Mystiqview

I have gone to the bolt place and get I think it is 6mm bolts with wing nuts. You can use some locktite to secure the bolts to stop them from unscrewing. Also spring washers and flats at both sides of the vari kennel is good for keeping tension.

Nup. No way. If a dog does not have a stable temperament, then it's out of the breeding program. I don't care when or where it shows any aggression. It is not to be tolerated in breeding stock. It can be passed onto the pups via learned or genetic traits. I don't want to risk or find out any of my puppies later on bit someone because of dicky temperament. If you can run a bitch during those times normally without having aggression issues, then it is possible to run another with a stable temperament. Only good examples should be bred from. This goes for everything there is about the animal.

Hi Kaffy, I think you are over-reacting a bit re the snakes and stuff. I have lived on property here and also now in suburbia. It really depends on where you choose to live and how you keep your area/yard. If you have a lot of junk lying around with long grass, wood stacks etc. You increase the risk of having snakes around. If you have a bushland/scrub area close by, you increase the risk. That is not to say, having a clear yard etc you won't have snakes. Traditionally they are shy creatures. They don't lurk in the shadows ready to come and get you or the dogs. If you have mice or outdoor averies, you increase the risk as you could be providing their natural food source. For the most part, if you have dogs running around and you neighbours have dogs/cats, you will not have a huge risk of having snakes around unless you are going to acerage. As for cane toads. Like what everyone else has said. You do nightly patrols to remove them. Miss one and if you have a water source somewhere, then you will keep them coming. For the most part, most people with dogs I know, the dogs tend to leave them alone anyway. That is not to say yours will. I also do not have my dogs outside at night. More to stop them barking at the possums/bats. Keep your water bowls up off the ground helps. I hang mine on the fence. Where I am since moving here just over 12 months ago, I am yet to see a cane toad and have a healthy population of green tree frogs which is also a good sign there are not many cane toads around. I am in the middle of suburbia. The shade cloth is good for keeping shade around the runs. My runs are made of weldmesh and chainwire.

SOME puppies MAY come from the accidentals. I know someone who dumped their 5 week rotty x puppies at a PP up at Caboolture. I know because I used to work with him. I think personally they would take them so long as they would sell. He got $50/pup and they sold them for hundreds more. You just have to look at another free website to see the increase in the oodles. Same goes for the paper. Who knows. Maybe they are recruiting BYB's to supply their stores. Not a big puppy mill, but small individuals in a house home doing the same. It does not have to be in a big shed to be a puppy mill

More than one dog creates a pack. Simple. The more dogs you have the more complex the pack structure. The best thing is to match the temperament of the existing dog to the dog you are wanting to bring in. I know people who can successfully run a group of entire male stud dogs with out a problem. I know of another who cannot run two entire bitches together and blames the whole thing on one to the point where she rehomed it. It is also how you manage your dogs. If you are not the "boss" so to speak, then they will constantly question your leadership and fight for control and in many cases win without you even knowing it. I am currently running one entire male and three whole females without a problem in a suburban back yard. Two bitches are breeding bitches and one has just finished a litter and the other is pregnant and about to drop a litter. I don't have problems at food time or "that time" as I am able to manage my dogs and they all know where they sit in my pack structure. My dogs are inside/outside and are allowed on the couch. (many say a big no no). But I do not have a problem with authority with them. They know their place and are spoiled at the same time. Establish your "house rules" early and stick to them.

I cannot believe the number of people I see with SWF sitting in their lap while driving. The other one, is SWF sitting on the back shelf of a hatch back. Hit the brakes and SWF goes through the front window, maybe hitting the driver on the way through. Dogs sitting on the back shelf of cars are just as dangerous as umbrellas and other items sitting there unrestrained in an accident. If hit, they are launched at what ever speed the car is travelling. As for dogs in utes: Aside from the danger of tethered dogs being tethered so they can still get to the side so they can potentially hang themselves, there is the danger especially in Summer of them burning their pads on the tray of the ute. You see some poor dogs in the middle of the day standing on bare steel of the tray in the middle of summer. You put your hand on it and it is burning hot!! I had heard a rumour ages ago too, that there was a push I think by the RSPCA that even if you have a canopy, dogs need to be restrained within them similar as they have to be restrained within the car??

As others have pretty much said. Instinct, drive and all that depends on the lines in which the dog was bred and the ability of the breeder to identify the traits early on as puppies and try to match traits of the puppies to the owner's lifestyle. Some BC's are more driven than others. Within one litter you can have a very driven puppy and a very lazy puppy and all things in between. It depends on whether you went for more working lines or show lines. There are good working dogs within the show lines and there are bad working dogs in working lines. Regardless of who is breeding the BC and their purposes, temperament and health should be kept paramount. I know with my lines, the girls tend to be more driven than boys. The boys are more content to laze around with you, the girls are out there and get em dogs.

Solid Black (as most show Border Collies appear) is a dominate K locus allele and totally independant to the A locus. So if a dog is Kk (Black, carrying non-black) and AyAt and bred to the same, you can get - Black, Red or Shaded Sable and Black & Tan in the one litter. A true phantom would be a dog like the sire, who has white markings hiding his tan points, whereas I believe the dam just has a single copy of K and has a Ay gene. Who knows what A series genes the KK (Black, carries Black) dogs have, especially if they are bred to other KK dogs. Half the dogs could be carrying sable LOL. I tried to keep my response simple. Yeah. There are a few other breeders who have produced it. For the most part, from what I have seen, many breeders hide the fact they have bred sable or something resembling it. There are those who will openly flaunt it if they get the chance. The colour breeders of any breed mainly. There are others, thankfully who will admit they have bred it, and register it accordingly. The frustrating part in my breed, is Australia is the only country that does not recognise the full colours of the breed. If I hopped over to New Zealand for instance, all colours are recognised.

Sables also occur in Border Collies, but the Australian Breed standard does not allow this colour (along with many other colours that are allowed over seas, including the country of origin). The sable in our breed is believed to have come in when they used Rough Collies to get the glamour coat. So of course, more genes would be included. The sable I bred last year, came from two black/white parents. The dam I believe is what we call a phantom sable or "seal" as one label used in the UK. The sire we believe is a phantom Tricolour as when young, there was observed tri markings around the hock region. Last year's litter produced two (possibly three) definite shaded sable and a couple of what I believe phantom sable from 11 puppies. I just repeated the mating this year. I have produced one definite sable or possible phantom sable from 7 puppies. Two puppies are what we call ee-red. Unfortunately red is a masking gene, so there is a possibility these two red pups are genetic sable with the ee-red masking the sable pattern

I generally start mine on Advance Re-hydratable kibble mushed into a thinish porridge with Milk Replacer. If pups are slow to lap, I will roll up small balls of budget human mince and shove in their mouths for them to chew. This will normally start them off. I will then mix some mince with the kibble in the porridge. The porridge then gets less "watery" and more just softened kibble by the time they are about 6 weeks. I will still put some milk replacer in the mix to soften. To soften the kibble, I found pouring HOT water over the kibble and cover with alfoil or another dish. It takes about 10-15 minutes to soften down.

Have a look at this breeder: http://www.suthenskys-kelpies.com/ She is really good and competes in agility and also shows. Her dogs have the nice amount of balance and drive. The breeder is really nice too.

Border Collie litter due 29th

I received this email yesterday from someone wanting a pup: I replied that I do not export to Asia. They responded back and said they are willing to come to Australia to collect the puppy. To this I replied I do not export to the Asian market where there is a chance of my lines/puppies ending up in puppy mills. I then received this horrible email back from them calling me a loser and unethical and I can I claim to be ethical if I don't export to Asia and I "latched out" (their spelling). He accused me for sending him abusive emails???? OMG!!!! I thought my first reply said it all. "I don't export to Asia." Any others who have had an email similar to this, I am more than happy to forward the whole message conversation.

It could be anything. He may not have been feeling well or something. It could be this car, the way you drove or your drive may have had a lot more corners and he was feeling sick as a result. He could have eaten something in the back yard before hand and that made him sick. I would before you go for a drive again with him is play in the car, and possibly feed him in the car a few times to reassure him that the car is a good thing. If you have another dog that LOVES the car, take them along too for a short trip, even if its the corner shop. If it's a confidence thing, the other dog will boost any lack of confidence your dog may have as a result of an unpleasant trip last time. Don't make a big fuss of the car or he will think of it as something wrong and be apprehensive. Make it the same as if going for a walk or something similar.

Raisin toast!!

Dju, The problem with merle, is when you mate merle to merle together you run the possibility of deaf/blind puppies. It is to do with this gene. Merle is also a dominant gene. When you mate merle to ee-red. the red will mask the merle so you cannot see it. Here lies the problem. There seems to be a growing fad in the breed to mate ee-red to merle. By doing this, if the merle carries ee-red and there are ee-red puppies in the litter, it is possible they are genetically merle. Short of a DNA colour test, you would never know. What you would have to do to be "safe" would be to consider any red pup in a litter as merle so you don't accidently breed it to another merle. Unfortunately merle does not always show completely as a merle dog. It may look a solid colour and only have a small patch of merling on the tall for instance as a pup, then will not necessarily show as an adult Also unfortunately, some of these new "breeders" do not understand even the most basic genetics, or what they are playing with. This generation may be fine, but the generations that follow may have problems due to the same ignorance and misunderstanding that bred these dogs in the first place. There are reasons why ethical breeders choose not to play with some combinations and colours. Breeders are caretakers of the breed and if things are done wrong at some point, it can take many generations to fix that wrong.

Also.. Another idiot breeding a blue merle to a red/white.. Red/white or as they classed as "wheaten/white" is a masking gene. So you can have red (merle) dogs not showing any merle and if some futher idiot then mates that to a merle or cypt merle.. you have deaf/blind pups. Yep.. good those dogs are not smokers...

While looking at a certain classified web page, I came across this: How can anyone offer a warranty on dogs that are not properly health checked? No listing of hip/elbow scoring of the parents, no health tests done on the puppies, so how can this person HONESTLY know their pups do not have any health issues!

Also if you allow him to go to what others consider a disreputable breeder/bitch, then kiss just about any chance of him being used by the reputable ones, unless what others have said he carries exceptional, highly sought after lines.

This is my point exactly and a comment I often receive from puppy buyers when they contact me. We all lead busy lifestyles. Some more than others. Many of us work full time, have family, hobbies, and a lot of other stuff we do. I have a drafted pretty standard email response (health testing, what I do, what I expect etc). And just add/delete the blanks plus a few lines to make it personal. Not brain science really.

I don't have water in my crates over night either. They have free access to water before I go to bed (generally between 9-10pm) and I am up during the week at 5:30 am. If it is exceptionally hot, then I will leave them in the runs outside. Mine sleep in the bedroom with us and there is a door to a balcony they have free access to. Especially in summer. Even as puppies, I have kept pretty much the same routine. The only difference is they are crated somewhere. If hot, they are crated downstairs in sun room where it is quite cool in summer. I am a light sleeper so tend to hear when they need to go outside etc.

I have seen those bottles you see in rabbit, rat and guinea pig enclosed ued in dog crates. I use a non spill water dish in my crate/car when travelling. The bowl has a lip around the top to stop it spilling over the side. Turn it upside down and yes it will spill out, but not like a normal bottle

And that is why the pedigree dog world needs to get off it's collective bum and start promoting itself properly, to the public. They do a great job of promoting the benefits of purebred dog ownership.....to their own members. We are not the ones who need converting, we already know. Rather than continually diss the "opposition"....the pet shops, the backyard breeders, the puppy farms....they need to positively promote correct breeding practises, good ethics and the benefits of owning a pedigree pet. And do it with a friendly, welcoming face. Cannot agree more. Even here on DOL. Some people need to take stock. I know there will always be those out to make a quick buck and want to pick the brain of a registered breeder and not want to do things properly and take short cuts. Not every one liner email or dumb question asked is dodgy. Some people just don't have good communication skills. The CCC's do not get out there and promote pedigree dogs. As you say, they list the benefits of a purebred dog. But with so much bad publicity against pedigree dogs and their supposed bad health, they should be out there saying what breeders are doing to combat health issues (health checks etc and steps certain breeds are doing to address specific health issues)

I know of a number of breeders of both registered and unregistered (eg oodle crosses) who have flashy professional websites that make you appear they are ethical. Some of the oodle websites I have seen also appear that their "breed" is recognised. There are some who advertised their stock are DNA clear for this or that. However I know they have done cosmetic surgery to their dogs to improve their winning in the show circuit. There are also a number of issues there maybe no test against, but people will double up on dogs with other issues and then will not want to know you when there is a problem. I know of people who can manage more than one breed successfully. Others cannot even manage one breed adequately. I encourage puppy buyers to meet with their breeder, even if there is no puppy available at their time of enquiry. Meet their dogs and everyone can see if they will be happy with each other. As for puppy visits: I encourage mine after two weeks when the eyes open then once a week or whenever they can up until 8 weeks. I am the same as others: clean clothes, not from another breeder, dog park etc. If they have a dog themselves, to put the dog away and wear clean laundered clothes. Shoes at the front, soap and alcohol wash. If there is parvo around (I keep in liaison with local vets), then visits will be limited. I have not had a problem yet. I have seen the result of poor socialised puppies and the reputation of breeders who have produced puppies who attack, bite or are poorly socialised. No thanks. I go that extra mile to make sure my puppies are well socialised, healthy and happy.

Boronia... LOL boys.. just love em.. My biggest criticism is people buying these pieces of training equipment and not enough time goes into teaching them how to correctly use them. I have been an instructor and knows what it is like to keep an eye on 10-15 people in class.. It's not easy