Staranais

I'd be really interested to see research on whether schools that do non-recoveries do tend on average to turn out more competent or more confident new graduates, but I suspect the research either hasn't been done or it would be very hard to avoid bias. If you compared institutions, it would be pretty easy to cherry pick good and bad institutions that are using either teaching style to include in your study, either accidentally or because you have an agenda, without it being obvious to anyone reading the study. I guess you could investigate how confident vets felt upon graduating from different courses, and how competent their new bosses found them to be, but you'd need to be really careful to ensure that the vets didn't know the purpose behind the study (since some vets choose recovery or non-recovery deliberately for either strongly held ethical reasons, knowing what the study was investigating would influence some vet's replies). Anyway, I imagine you could design very good teaching programs that did or that didn't do non-recovery surgeries. But turning a non-recovery program into a recovery-only one would take a lot of careful thought. Just chopping the non-recoveries from a course without a plan to replace those experiences with something just as educational (not just more routine spays!) would inevitably turn out inferior graduates.

Oh those are pretty, Belgian Blue. Cairo1, what is a fill in flash? My point and shoot has a flash, but it gives my dog red eyes when I use it (looks like the vampire dog of doom)!

I didn't know spinach, mushroom, or beetroot could cause health problems in dogs (when fed in reasonable amounts)? Have never heard of that before. Don't really have the time to research it right now, but would be interested if anyone else had some concrete info on it. Pity they didn't include more information or even references, so you could tell if it was actual fact that some of these things cause harm, or just a rumour or an over-reaction.

It sounds flash!

One longer walk - preferably days long! My girl loves hiking. :D Walking for less than several hours just doesn't really tire her out at all, unless I stop & do training along the way, or take the tennis ball flinging thing.

The dog is in front of you at the end of the leash, pulling and barking aggressively, what do you do at that point where the dog has lost the plot???. As I mentioned previously, I would have a DD dollar on that dog and block it with a firm no and release it when it regained composure. I am interested in how you would tackle the same situation??? I'm not Kelpei-i, but in the past I have done as you have done (on a flat collar), or physically picked the dog up & removed him from the situation (he was extremely stable & did not redirect). However, I also think that by letting the dog get so close that my dog was aroused or freaked, I had undone some of my work desensitising the dog & made my job ultimately longer & harder. So, what I did to control & redirect my dog was only making the best of a bad situation. My old boy was a terrier - very predatory, very game, scared of nothing. I believe we never got him feeling calm around other dogs, although with drive work (mainly) and corrections (some) he became very trustworthy in public and would act non-aggressive towards other dogs (so long as he knew he would either be rewarded with a tug or corrected). I think the distinction between acting calm & feeling calm is an important distinction for some dogs. I would love to learn more about handling aggressive confident dogs, but sadly just about every trainer I've visited in person (in the quest to reform my prior dog) have had more excuses than knowledge to impart. :D

Some mixed dogs are lovely. But if you're getting a mixed breed puppy, it could grow into just about anything (even if you've seen the parents). Some people don't mind that - but if that's the case, then you might as well save money and save a puppy from the SPCA or another rescue, not pay a lot of money to get a mixed breed dog that has been deliberately bred. It's also harder to test for health issues in a mixed breed dog, and most people that breed mixed breed dogs don't bother to do it. Of course, some purebred breeders don't test for health issues either. It's important to do your research & be picky.

I have big pieces of leather (just got a cheap leather hide & chopped it into big pieces) that my girl loves to tug with. When they're used to tugging on the flat leather, you can roll it up to get them used to biting on a thicker tug.

I don't feed tinned food - the supermarket brands are mostly just rubbish. The chunks of "meat" in there are actually just TVP (soya). The "meat" listed on the ingredients panel is just a little bit in the gravy. Ew! However, I guess the high end cans wouldn't be any worse than a reasonable kibble so long as you also do something to take care of the teeth (feed bones, meat chunks, or brush). Would probably work out more pricey than a high end kibble, though. ETA: As for the original question, is canned food bad for teeth, all I can add is that I've visited the cat center here where they do commercial cat diet trials (including testing the effectiveness of dental kibbles for companies like Hills), and anecdotally the people there told me that the cats that are fed only canned have the worst teeth - worse than regular kibble, which is itself worse than the dental kibbles. But I don't think that's published, since no company was paying to have their canned food tested for how good it was for teeth. So I can't imagine why it would be different for dogs.

I think of the hydrolysed diets as less like Maccas, and more like a drug - like antibiotics, or steroids, or any other drug. In an ideal world you might not ideally want to feed your dog antibiotics, but if your dog is really ill and it will can cure him or just stop him being miserable, of course you're going to do it! Same with the z/d. I'm not going to feed z/d to my healthy dog (even if it wasn't so expensive), but if it was the only thing stopping her having nasty and ongoing GIT signs she'd be on it like a shot.

I think that is a very good point. No matter what techniques are used to reduce aggression, there needs to be a system in place for dealing with the unexpected situation without setting the training back weeks. Just from my experience with my own very DA dog, I think reducing aggression using pure desensitisation requires a trainer who is very skilled in reading dog body language & manipulating critical distances, and a very controlled environment. I also think aggression would never be "cured" unless the dog learns a new emotional reaction to seeing other dogs or seeing people. Just controlling the behaviours the dog exhibits (through punishing the aggression or rewarding alternative behaviours really heavily e.g. working in drive around other dogs) is IMO only management. It teaches the dog self control or it distracts it, but the desire behind the fighting behaviour still remains.

Does he even know the command for quiet? If he understands the idea of quiet, then if he's on the bed or in a crate in the bedroom & starts making a fuss, you can tell him to "be quiet" and he'll know what you want (or know why he's being evicted from the room if he doesn't quiet). I'd teach it during the day in another context. You could do it quite easily with a clicker & some food treats. It might be more training than you were hoping to do with him, but I figure expanding a dog's vocabulary is always a good thing. I'd also tire him out totally during the day with physical and mental exercise, so he actually wants to sleep at bed time. The clicker training could help with that as well.

Depends how old the dog is. If it's a pup, I wouldn't want it to do any time in quarantine. Those weeks are so important for socialisation and learning.

It's just so unprofessional, isn't it? I had a consult once with a dog behaviourist/trainer who was very outspoken in bagging all clicker trainers and all food trainers - but as the session proceeded it became clear that he didn't actually understand what he was bagging nor had he tried it for himself. That's IMO just as silly as the positive trainers who bag pinch collars or e-collars without ever having seen or felt one. It doesn't make you have confidence in anything else they're saying.

Yes, who knows why she was declared unfit for rehoming? Did she have a bad temperament, did her health problems cost too much to fix, were her health problems too advanced to be cured, or did she look too much like a pitbull? You'd need a whole lot more details before you condemned the RSPCA for putting her down. Shame on the owner for letting it get to this stage. If you can't afford the vet care, you shouldn't have the dog - letting it get into this state is pretty inexcusable.

Is it really? Are Delta trainers more highly accredited than NDTF trainers? I didn't know that.

The owner certainly should have stepped in and stopped it, but many people are loath to speak out and contradict authority figures (like behaviourists, vets, show judges). It's just the way many people are - look at the Milgram experiments, they're quite fascinating. Most people are followers, not leaders, even if they're otherwise nice people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment I'm more amazed that the judge thought this was OK to do in public - surely she knew people could take photo and video of what she was doing? She must have thought no-one would object? I would also be kind of disappointed if my dog didn't bite a judge who was doing that to her... mind you, the judge probably wouldn't have had the balls to try to do that to a bigger dog like mine.

And also we have had stories from people like myself, who have in the past been duped by absolutely useless trainers who used corrections from check chains and prong collars. It goes both ways... using correction tools does not automatically make you a good trainer, nor does it mean you know what you're doing. You can waste just as much money and time employing an incompetent traditional behaviourist, as you can employing an incompetent positive one. I don't even know that Karen Prior claims to be a behaviourist and work with aggression. If she doesn't, then it doesn't really matter if she can't fix aggression, since she doesn't claim she can. Does anyone know if the KPA is even claiming to produce graduates that can stop dogs from acting aggressively?

That's a good decision, especially if you can't afford all the things that go along with whelping and caring and homing puppies properly (which I'm presuming you can't, if you can't afford to desex her). Raising puppies is a whole lot more expensive than getting a dog desexed, even if she whelps naturally. It is a pity her original owners didn't care for her better.

You haven't addressed this point, so I'm just a little worried about it - do you have money put by for an emergency caesar? I'm not scaremongering, but I do think you should take the possibility seriously - it's not unlikely that a bitch this small with an unknown sire and an unknown number of pups could need a caesar. And if a caesar is needed, the vet will not necessarily let you have it on credit. If you don't have the funds, your only option may be PTS the bitch. So please think about that if you want to let her have the pups.

Please make sure you have enough money put by for an emergency caesarian - since she's a small breed & the sire is unknown, the babies could well be too big for her to have naturally.

It looks like she was almost trying to do some weird chiropractic thing to its neck? Poor dog. How bizarre. I guess that's why she's judging tiny companion breeds, a guardian breed might have given her a new orifice for trying to do that to it.

Agree with the others to desex her now if you can. Your vet will tell you if that's possible. If that's not possible then I probably wouldn't have the heart to cull them at birth, unless there was no chance of finding a suitable home for them.

Nah, SA. Erny will just whack her e-collar out :D Oh, I thought she'd just teach him how to achieve drive satisfaction... LOL, someone probably ought to tell Steve about this thread so he can come in and defend himself!

Hey why not?!!! Have you not ever seen him scaling an A-Frame on full height? lol Hehehe.... funny visual Erny... :D :D Watch out Erny, he might come up the leash at you! ;)