments coordinate baiting programs, so they could possibly tell you where baits have been put, or at least who coordinates baiting programs in their area. Be aware that baits can be picked up by crows and carried and dropped again, meaning that they can lie outside the bait area. Baits can also last a long time if they do not get wet. Baits that end up under a log or a cow turd can last for a year or more if not destroyed by ants etc. Also, dogs can be poisoned from dead crows etc that have the 1080 poison on them. If travelling with two dogs, and one g ets a bait, seperate the dogs as the poison can be passed from one dog to another. A vet told me once that a dog who gets a 1080 bait can be saved by being placed in a coma. ggod luck

I know, why don't you just get rid of the baby? Foster it out. Spend your valuable time and resources on this dog. Sorry, but sometimes the suggestions from people on this forum re managing the child / dog mix are just ridiculous. Perhaps people just shouldn't contribute if they don't actually have kids. Good on you VA - I'm with all those who reckon you are doing the right thing. Babies come first. Babies are more important than dogs, and birds and cats. And dogs should exist in the family home to make our life happier. I really really hope that some of the judgemental comments you are getting are not hurting you. People who are encouraging you to give this dog another chance to hurt your baby need a reality check. People who are judging you for having fallen in love with a beautiful animal and gone with your heart rather than your head for once need to ask themselves if they ever made a mistake. People judging your parenting skills might not be so quick once they have their own kids. Stuff em.. And people suggesting fox terriers or any terrier breed over something like a golden retriever for a dog for young children need to go and read some breed descriptions. You are getting some good advice, and some real people out there who value babies above dogs who back your decision 100%.

VA, Don't pay any attention to negative or hurtful or judgemental posts. You are making the best decision for your family, because you love your kids. You are putting your kids needs first, and you have every right to be very very very fussy about your new dog. You HAVE to be fussy and get it right. After all (at risk of getting shot down here), KIDS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN DOGS. Glad to see you have your priorities straight. Dogs can be a wonderful addition to the family, and the right dog will fill it with little kids - but it has to be the right dog, and you can't afford allowing the dog a month or so of knocking your baby flying while he settles in. It has to be spot on from day one or it is not worth doing. I understand. I know this is a big ask of any dog that you bring into your home, but I also know that it is achievable. Good on you putting the kids first. There certainly seem to be people on this forum who don't understand that as a value. I'm sure you are able to give an excellent forever home to the right dog, but you need an excellent forever dog too. Start by stacking the cards in your favour and keeping away from any rescue with problem behaviour / lack of training / under three years of age. Consider also a puppy - definetely won't be well behaved from day one but at least you'll get the fun part of puppyhood, and be able to put in that all important early training yourself to hopefully end up with a less difficult teenager.

Don't feel bad. You gave a rescue dog a chance and it didn't work out. It is no one's fault - it is just not a match. And as a Mum, your kids come a very clear first. I have young kids too, and if I felt they were not just safe, but able to be happy and confident around a dog, I wouldn't have it either. You need a dog that has a relax mode. After you've all got over your disappointment, and decided to have another go, here are two points I arrived at when deciding upon a dog for my young family. 1- The older pup is hard to handle, very energetic and bouncy. If it hasn't had a super upbringing and excellent training, it is just a disaster waiting to happen with little kids. I decided upon a young pup because I couldn't find a suitable mature dog in the breed I wanted, and I decided that at least with a young pup I will be able to give it the training and upbringing I want it to have - I'll know it's history, and I won't be trying to "fix" anyone elses problems. 2- If you can find a suitable mature dog, they would be an excellent choice. I was very fussy, though, knowing that in a full grown dog I wanted perfect behaviour from the start - not having to fix problems because you don't get a second chance with your kids, they can get hurt or shy of dogs so very quickly. 3- Breed selection - do a little more research.

Hugs Sounds like you are doing a terrific job. You're getting advice and support when you need it. You are doing what your trainer says. Your dog is lucky to have you. You're probably a great Mum too, if you care about your kids like you care about this dog (which of course you would - more so). Amongst all this - look after yourself. Something nice everyday. Here are some ideas: Get up early and watch the sun rise. Buy a cheap coffee machine and expensive beans and have a really good cup of coffee every day. Go somewhere you really like just to enjoy yourself every week. Lay in bed on the weekend and cuddle the kids. Have dinner at a restaurant with a good girlfriend (and no kids). Sing, dance, whatever. Get off the internet - sitting around makes you feel down. Turn the computer off and go and do something that makes you feel happy. Goodluck.

Research the Brittany - this is what I have chosen for our active young family. Also, hard to go past the Golden Retriever. I love gun dogs because of their trainability and eagerness to please. Brittanies are good at agility etc. If my kids were older than they are (5, 3 and nearly 1), I'd consider a GSP too, or a Wei, but I think these might be a bit of a handful for a baby or a three year old in particular.

Glad your dog is ok. The vet sex mixup is nothing. When I was a kid my Mum was into wildlife rescue. Once I went with her to a vets to pick up an injured young golden eagle. We got there and it was a cross bred bantam rooster. The vet was quite embarrased.

I have for the first time, a pedigreed purebred dog on order with a registered breeder for a family pet. This is why I chose to go registered purebred. 1 - I think mongrels (like real mixed bred dogs) are ok if you get them as adults or if you don't really need to know what you are getting. As I was getting a dog for a family pet I felt the need to make sure that the dog fitted our needs well. I think that I might have been able to find a cross bred / mongrel adult dog to fit us if I was lucky, but given our isolated location, I decided it would be too hard to find. After choosing a breed, I felt certain I would end up getting a dog that would suit us. 2 - I considered pure bred unregistered but quickly discarded that idea. These dogs are only a few hundred dollars cheaper than registered ones and they carry no guarantee about the health problems that can be found in certain breeds. Initially I was looking at Golden Retrievers, who have the risk of hip dyslpasia. Registered GR puppies come from parents who have been screened for this condition, so you can be reasonably assured it won't become a problem in your dog. Unregistered GR puppies could come from two parents with bad hip dysplasia and could be severely affected at a young age - you have no guarantees. Many registered breeders offer a guarantee against genetic diseases. 3 - Professionalism / support / product (dog) knowledge. I eventually found (after a few phonecalls), a registered breeder who really understood me, what I was looking for in a dog and what I had to offer as a pet owner. She was terrific in answering all my questions about the breed. Her reputation is excellent. This is a lady who is serious about her dogs and has made significant financial and personal investment in advancing the breed in Australia. I started to feel that the money I give this lady buys me not only a pup with a guarantee against hereditary disease, but also the backing and support of a leading breeder. It gets me expert opinion on wether or not an individual pup is a good fit for my family. I am making an investment in the breeder. 4 - The right start for my pup. I know my pup will have been given the best start from a dietry and socialisation point of view. If you are considering buying a purebred dog, I'd suggest you spend quite a bit of time researching and talking to breeders and deciding exactly what you are looking for in a dog. Hopefully you'll find a breeder which you "click" with, and then you have a really ally. It might take a while to get a pedigreed purebred pup, but given the financial and emotional investment in any new pet, I think it is well worth while. If you are situated such that you could consider adopting a dog from a shelter, this is probably also worth considering. Many rescue dogs come vet checked, desexed, immunised and temperament tested. If you find a good shelter they may be able to give you lots of great advice and support. Puppies can be an enormous amount of work with additional feeding, recreation and training requirements. A mature dog may suit better, though I found mature dogs without "baggage" hard to find.

I quite understand where you are coming from here, but have you considered the OHS implications of running a couple of thousand of these rather nasty animals?

Don't worry, me too, I think that just means that you have a life away from the computer! My recent tweet: Check my facebook page, I've just updated my status. My facebook page: Check twitter and find out what I've been up to... Edited to Add: My recent tweet: I'm on DOL!

Haven't read the whole thread, but here is what I have learnt about fleas. Get the dog's bed off the ground. Something they have to jump up onto, with air circulating underneath and no more bedding than is necessary. Bedding should be the sort you can machine wash and hang on the line in the sunlight to dry. Sunlight soap kills fleas. Not their eggs though, but is useful for quickly and chemically free getting rid of the live fleas on a dog. I once got a puppy off someone and it was so overburdened with fleas that it's gums were white. Sunlight soap got rid of the live fleas. Poor little bugger - I took it home early (5 weeks I think) because of the terrible living conditions. Under different circumstances, and perhaps if I were a little older at the time, I would have reported the owner to RSPCA. So, with Sunlight, massage well into dogs coat and let them run around like that for 15 minutes or so, then wash off really really thoroughly. It is pretty harsh, so you don't want a trace of that left on them. Proactively treat for fleas when the weather turns warm. Get in first, before their numbers build up. It's always good to try and go chemical free, but sometimes you just have to get the big guns in for everyones sake. Remember that herbal remedies also contain chemicals and are not necessarily safe and possibly not monitored in the same way other veterinary medicines are. Flea bombs are the best - but read the directions and use enough flea bombs to do the whole house properly. Under treating with chemicals leads to parasites becoming immune to that chemical.

I THINK The purebred is the animal. The pedigree is the record of its ancestry / breeding. An animal is sometimes refered to as a pedigree "x breed", which is something of a term coined to mean an animal for which a written pedigree exists. ETA: Just noticed the Lithuanian Goat Catching Retriever - excellent piece of work. Well done. Where can I buy one?

Recommend a book about dogs - not just training, but fiction and non fiction stories too. I'd like to reccomend "Trackers" the story of the Australian Dogs of War A non fiction account by a Vietnam veteran of his time in the war as a handler of an Australian tracking dog. I'm embarrased that I can not remember the authors name but I will never forget his book and the heroic actions of himself and his dog.

This stuff is widely used in saddlery and needs no care, is easily cleaned and is nearly indestructible. However, it does not have the give, the softness or the pliability that a good quality leather collar has.

Thanks Huga! Maybe it will, but the guarantee is only for 10, ok? We do this to everything. No sharp edges on our stuff Yes, I've seen your stuff and it is top notch.

Excellent post.

On our working dogs we have usually used either chain or wire collars. Both of these handle the dog jumping in and out of troughs to cool down, don't harbour anything nasty close to the skin and are strong. The chain collars are made of a comfortably heavy guage of chain, with snap closing them. The wire collars are made out of a heavy guage fencing wire, galv wire, and have a simple loop in the two ends of the wire closing the collar around the dogs neck. They are not a collar you could take off quickly and easily should the need arise and we've moved towards chain collars for this reason. We did have a sensitive skinned boxer cross who would get some sort of skin irritation with collars, but she was fine with the chain collar. The chain is alot thicker than a choker chain and the dogs seem to wear them very comfortably. They are cool and strong and clean and smooth. When conditioning new leather, to take the sharp edges off, get an old piece of canvas (hard, roughish canvas like a horse rug) and hold it in your hand, then pull the leather through the canvas to take the sharp edges off (close your hand around the leather and pull it through) and burnish the leather nicely. Most good quality leather should get enough oil from the dog not to need any additional leather conditioning. I wouldn't use additional leather conditioner cause I feel it can harbour bacteria close to the dogs skin. I would avoid cheap leathers and only get the best quality leather if I was to use leather.

We are awaiting a new puppy from a lovely registered breeder and I am considering all sorts of things about her welfare. Something has come to mind as a result of another thread and I thought I would put it to the forum as a way of gleaning useful advice. I really want to give our pup a good start in life in every way, and this post is to do with diet. In the past our working dog pups have been fed combinations of chicken carcases, milk, eggs, and something of a stew made up of left over veges and meat from the kitchen. They may also get raw beef and beef bones when it seemed the stew was low on protein. They all grew quite healthily. One breeder put us on to feeding some added calcium, which we did with one dog (that was the last pup we raised). So what does the forum have to say about the feeding of kitchen scraps in particular to dogs and puppies? I understand that onions, corn cobs, chocolate, cooked bones and potoatoe peelings are not good for dogs. What about left over mashed potatoe and gravy, rice, roast meat, sausages etc etc etc. Left over weetbix with milk. I know some pups may be lactose intolerant, so that is to be watched for. As a family with young children, there is often lots of left over food. I'd love for some of that to go to our new pup, but only if it benefits the pup. The chooks already eat alot of the scaps, and there is always the compost heap. Are there any high alergen foods so far as dogs are concerned? Things to be avoided until a certain age??

That family will find a dog somewhere. Probably cheaply. Probably from someone who makes them feel good about buying a dog. They will possibly lie to a purebred breeder if they are determined to get a purebred dog. Is there a breed which is actually suited to this environment? Brings top mind another topic which I might start as a seperate thread.

Ahh yes the mini-retriever, suited to retrieving tiny tiny objects I'm not trying to cause controversy, I am just trying to get things straight in my mind because the more I experience in life the more differing views I encounter and perhaps engender some discussion. This seedstock is what exactly? In the case of bull arabs I means Here is a link: http://www.bullarab.com.au/ I enjoy debate too and I think it is an intelligent pursuit which fosters increased understanding.

Gee rufus, are you bashing that wasp nest with a stick or what?? I have a friend involved in trying to establish the Bull Arab breed as a registered breed in Australia at the moment. They have had to have alot of genetic testing done to show that the animals are basically related (distantly, but from the same seedstock). There is a process to register a new breed, and I think the ANKC might administrate it (not sure). Many of our existing pure breeds are developed from other breeds, and I imagine that, yes, this could occur again in the future. Or maybe someone could breed like miniature labs or something - this has been done with cattle by isolating some gene that made them smaller but otherwise much the same.

I also think that this is an interesting proposition. Why could someone not ethically breed F1 crosses? With the appropriate health checks and quality parents? This is where I am at with this line of thought: You would have no control over what you were producing. As the F1 cross can be very unpredictable, it would take many (I don't know enough about genetics to know how many) generations before you were producing reliable and predictable traits. What would be the point of embarking upon a long term breeding program to in essence create a new breed, when there are already good breeds available? It's not like you could start ethically selling pups as having "x" characteristics for your first or even first few generations. So while it may be possible to ethically breed cross breds from an animal welfare point of view, and from an minimising heredited problems point of view, it serves no purpose and does not produce a product which can be ethically marketed. In reality the price you pay for a purebred pup, given the testing its parents have had, your ability to look at the lineage and it's temperament traits etc etc, is excellent value. While we talk about perpetuating myths, I'd like to explode the myth that ALL registered breeders are ethical, and that breeding to "improve the breed" necessarily improves the breed as a pet, as opposed to improving the breed according to the breed standard which may lead to an overexaggeration of some breed characteristics.

I certainly understand why breeders do ask so many questions. I'm sure I would too if I were a breeder. But it can be daunting. I have felt like I was jumping through hoops (in some cases), and what I am trying to convey is that this may impact people's decision on wether to buy a purebred registered dog. Guaranteed if you buy from a puppymill the sales person will be smooth as anything and leave you feeling great about your purchase and that you are a perfect home for a pet. It is the difference between a business that cares about their dogs and one who is there for the money, but from the consumer's point of view all they may see is a purebred registered breeder giving them the third degree v's old mate with the adorable oodle who is all smiles.... Not sure how this could be fixed.

This is an interesting thread, and I thank the OP for starting it. I thought it was clear from the start that the OP was trying to start an intellectual debate among peers - not promote oodles. I agree with the many good points that have been raised. RE the politics which move towards restriciting dog movement - we see this in the farming sector, too. Powerful and vocal minority groups cause policy changes that are based upon votes, not science. This has been very damaging to primary producers. The voices of these minority groups also turns urban opinion against primary produces, painting them as in the large, environmental vandals. Advocacy groups for primary industries such as Agforce and MLA have instigated public education programmes to try to combat the misinformation and negative sentiment being bandied about. These programmes have to be funded by the farming community. So perhaps, if it feels under threat by politics, or by puppy farms, the purebred community will have to consider funding its own public education programme - which is very expensive. RE the oodles. I believe that there is powerful marketing out there for the oodles. The breeders are savvy sales people and willingly tell you, oh, no this labradoodle is ideal for an asthmatic as it won't shed..... After some research when considering buying a dog for our family, I found that these claims are not reliably true because of the nature of genetics. Crossing a lab with a poodle is not like mixing blue and yellow. You're not going to get green. At least not reliably. The idea of combining the positive traits of two nice breeds is very appealing but it doesn't always work. You could just as easily get all the negative traits of the two breeds. Again, education education education. Another point - the freebie back yard bred dog. I see these as a seperate issue to the oodles. While oodles are bred in puppy farms by opportunistic liars, a wonderful array of muts and mongrels are bred in back yards across Australia for a whole heap of reasons, and for no reason. These are often given away for free. Sometimes they are so far departed from any breed, they are not just a something cross they are just a dog. These are a steady source of pets for many people who are often pressed into taking a pup from a friend. More concerted efforts to ensure unregistered dogs are desexed should help limit the number of these dogs around. Many are wonderful and loved pets, some are not so wonderul or so loved and many are pts. The RSPCA. I by no means agree with everything the RSPCA does, but in a debate of what threatens the purebred dog community, the RSPCA must be discussed. The RSPCA put out a booklet called the smart puppy buyers guide, which I understand many people here dislike. I happen to feel that on the balance of things it is a positive. I've read the booklet and it is available on their website if you want to check it out. The booklet counters puppy mills by suggesting puppy buyers insist on seeing the parents, the rest of the litter and where the puppiers were raised. This is a good suggestion. It also points out the potential hereditary problems with pure bred dogs and suggests that buyers go to a registered breeder and check that the breeder has had their breeding stock cleared of such hereditary problems. This is also a good suggestion. It naturally pushes adoption from a shelter, which is a natural thing for the RSPCA to do and it would be good if more poor dogs found good homes. Lastly, the supply problem. I'm waiting for a pup, but I think it is really going to be worth the wait and worth the money. Dangerously, people breed unregistered pure bred dogs which have not been cleared of hereditary problems. These pups cost nearly the same amount as a purebred pup from a registered breeder at times. I'd suggest breeders advertise the price of their pups on their DOL adds or their websites. As a consumer considering purebred registered v purebred unreg v mut from pound v byb v puupymill, one of the difficulties I had about purebred registered dogs was not knowing how much they would cost. It was a little intimidating ringing up a few breeders when I had no idea if they were going to say $500 or $5000 - I didn't want to seem like an idiot. The other problem I had was feeling like I was at a job interview when talking to breeders - trying to prove my worth as an owner. I understand the good reasons that breeders do this, but it may have the effect of some people just going elsewhere to get their puppy without the wait, without the grilling and at a slightly cheaper price.