Staranais

Poor wee guy. What drugs was he given? And when were they given to him? ETA, pending any further info, it could just be the pain meds wearing off, but if you're concerned that he's deteriorating then if it were me I'd be taking him in to the emergency vets if possible.

Good work! I've just started training a formal retrieve, am shaping a nice calm hold at the moment. Hard and boring work since I hate shaping.

I didn't, it's quite a bit different to how I started my dog. Still a good read, though, and I'm sure the method works to start a dog tracking. The more into tracking you get, though, the more it becomes about training the handler rather than training the dog. ETA, congratulations RubyBlue!

When you say you clean her teeth at bath time, how often do you bathe her? Teeth cleaning really does need to be at least once or twice a week to be helpful, and more often is better if the dog seems to be predisposed to accumulating tartar. Bones help, chews help, dental kibble helps. Some dogs just seem to be predisposed to tooth issues, though. Agree with the others that if he still has stinky breath after his teeth are cleaned, then something else could be causing the issue.

I wouldn't say my belgian was especially good with kids. She's also very high energy, which I'm not sure if Haven wants? Not all belgians are as extreme as mine, but I personally wouldn't recommend a belgian for Haven's situation, unless perhaps she could get an older one with known temperament. I second the recommendation for a black lab. Or if you don't mind an adult dog, how about getting an adult stafford with a good attitude towards other dogs. Or how about a bull mastiff? Pretty sure they're quite solid with kids.

I agree with you that if I had kids, I'd want them to be around dogs, in order to learn how to interact with them. Supervised, though, no unsupervised. But I do think that some breeds of dogs are, in general, better with kids than other breeds. I'm not sure if I'd agree with her that Labradors tend to be very calm though, most of the young labs I've met have been friendly but also reasonably energetic and boisterous!

Yes, that sounds about right. My girl had it in one shoulder, and it would have ended up costing us about that by the time we were done. Luckily, it was very much worth it, she now runs like the wind and has even started jumping. Good luck with the surgery, and make sure you follow their aftercare instructions to the letter, since IMO that's just as important as the surgery as regards prognosis.

Sometimes hard to tell if it's good or faulty at 8 weeks old, though, Joe. There are plenty of dogs that seem nice enough at 8 weeks old but that go on to develop something like a joint dysplasia or a temperament flaw as they get older. So I agree with breeders putting pups on limited to start with, but changing them back onto main if the dog grows up to be a good representative of the breed. Especially for the more over-bred breeds. If buyers don't like that, they can always go to another breeder.

Yes, the goldie looks really far from her leg to me, and also doesn't always stay a consistent distance from her leg in the figure 8 - from what I've seen of the judging here, she'd never win a trial here with over 90% of the marks (which is what is required here to advance in Ob). But clearly that style is what is ideal in American obedience, whereas probably they'd penalise our competitors for crowding. Vive la difference, I guess! Lewis has very nice attention.

I haven't got any recent photos or film of my girl, RallyVally, but this is an example of the style of kennel club heeling that we are supposed to aspire to over here; extremely precise and very close. This lady in the video is trialling in the highest class (I don't know her, just found her nice clip on Youtube):

Yes, my girl heels like this as it is the required heeling style over here. I used clicker training & a no-reward mark to guide her until she understood the concept of just a feather-light but consistent touch on my leg (rather than bumping my leg, or pushing into me). Do lots of left turn work to make sure she doesn't crab. She still needs head cues for turns, though, it would be more difficult if she couldn't see those. Good luck!

You'll probably get more response in the training forum.

I'm sorry. Where is the OCD? Just asking as prognosis is very different for OCD in different joints. I don't know that specialist, but probably someone on the forum will.

The first paper especially seems a little out of touch with the real world, WoofnHoof, to put it mildly. It says that using unethically sourced cadavers for dissection can lead to a bad attitude towards animals and desensitisation of vet students. It states that the body of a dairy cow that has been put down due to injury is unethically sourced since, even though she was not put down for dissection, as a dairy cow she was "used by an industry that breeds animals for killing". And also says that dissecting any organs or meat that are bought from the slaughterhouse is unethical, since it's not ethical to support the slaughterhouse. That seems like rather an extreme view. Apparently using anything sourced from the meat or dairy industry in our training is unethical and desensitises us to killing. You don't need to read far between the lines to start to suspect that the author would prefer all vets to be vegan. I wonder if she thinks the same of everyone who buys meat or milk to eat, that they are all unethical and desensitised? However, this is getting a little off topic. I'm going to have to bow out of this discussion, since I don't think we'll ever agree. I'm a huge supporter of animal welfare, have protested against unnecessary animal use in universities before, and don't eat meat myself, but sorry, think that the kind of extremist view expressed in that article is only going to harm animal welfare - it alienates farmers and vets alike.

Yeah not sure what the go is with the first file I think it's a PowerPoint converted file, essentially it surveyed the preferences for donated cadavers vs live terminal surgeries, students in early years showed preferences for the donated cadavers whereas the students in later years preferred live surgeries. The comments were interesting they talked about benefits and negatives of both, some students comments were controversial 'stop trying to ruin the vet course' and 'this is vet science not animal welfare'. The second one referred to desensitization as part of a talk on the role of vets in animal welfare, interesting stuff. I can't do powerpoint either, sorry, but I'd wonder if there was some relationship between vet student attitudes to animals, and the production animal vs companion animal preferences of vet students. If you're a production animal vet, you still are involved in animal welfare, but at the end of the day you are raising animals for food, you tend to be required to PTS animals if you can't fix them cheaply, and some methods of cattle/sheep/deer diagnosis require slaughtering individuals to diagnose what is wrong with the herd. So I'd wonder if students with a strong production bias might carry that over to their dealings with companion animals. No proof though, it's just me wondering. I could be dead wrong.

Does the breeder have any responsibility? Legally, I'd say probably not, although I'm not a lawyer. So far as I've seen, buying dogs is pretty much buyer beware. Ethically, I think it depends on whether there was anything else they reasonably could have done to prevent the problem, and if there was anything else you could reasonably have done to prevent the problem. Breeding a giant breed bitch who was too young to score does sound a bit worrying. But as someone else said, I guess it's possible that you did some things incorrectly too. Giant breeds, even well bred ones, generally do have some level of innate predisposition to joint problems. And sometimes these things just happen - they're no one's fault, just shitty luck.

That really sucks, I'm sorry. E.D. especially is known to be highly heritable. I very much doubt the shoulders and hips both would have developed abnormally without some genetic predisposition, unless you were doing something seriously out of order with the pup's diet or exercise or the pup underwent some form of trauma during growth. But on the other hand, if the sire was scored, and the dam's parents, and all got good scores, it's hard to tell what else the breeder could have done. Breeders can do all the right things, and still there's no guarantee that the pups will be sound. Have any of the other pups from the litter developed joint issues? It's good to get a health guarantee with your pup, but some guarantees aren't worth the paper they're written on. Many breeders will offer you your money back if you return the puppy, for example, but of course once you've had the pup 6 months it's pretty unlikely you'll want to do that.

It's true that some breeds are more likely to bite people than others. It's also true that some breeds can do far more damage than others when they bite. It's unfair to single the pitbull out, though. Many other breeds have been used for guarding or protection work or fighting in the past, and could do a great deal of damage if they chose. The pitbull isn't alone in that regard. My malinois, for example, could do a great deal of damage to someone if she wanted to do so, and if mismanaged she'd be at least as likely to bite someone as the average mismanaged pitbull is. Yet she is (luckily) not banned. Perhaps one day we will all only be allowed to own dogs under 10kg, since anything larger will be deemed too dangerous. I really hope not. For what it's worth, many of the bull breeds I've met have been dog aggressive, some of the most dog aggressive dogs I have met have been bull breeds. However, only a few of them have been human aggressive, and in fact some of the most human-stable dogs I have ever met have been bull breeds.

Here we use blood from live donor dogs - either a direct transfusion from a donor that is bought into the clinic, or as blood product from the canine blood bank (the owner of the blood bank keeps several retired greyhounds and bleeds them regularly, then sells the typed, separated, & tested blood products to vets). I don't know much about the greyhound donation that Sir WJ describes, as we don't do it here. I guess if the dog doesn't suffer, and it's going to be PTS anyway, I have no problem with it. Although it's still sad.

I'm loving tracking at the moment simply because it's so good at tiring the dog out. One simple 500m track transforms a bouncing-off-the-walls malinois into a malinois you can actually live with, at least for a couple of hours. :D Hope your test went well, Rubyblue!

Kind of off topic, but I'm the opposite to most posters here - I'd probably rather have my dog operated on by one of my classmates under the supervision of one of our surgeons, than by a random vet out in practice. Simply because there is a wide range of surgical skill and knowledge in vets out in practice, whereas I know first hand that all of our surgeons and anaesthetists are really, really good at what they do. Although luckily, they aren't the only two choices available.

I guess it's like choosing baby names, at the end of the day you need to choose something you can both live with. Having said that, if it's going to be primarily your dog, you should have the last word. Vice versa if it's his dog.

I can't imagine the pressure of doing a major operation on a person full stop! It's bad enough doing it on someone's well loved pet, or best performing dairy cow. Being supervised by a good surgeon as you work is really, really valuable though. They don't hold the scalpel, but they talk you through exactly what you're doing, and can tell you how to respond if things aren't going according to plan.

Yes, Flickmac, I guess the economic perspective is that salaries for new grads would need to rise if vets spent longer in school, or doing a vet degree would simply not be financially viable (it's already a pretty poor financial investment). On the other hand, salaries would need to rise for practice owners if practice owners were expected to teach every new graduate employee surgery from scratch & supervise them for months on even basic surgeries (experienced vets are often very generous with their time to students and new grads, but you must remember that every hour they spend supervising a new grad is an hour they can't spend doing their own consults and surgeries). I don't think most pet owners would want to absorb any extra rise in vet salaries, we already have threads on DOL about how expensive many vet clinics are. Farmers certainly wouldn't want to absorb the cost, either, many farmers couldn't afford to do so. ETA, I should clarify that I'm not talking about recovery vs non-recovery surgery, here, but about a vet course with students not doing any live surgery at all until they graduate, as Hugh Wirth and some posters seem to be promoting. I can't see how that could be done without costing clients more, one way or another. As an aside, I've been told that army medics often learn how to deal with trauma cases by operating on simulated bullet wounds in live pigs. I don't believe doctors do though, not here anyway. However, human surgeons do a much longer training course than vets do, which is subsidised heavily by the government (as it should be!), so they get their hand held for many more years than vets or army medics do. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25735344/from/ET

Westiemum, I don't want to devalue your opinion at all, but in my experience the week watching animals getting stunned and killed at the meatworks, or the week working at the SPCA putting down kittens in kitten season, is going to teach vet students that some animals are disposable a lot more thoroughly than putting down one animal during a prac class ever will. Unfortunately, animals are to some extent disposable in our society - witness what goes on in the meat industry, in the dairy industry, in the egg industry, in the SPCA. If you want a vet that really believes that animals are never disposable, you'll have to find yourself a vegan vet. Even then, they likely will have participated in the death of some animals during their training.