Staranais

Am I really the only person who has taught this? Anyway, tonight she ate all four pills in order to get the special treats I was offering. Success!

I too would be careful. At the very least, I'd clear it with my breeder first, and only proceed if they give you the go ahead. They might even have a diet plan for you to follow that they have used successfully. And if the breeder isn't very happy with prey model, you can still do a good quality commercial & give some meat or RMB every day for teeth cleaning purposes, and move to the full raw diet when your dog is mature. Raw diets can be great, and generally I'm all for them. But it's easy to mistakenly feed too much Ca or too much protein with a homemade diet, and both these mistakes are particularly likely to cause serious issues in growing giant breed dogs. Just be careful.

Technically, up to 50ml per kg per day is normal for dogs & cats. It can be a bugger to catch it to measure it though! If he's going heaps more than usual, even if you can't measure how much, then I'd see the vet about it.

I was in a similar situation earlier this year with my new girl (shoulders, not patellas). Edited to add, the breeder did all the right things (except x-ray shoulders, but that's not common to do), we did all the right things too. Just bad luck, I guess, but it ended up costing more than a thousand dollars to fix her up. So who should pay? I can see both points of view. It's my puppy now - so whatever happens to her is now my responsibility. But on the other hand, if the breeder washes their hands of a possibly genetic issue the second the puppy leaves the property, then what really makes them different to a BYB? As a puppy buyer, I have come to the conclusion that I believe the breeder should pay half the treatment cost, or else offer back the price of the puppy to put towards the treatment (whichever is the smaller sum). Then they should not be liable for anything else. And if they want to demand that the dog is desexed/sterilised and not used for breeding, I think that is OK too, as a condition for the refund.

I'll try to remember to bump this thread with more video in Feb 2011, Rommi! I wish you lived closer Kavik, then you could borrow my girl for the weekend - you could test drive her to see if you liked her, and I would have a weekend off, LOL.

She's nearly 14 months old, she had surgery at 10 months old. A little older than most OCD dogs. We first saw the limp when she was about 5 months old, but it went away again for a while, & it wasn't until she was 10 months old that it came back & we were able to localise it to her shoulder. You're right, the shoulder is about the best place to have OCD, if you've got to have it somewhere. Of course, we'd rather not have it at all! Can't wait until she's well enough to do the fun stuff again.

Bump!

I hope you're right, Rommi! Thanks for taking a look at the video. I'm just happy that the limp is becoming much less obvious. She's 27kg, Kavik. On very long legs! I love the kelpies, they were on my shortlist for sure, but I wanted something I could do Sch with if the SAR doesn't work out for us, & over here you can't trial all Sch phases with a kelpie. Are you thinking of going for a mally next time? I'll warn you, she is VERY high maintenance. She's an absolute sweetie & very smart, but some days it feels like living with a 5 year old with a chainsaw.

I hope he feels better soon - hopefully it is just stress. When you have the time, I'd love it if you'd start a thread telling us about the process of moving to China with a dog & how you're finding it there as a dog owner (please?)

Only when she's asleep.

Will definitely write to the FCI this week. I would be gutted if I moved to Aussie in the future, and my girl lost all the schutzhund & KNPV titles from her pedigree. They're part of her breed history, & her ancestors worked hard to achieve them.

LOL, thanks. We still have 3 months to go before we can do exciting stuff again (jumping, running, hiking), but might give your ideas a go after that.

Good spotting Jigsaw! Not sure it's an actual rotation or just looks like that on the video, I'll observe when I run her with the bike tomorrow. But you're right, it was the LHS shoulder. She still has a very slight limp on that shoulder & may always have a tiny one, but it shouldn't stop her working or slow her down any. Might just be the way she's standing, ValleyCBR? I can't feel any atrophy on her LHS any more, but she probably has lost a little muscle mass generally since she was on crate rest for a month back in May. We're only starting slowly with the exercise again, & this week is the first week I've taken her trotting. If it is a muscle mass thing, hopefully it will resolve as she gets stronger. ETA - hey Kavik, she's the perfect size! She's ended up weighing almost exactly half what I do. We do a party trick where she rides on my shoulders - couldn't do that with a GSD. Your boy is handsome though!

I think the insurance companies mostly always make money on it, otherwise they wouldn't do it. For me, the knowledge that I'm probably losing money overall is OK, since I know if my girl really needs an operation or hospitalisation I won't need to hesitate. If I never have to claim, I win, since my dog was always healthy!

Damn, I wish they'd help me become a vet! Where do I apply? My loan is huge, I'd love to save some money. Unfortunately, I've never been offered anything by a drug company yet. Hills SD on the other matter...

Here we go. I've shown her going past the camera doing a walk/slow pace, a pace, and a trot. All are shown at regular speed then slow-mo. Pretty sure she's trotting when we go faster, pacing when we go slower. Interesting! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Uz7y4CWgiU

Oh that's a good idea. I'll have to have another bash tomorrow when the light comes back. Just uploading some video of her going up & down. She seems to break into a trot from a pace if I get her to go faster, so perhaps she's a pacer when she's going too slow for a trot & too fast for a walk.

Especially when she keeps breaking her stand to come over and see what it is I'm doing with the camera! In her credit, she's never done a stand stay before we took those photos, so it's a miracle she stayed still that long at all.

This stacking stuff is harder than it looks! Not sure if either of these are quite right.

Yes, a wild or feral dog that couldn't live on what they could hunt or scavenge would die. I've lived & travelled in places with feral/pariah dogs, and the ones I observed ate a diet mostly made of (mostly vegetarian) human garbage (plus, presumably, whatever small mammals they could catch). I would imagine that most of the world's canines survived on this type of diet until quite recently. I have no idea how many of them suffered from malnutrition. The pariah dogs I met would probably have been very happy to eat the diet of any dog on this message board!

I agree. I'm personally quite happy to use almost any sort of aversives to get the last few % of reliability for things like recall, stay, don't chase the cat, etc, since these are life threatening (to the cat, anyway!) And I'm happy to use mild aversives to squish really annoying behaviours (don't hump my auntie, don't nick my chocolate, don't pull on the lead). But tricks & competition, we train almost entirely positively, since they're just for fun. I've talked to trainers who have told me point blank that they'd rather see a dog PTS than use a correction collar to stop a behaviour like stock chasing, which seems either cruel or ignorant to me. But I don't think Corvus is that type of trainer.

Not leaning forwards. Front legs straight, back legs with leg from hock to paw perpendicular to the ground. OK thanks. We'll go dig out the clicker and give it a go.

That's a hard one. I understand you need to do something because of the council complaint. But I would personally be reluctant to punish my dog for barking at someone hammering or making a loud noise, since that's her job, and I think it's reasonable for her to bark when something interesting or alarming is going on. Can you have a word to the neighbour and ask them to stop teasing her, or would that make the situation worse, do you think? Or how about blocking her view of the street, or confining her in a part of the yard far from the street, so she's less stimulated by the noise?

Hmmm, interesting, thanks guys. I will try to get some photo & video tonight. Will be good to work out what's going on with her. Dumb question from the non-show trainer - a stacked photo is just the dog standing square, leaning slightly fowards, yes? Or is there more to it than that?

Because some people have never been unlucky enough to own an aggressive dog themselves. They therefore don't understand that although your "polite" dog is currently acting polite & well controlled, it is still aggressive. And when you do finally convince them of that fact, they will over-react since they start to believe that your dog will eat their dog at any minute, since they still don't understand that a dog can simultaneously be aggressive & well controlled. I got that a lot with my old dog in the last few years I had him, people saying "I can't believe he's aggressive! Why, he's just sitting there!" They didn't understand that he was sitting there because he was well trained & I'd told him to do so, and that if I released him to do what he liked, he'd probably be making a meal of their dog. You have my sympathy!