Salukifan

A decent probiotic wouldn't go astray after antibiotics are finished. Can't hurt, might help :)

And we all cope with them differently. Some, like you Corvus, will go for the "feel the fear and do it anyway" approach. Others prefer to find methods to avoid having to feel that fear and anxiety. I think if you got to the stage you couldn't leave the yard with your dogs then perhaps some help to deal with the anxiety might be justifed but its' hardly an irrational anxiety if you keep having negative experiences. I don't call other dog owners numpties or nuff nuffs but I do know that there are dog owners out there who, through either ignorance or arrogance, have no respect for leash laws and whose off leash dogs are a problem. Clearly I'm not alone. Biggest problem Ive had so far was with roaming dogs and I genuinely thought I'd be doing battle one day. We're never going to agree on this topic but for some people "get over it" isn't the solution. Hence my advice about avoidance strategies. Horses for courses.

Knives won't be as effective as a nice big umbrella or a bamboo pole. Umbrellas and poles aren't illegal either :)

It should also be an lesson to expatriates on limited term postings not to take on dogs and expect them to be as well treated as you would like if you hand them onto the next person posting in. I know it's not that uncommon and does give dogs homes that they might not otherwise find. Nonetheless, maybe the practice bears reflection.

No sign of mine yet - and I leave tomorrow morning.

This is a real issue for a lot of people, me included. Dead easy for others to poo poo your fears but after a few incidents, I think it's perfectly natural to be wary, even hyper-vigilant about walking your dogs. I have two breeds – Poodles and Whippets. Two poodles and one Whippet are seniors so I do two lots of exercise unless I can find a good free run area where the oldies can potter and the youngsters can tear around. You do become good at finding safe, isolated places (easier in Canberra than in the burbs of a big city) and at walking very very early or late. Canberra's parliamentary triangle is pretty much a human desert after hours so in summer I often walk the dogs there – very pleasant! One thing I will note is that walking your dog along busy roads, despite not being the most pleasant of places, does tend to mean that you don't meet off leash dogs. I will cross the road to avoid other dogs or change direction if I have to. I 'read' the oncoming dog/s and walkers – if what I'm seeing isn't a picture of control and some sense of management of the dog, I get out of the way. Learn to become the dog owner version of a hermit – find times and places where you don't meet others. It can be done. It will usually involve putting your dogs in the car and driving, rather than walking out your front door, but it's a small price to pay for better peace of mind.

I think you mean phosphorus. If you were feeding primarily meat off the bone as the alternate meal, that result would be expected.

Adult or Junior? If it's Junior, switch to Adult - it will have less fat. They also do a lower fat one.

Yep - I'll be there for the fourth year in a row. Bring on the fudge!! I know Murve and Monet & Diva's mum are coming and so is Bilbo Baggins. :) I think I'm showing a WSS in addition to my Whippet :)

This dog got "no treatment"? Did it apply its own bandage? I don't know the full story but seems to me that the rescue has been a tad liberal with the facts - all good to raise donations though I'm sure. Years ago, our family dog was hit by a car and broke her pelvis. She was bandaged in the same manner Ben was - and that was the sole treatment. Not sure we'll ever get the full story but it does seem that this one has been embellished.

Which Royal Canin are you feeding? How many times a day? Is she getting other food - treats, handouts, scraps?? Have you had her thryroid levels checked? It's pretty common to feed less than the recommended amount by the way. :)

Of course some people don't give a toss about obeying laws under any circumstances. Speeding, drink driving, dog registration... if it doesn't suit them then what's the harm eh?

Corvus: Not where community safety is concerned. Some folk just think they do. Or, more to the point, they don't think - about any aspect of dog ownership. Liberty and autonomy in our society only stretch so far as not doing harm to others. If your actions harm others, if your failure to raise and contain a safe dog harms others then you can expect to be penalised. The problem is that penalties don't save lives. I agree about not really caring about animals. Even more serious from the dog safety perspective is the failure to understand them. Seems to me that too many people have some kind of Disney point of view about dogs. Then there are those who think it's "cool" to own a powerful, aggressive dog. Its that kind of attitude that makes people want wolf hybrids - thank God we don't have those here. The frustrating thing about so many dog attacks is that they are so PREVENTABLE with half an ounce of education or foresight. That, to me, is the greatest tragedy of all - human ignorance kills.

Beagles are probably one of THE most socially focussed dogs around. They were bred to live and hunt in a pack and to hunt while giving tongue. Small wonder when this gregarious, vocal hunting breed is socially isolated (ie. only dog kept in back yard and not allowed house time) they become "troublesome". To be quite frank, I'm surprised they don't become insane. If people aren't prepared to share their life and house with a dog, or at least to give it a canine companion and if they aren't prepared to give a dog a lot of exercise, I honestly can't think easily of a less suitable dog for a family. They get taken advantage of a lot due to their amenable natures. They deserve a better life than to be treated as an animated back yard ornament. No wonder they bark their heads off or escape their yards in such situations.

it doesn't have to be purebred. It needs to be thoughtfully bred IMO. Not just bred because it has a uterus or testicles or because the pups will make some money. And neither side of the purebred or crossbred argument has a monopoly on that.

It might make a difference if you bred for lowered reactivity, higher bite thresholds and higher bite inhibiton and you ruthlessly culled any sign of HA. However, "culling" is a dirty word to animal rights types, even if it doesn't mean the death of any dog. It conjurs up images of seal pup hunts and that is part of the problem. In the "old days" a pet dog that displayed any sign of aggression off its property to people in the community got a bullet or worse. Nowadays that also is a dreadful suggestion to a lot of people. They find excuses for the aggression (seen plenty of that here) and line the pockets of behaviourists, most of whom know damn well that raising thresholds to aggression doesn't cure it. Fact is, we've got ignorant dog owners buying dogs from ignorant dog breeders and failing to raise them and contain them as they should. The only cure for ignorance is education. Penalties tend to educate one owner at a time - and we need to do better than that.

And when looking at those stats think of the influencial factors. For example - are crossbreed dog owners equally represented in statistics of dogs that have attended training. Are crossbreed dogs more likely to be owned by people who do not contain them. And also remember that any dog attack stats attributed to breed are inherently unreliable. No scientific research on the issue credits breed descriptions as accurate.

No extendable lead is going to last with sand in the rewind mechanism. A cheap one is an accident waiting to happen.

I would argue because not everyone understands what "purebred" means beyond a set of papers and "showing". They think its all about looks and they are utterly WRONG. Most families, I would argue, want a pup that will grow up to be a predictable size, shape and temperament. They don't want a dog that has unpredictable behaviour, an unknown bite threshold, unknown levels of protectiveness, unknown territorial aggression and unknown levels of dog and human aggression. That's what you get with a crossbred pup and some crossbreds are WRONG from the get go. Allow me to illustrate my point: someone in their wisdom down here bred Maremma/Golden Retriever crosses. That's crossing a highly territorial guarding breed with a high bite threshold and low bite inhibition with a breed with a very low bite threshold BUT very high bite inhibition. Trainers I know have seen several of the pups. The ones they've seen are highly territorial resource guarders with very low bite thresholds and very low bite inhibition. One of them was displaying such behaviour at age 4 months. The family that owns it did everything right and still has a dog that, in the right conditions, is extremely unpredictable. I'm confident not every pup in the litter is like that but who'd take that chance. Do the math on crossing a guarding/protection breed with a dog of fighting ancestry and by any estimate, some of those pups will come hard wired for low bite thresholds, low bite inhibition and low triggers to aggression. No amount of training or socialisation can change that hard wiring. No training or socialisation will give you a dog that's going to trigger easily to aggress on dogs and humans and when triggered, will bite hard and display considerable tenacity in doing so. That cannot come as a surprise knowing the parent breeds - the genetic combination has all but guaranteed that combination in some progeny. And there are people out there doing those crosses every damn day and selling them to people who DEVELOP those tendencies in their dogs. Forget the rhetoric, SIZE DOES MATTER because the larger the dog, the more the damage it can do and the harder it is to stop. Do you think that poor grandmother in Deniliquin would have battled to get a 5 kilo dog off her grandchild? Dangerous dogs don't come out of nowhere and not every crossbred of the type I've described. will be dangerous - but what a lottery to have a ticket in. Anyone buying such a pup or dog needs the benefit of a rigorous temperament test and few, if any will get one. People rigorously culled HA out of dogs of fighting ancestry and made damn sure that most guarding and protection breeds weren't hair trigger dogs. Now we've got people combining traits from less than ideal specimens of such breeds and producing potential powder kegs. And who cops the blame? Breeds that were never meant to be combined into such a way. And to solve it we are given BSL that doesn't deal with the issue AT ALL. The ONLY way to solve this is to educate, educate, educate AND to penalise the hell out of any owner whose dog displays HA in the community. In the meantime, there are accidents waiting to happen in backyards all over the country with families none the wiser.

Agreed. But when breeding is undertaken by people who give no thought to combining powerful breeds with different trigger levels to aggression, different bite inhibitions and different attitudes to threat and sell them to people who fail to socialise, fail to train and fail to contain them, its no bloody wonder we end up with such incidents. Crossing protective breeds with breeds with low triggers to aggression is downright foolish - the results cannot be predicted. Add in all the other ingredients and the same story plays out over and over again. Dont' even start me on what happens when you allow people to breed purebred dogs that display levels of aggression that are unacceptable within the breed standard.

I thought the question was "what is effective voice control to an average pet owner" not "does your dog have it"? As to the first question I'd have thought the answer was "dog comes when its called". Some people regard 100% recall under any level of distraction as important but I'd argue thats NOT your average pet owner.

Crossbred, unregistered, inadequately contained.. Why isn't the press picking up on these recurrng themes rather than banging the BSL drum for the pollies??

I have never fed kibble, meat and bones in the one meal. My dogs get RMBS or they get some kind of raw meat (not a large amount) added to the kibble to "spice it up". So far, no issues. Having observed my dogs scarf a range of pretty iffy stuff over the years - poo, decomposing animals, dead carp.. you name it - I'd have to say I don't think any of them have sensitive stomachs. As canines, that's pretty unsurprising.

Stop feeling guilty - it could simply have been his time. My old cat degenerated badly over three days due to the onset of kidney failure.

Not a problem in my house