baykinz

"Innocent until proven guilty" isn't quite what I meant, but in any case if they had to jump through that many hoops to get their 4 dog permit), the enclosures on their property may already sufficiently comply with dangerous dog requirements (I don't know where the OP meant they get locked up at night, in runs or in the house). In which case the dogs could have been declared and be back home (but in their enclosures) and the only notice would probably be when the required signs went up on their property.

I think this must be the same incident as I read about in the paper this week. That said, as I recall, two specific dogs were being investigated/believed to be responsible but no action had been taken against the dogs. Did anybody actually see those two dogs kill the pony? Is there much they can do without proof if the owners say "no, no, couldn't possibly be our dogs they were locked up as always"? If it happened at night and nobody saw, there may be trouble proving it was those specific dogs in order to get them declared, even if everybody's absolutely sure it was them.

I couldn't work out how they are self warming.Do you know they are heated? Those look like they just have a particular kind of insulating material inside which captures the heat and retains it in the pad so the dog is lying on something warm. It's probably not as warm as something you plug into the wall or heat up in the microwave, as it is just using the dog's own body heat and some will inevitably be lost (especially if your dog is a restless sleeper and tends to get up from their bed then come back during the night). They aren't heated by anything other than the dog lying on them. I tried, for a while, a microwave one similar to what Ptolemy posted and it didn't stay warm for the 10 hours they claim, but by the time it was wearing off, morning was warming up so it worked quite well.

Thank you! They seem to be getting along a lot better than their namesakes so far, but I suppose they couldn't really get on any worse XD Here are just a couple of photos from today. Investigating a bug together. Eating their bones. As Tesla eats dinner in his crate, this was my first chance to see if Edie would have any issues with food and other dogs, and fortunately it all went well. This is a lot closer than Tesla ever got to his other doggy friend when they had treats, so he's definitely gaining confidence around her. Edie can chew up her bone a little bit faster than Tesla, but not by much. He has jaws of steel.

Edison ('Edie') is a 9 month old ACD cross who was a stray before finding her way to an RSPCA shelter. We adopted her as a friend to my terribly lonely Tenterfield Terrier, Tesla, after he had to say goodbye to his previous doggy friend. These are some pictures from her first day with us. The shelter staff told us she lived outside at her foster home and hasn't been toilet trained, but she definitely knows to go outside to toilet (can't use the dog door, though), so she must have been trained a little before she became a stray. In general she seems happy-go-lucky, but she's deathly afraid of cars and mowers. I didn't get many photos of the two together, as Tesla's still being quite reserved with her. Edie, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to follow him everywhere.

I don't think anybody is saying the computer made her ill. A tragedy in her life affected her mental stability and the computer just happened to be how that manifested itself. Sometimes mental illness is over-diagnosed but that doesn't mean there are no genuine cases and without knowing much more intimately the details of this case and this woman I don't see how anybody can say she was definitely not sick. Getting help can be astonishingly hard for somebody suffering from mental illness and I am surprised that the school/s of her children did nothing. My mother is a teacher and at every school she's worked they make an effort to investigate if children come to school regularly unwashed or without clean clothes or smelling or without lunch. There's no way these kids didn't smell awful with the state the house was in, even if they were laundering their own clothes and packing lunches, and their school should have looked into their situation and taken action.

If you're within Melbourne (or Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide or Perth) Pookinuk stocks both Nutro and Artemis has a flat rate of $5 on shipping for food orders, which is pretty rad considering how much some of the bags weigh.

I think it's pretty obvious I disagree with you about how effective your proposed measure would be as a preventative. Why do you think a dog ban would reduce much other than dog registration? I've outlined briefly why I think these kind of individual ownership bans won't be implemented over BSL. How do you propose your preferred measures are implemented effectively? If you have a great idea on how to make this kind of thing work I'd genuinely like to know.

I've never been able to read the name on a dog tag without already being close enough to the dog that I am touching it. I have the dog's name and a contact phone number on mine.

The solution I saw positioned by you, Lo Pan, was one of giving out bans on pet ownership. Forgive me if I missed something else, but I did mention this suggestion briefly in my other post I think. Giving people 'dog bans' on ownership will not protect the people or animals involved. All a dog ban would prevent in action is a person from registering a dog, not from owning it without declaring it to their council or relevant authorities in the case of a ban, and at any rate that sort of scheme requires a person to have already committed and been charged with some offence related to the neglecting or abusing of an animal or the owning of a declared dangerous dog. It's a punitive measure and not a preventative one. The only way individual dog bans could work was if the government had an army of free volunteers going around to every banned home constantly checking for animals. From a political and administrative point of view it costs a lot more money to employ a whole bunch of people to enforce individual prohibitions than it does to prevent the animals from coming into the country in the first place, and from a legislative point of view it's a lot more legally clean-cut and concise, without opening up any opportunity for individuals to claim bias or discrimination against them in the handing out of penalties or for convictions and penalties to be misapplied in any way. I'm sure you know what a shambles the application of even our current animal cruelty laws can often be. Unless there were some extremely compelling evidence indicating the astonishing efficacy of a pet ban penalty system, there's little to no incentive for legislators to further complicate animal welfare laws. In the eyes of most people who could have a hand in potentially changing this legislation BSL is an elegant, pre-emptive solution to both the real problem of inappropriate owners looking for 'fighting dogs' and the perceptual problem of the public reaction to these dogs and their possible introduction. Individual assessment of suitability for dog ownership is not an elegant solution, because it is unenforcable, potentially subjective and relies upon some infraction being committed before it can do any good.

It is not possible to stop irresponsible people from owning dogs. People with a dog ownership ban would just not register a new puppy, the same way so many people with a revoked license keep on driving without it. It is not possible to police dog ownership so closely and so effectively as to prevent anyone from raising a dog incorrectly, or owning a dog when they shouldn't. I agree with Adnil. I think there are two places interest in these breeds is majority generated and neither of them are the average responsible-but-not-particularly-'doggy' pet owner. There is interest from 'dog people' like those on this site, certainly, but there will also be interest from the same people who call and email breeders of staffies, rotties and gsds asking if they can 'pick the most aggressive of the litter'; the kind of people who hear 'dangerous dog' or 'fighting dog' and prick up their ears for all the wrong reasons; people who think it's funny to throw empty beer cans at their chained up dog and watch him go nuts barking and snapping and pulling at the end of his chain. And you can't stop these people from owning dogs. Even with 'dog bans' you couldn't stop them unless they had been formally charged with abuse/neglect or had a dog harm a human in the past (and that would only stop them from registering the animal, not from picking a pup out of the paper, or getting one off a friend). BSL rubs me the wrong way, but one of the functions it serves in application -- trying to prevent the wrong sort of person gaining access to a type of dog which is attractive to them and also very easily mishandled -- is important and nobody has ever offered up any other foolproof way of preventing idiots from owning these dogs. BSL seems pretty much a terrible way to go about managing these dogs, for a number of reasons including the fact that many dogs of other breeds can become dangerous in the wrong hands and that it prevents responsible owners from enjoying the breeds, but there isn't much by way of viable alternatives in terms of regulating ownership of dogs that can be very problematic in the wrong homes. How WOULD you effectively police who can own a Fila or a Tosa? I don't think many people would agree anybody who wants one should own one, regardless of experience or aptitude, but once they're around you can guarantee that eventually somebody irresponsible is going to get a hold of some and start churning them out to wildly inappropriate homes, no matter how vigilant registered breeders were with their placement or how hard authorities worked to police their care, and before long every example of the breed, no matter how sweet-natured, gets the 'cross to the other side of the street to avoid the scary dog' treatment when out for a walk and the tv talks about how savage they are (which in turn further puts off the average responsible and hard-working but not overly well-informed owner). In an ideal world every potential dog owner could be officially assessed on their merits, nobody who shouldn't own a dog would have a way of getting one and everybody would understand that aggression and danger isn't just about breed, but that isn't the case. I'd like to see a great alternative to BSL which would address poor ownership leading to aggression in less controversial breeds and allow responsible owners to enjoy fine examples of these banned breeds, but what is it? BSL isn't going to go away unless somebody comes up with viable alternative legislation to prevent the inevitable backlash if the breeds were allowed and there were an attack due to irresponsible ownership.

I bought some of these in case puppy took a while getting used to the dog door and needed an emergency place to go in the laundry. It did take him a few days to master using the dog door unassisted, but he never once went on the puppy pee pads. He just adopted them as another place to lie down and take a nap, and would try to find a place in the room far away from both his crate and his pee pad bed to go toilet.

It is extraordinarily unlikely that she will be properly punished. The (only recently introduced) animal welfare laws in Bosnia dictate only a fine, which would probably be applied to her parents, as she is a minor. There would not be any kind of community service, counselling or offender rehabilitation involved. I suspect this very new law is rarely enforced in general and the girl wouldn't even be fined if the incident weren't so public.

And what if they want a lab temperament and not the lab coat so get a labradoodle but they get the poodle temperament and the lab coat? Just a thought ... Surely, though, the purpose of attempting to legitimise an Australian Labradoodle breed is to eventually prevent this pot luck nature of buying a puppy by developing a dog that breeds true to the desired temperament and coat type? However, I think that even if people did manage to refine the breed so that it was breeding true and was accepted by the ANKC, the average pet puppy buyer interested in labradoodles wouldn't understand or be interested in researching the difference between a 'purebred Australian Labradoodle' and a Poodle x Labrador when the latter is so readily available.

And what about people who are convicted of murder and then later found to be innocent? I'm afraid I'm going to have to side with Alan Gell on this one. Until you can guarantee guilt (beyond any doubt) capital punishment will always bring with it the risk of killing innocent people and that is never an acceptable risk. The days of innocent people ending with a noose around their neck is from a bygone era and long before DNA. Many people guilty of a crime end up admitting of such and that is the very time that CAPITAL PUNISHMENT should ensue. Cameron Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 despite doubts about his guilt (experts say the fire he was convicted of lighting to kill his children was probably not arson at all). Robert Springsteen was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 and his conviction was only put aside in 2009 (the DNA evidence didn't match). Innocent people are convicted of crimes all the time, despite modern technology. DNA is not even a factor in every single case. I believe the Innocence Project claims that only 5-10% of all criminal cases contain viable DNA evidence. Confessions are often false.

I love seeing Elbie's new tricks posted! He's a clever cookie (and cute, to boot). I keep eyeing off books of tricks, myself, and have to remind myself that I've only had my puppy for two weeks and am still muddling through toileting and some basics ... Tesla's idea of an appropriate response to a down/drop lure is usually to jump vertically in the air directly from a sit.

Before taking the puppy I would, personally, try to work out some agreement with the breeder where, perhaps, if the heart murmur naturally became worse within a year, to a point where the bills were piling up or you were unsure yours was still the right home for the animal, the original purchase price could be refunded, either to go towards medical expenses or for the return of the dog to be rehomed by the breeder, or for the dog to be rehomed and a puppy from a future litter to be secured for you at no extra cost, or whatever other arrangement you agreed was fair. In all likelihood the puppy's mild condition would improve or remain stable, rather than getting severely worse at that young age, but securing a mutually agreeable contingency plan before taking the puppy lends a bit of peace of mind if you're worried about looking after (or paying for) a dog with serious ongoing problems (which it sounds like this puppy probably won't become, anyway).

Thanks! Tesla and Louie aren't often as calm together as in the previous photos unless they are asleep (they only settled down there after a lengthy period in which Louie only wanted whichever chew was in Tesla's mouth at the time....). Here's a bunch more photos I took this morning (including one of the other dog). The early morning sun in our front room was conspiring against me, so the quality isn't all that great overall.

The facebook pages with horrible pictures of animal abuse are dummy pages set up to lampoon Antonia Miskic, not her actual profile.

I, on the other hand, do NOT feel sorry for such a sorry excuse for a human being! In fact I would go so far as to say that this is the time when I wish Jack the Ripper had that girl in the palm of his hands and made the most of it! Gosh, if there is any justice in this world, I just hope that she becomes a victim of a drowning. AMEN That is a disgusting thing to say about any living being, let alone a child.

My grandfather remembers putting kittens in a sack and drowning them being a fairly normal thing done by otherwise completely reasonable and sane people in the time and place he grew up in. The girl in this video might be a psycho, but without knowing anything about her familial and cultural circumstances I don't think we can really say that she is just evil. She might be awful or she might be otherwise perfectly pleasant. I'm sure there are places where drowning unwanted puppies is given no more thought than salting slugs, stepping on snails or removing a wasps' nest, and the unusual thing about the video would not be the disposal of the puppies, but the fact that the kids bothered to film it. The video offends me but I can't agree that it's conclusive proof that the two kids are evil demon children. Are they laughing and playing around because they get some sort of sadistic pleasure out of killing puppies, or are they giggling and hamming it up because they are making a video, and they'd be just as silly about it if it were a video of them mopping the kitchen or some other unwanted chore? It seems like they were probably given the bucket of puppies by their parents and told to get rid of them in the river, although there are sure to be other ways they could have gotten some puppies. I guess it would be nice to believe that only monsters kill sweet little puppies, but I suspect that is just naïve, and to say that this girl is a future serial killer or doesn't know love and compassion is unwarranted. Getting rid of animals in this way was normal here once, too, and it didn't spawn generations composed entirely of serial killers without love and compassion. I hope the girl is punished appropriately, because this act is disgusting and offensive to me, but lynching her achieves nothing, and making assumptions about her without knowing anything about her family, her community and her own cultural attitudes is unhelpful and even counterintuitive. If this is an issue of community, rather than the individual (and her open attitude to privacy suggests that it is), then lynching a young girl can only make that community defensive about their way of life. It's definitely not an action that could lead to eventual change, which is something I should hope would give people more pleasure than lynching would, anyway.

Thanks guys. He is indeed named for Nikola Tesla. So far nearly everybody I've told has assumed he's a girl named Tessa. Here are some pictures of Tesla with our other dog, Louie.

After about a year of planning and selecting a large dog breed I faced sudden opposition a few weeks ago and had to abruptly downsize my plans, and today I brought home a Tenterfield Terrier puppy. Tesla is nearly twelve weeks old. Here he is perched right up on the back of the couch: With my brother: and sleeping. On my bed in a towel nest, despite all my assurances to myself that puppy would never go on my bed:

What a week for poor Elbie, although I have to say I'm actually very fond of those wonky ears.

When I was younger we had a 'totem tennis' set and our arthritic cav managed to pull it out of the ground, so I'm disinclined to trust anything that screws into the dirt like that, too. Pouring concrete when you put in a post (or laying a small slab with a metal ring protruding, to tie stuff at ground level) would probably be the simplest way, but of course it's a big great hole in the yard if you ever need to remove it, and not the most attractive landscaping statement while it's installed, either. I'm wondering if you'd be able to do a bit of handyman work and bash together something attached to the fence itself, to which you could tie a tug? I guess it depends on the fence, as to whether you think that would hold up any better than your deck would.