Staranais

OK, would that really be environmental or a secondary complication of another condition? It can develop as a result of untreated eye infections/conjunctivitis as an adult.If apparent as a pup(and you can normally tell by 8 weeks,or at least ones that may be borderline) then yes,it is genetic .As far as i know,it is a dominant gene and only requires one parent with it to pass it on ? Gareth, I guess it depends whether the first condition was itself caused by primarily genetic or environmental factors. At some point it sort of becomes splitting hairs I think, since there's almost no condition that's not influenced somewhat by both genetics and the environment. Exact mode of inheritance depends on the breed, I think, Centitout. But if it were a simple dominant gene causing entropian, then you'd generally only get pups with entropian from parents that had entropian. That's not what we typically see - it's perfectly possible to get pups, or a pup, with entropian from parents that appear clinically normal.

A huge achievement!

We just had our lectures in small animal opthamology, the specialist vet that lectured us thinks entropian in puppies usually has a very strong genetic basis. By genetic, I mean there are breed predispositions to entropian, lines within breeds that are especially predisposed, and a component which is just luck of the genetic draw in any one particular animal. It can also be entirely environmental though, caused by corneal disease or conjunctivitis (and in foals, by dehydration).

I think that's fair. The breeder shouldn't have to cover thousands of dollars of surgery that the owners choose to do, but I think giving the purchase price back (or covering all or part of the operation cost up to the purchase price) is fair, if the owners are spending that much money fixing the pup up from a disorder that could be due to the breeding. I wouldn't send my current pup back if she developed a condition that meant she couldn't work, I'm way too attached. But I'd be peeved if the condition was one known to have genetic component, and the breeder refused all responsibility. If I wanted to play pot luck with health and temperament, I would have gotten a pound puppy. Luckily, I had a pretty good breeder, so it's not an issue for us.

That happens with the chain off because the idea is to reinforce the corrected behaviour which is more important than the correction itself. Whipping a dog around by the neck on a choker teaches fear and avoidance. The essence of choker chain training is to teach the dog that your guidence is essential for his/her pleasure. Many people incorrectly use a choker as a punishment system for naughty dogs which is not what it's about. I've used the long line as a teaching tool before, Koelher style, and it worked fine. But my current girl just wore it as a pup as a safety device while I worked on her recall using positive means. I never even picked it up, just tamped it with my foot when necessary. I'd say she has a 90% recall now, we're still working on getting it totally reliable around the huge distractions (well, she is a teenager!) Lots of ways to skin a cat, or use a long line. Our tracking line is totally different though? The long line is far lighter & far longer, so she hardly knows she's wearing it. I don't think I'd like to track her on the long line, would be ouch on my hands!

Kind of like going to bible college, then, compared to doing a degree in comparative religions? Tee hee!

Brush his teeth with a baby toothbrush, or some cloth wrapped round your little finger. You can get special dog tooth paste, don't use the human stuff.

Could be normal? Most dogs have an itchy spot that makes them scratch (or makes them lick the air).

Does one need to actually own a breed of dog to be allowed to comment on them, then? I mean, I suppose it would be silly to say much about a breed you had no practical knowledge of, but what if you're a dog trainer who has trained members of the breed, for example, or a handler who has handled them?

Nothing I can think of?

Oh, but she would have so much fun trying!

.... Hi Star - that goes to something I raised in another (can't remember which, but it related to how much chemical we apply and how much processed food we feed to our dogs over their lifetime, and the affects) thread where I expressed my opinion/belief that it isn't just about what we feed our dogs when they come to us as pups, but that their health can be (regardless of our great feeding) affected by evolution throughout the generations and therefore it is really important that the parents and grandparents of our dogs are fed a wholesome, balanced diet. Yes, it's entirely possible, although I don't think anyone has studied it in dogs. I think they just observed the effect over 3 generations (the mother's metabolism affected the eggs that were in the calf that were in the mother), but still something for breeders to think about I guess!

Plenty of research out there showing that the emotional state of a mother will impact on the emotional state (or personality) of the newborn. Emotional states lead to behavioural responses ie possibility of "dominance" I don't understand your label of "true dominant"? Please explain further. Dominant lineage - could not this be because of learnt experiences from another animal that behaves dominant? I'm not saying genetics has no role, but there are a lot of other possibilities, so I "try" not to assume. They were telling us at school the other day about some research they'd done on dairy cattle, where keeping pregnant dairy heifers hungry can not only decrease their unborn daughters ability to produce milk over their entire lifetime - it also appears to affect their daughter's daughters' lifetime ability to produce milk! Different to emotions and temperament, I know, but there's a lot that goes on that we don't know about in the big new world of epigenetics. However, I find it very hard to believe that a tendency towards dominance doesn't also have a substantial genetic component, just like most other personality traits in dogs and humans do.

Fair enough! Pity no one else was prepared to give it a go. Now, if we were a little closer, and you were happy to wait 6 months for my girl to mature a little more, then we'd love to give it a bash!

Perhaps you just haven't triggered him yet, Kavik!

I read a little of that book, but didn't continue because it seemed she really struggled to find any other explaination that could possibly describe dominance related behavior, the explainations seemed to waffle on and really seemed to simply describe the behavior more than actually getting to the roots of what was driving the behavior in most cases. The website is a little bit worrying too, here's what she has to say about the staffy, pitbull, english bull terrier, rotweiller, german shepherd, and other dogs that have had aggression "bred back into them": "And it’s a fact — these dogs are, by nature, always prepared to be highly aggressive. They don’t want to avoid aggressive encounters at all, and often look for an excuse to start attacking. These dogs will approach and present a stick or other object as if they are inviting play, and they then begin an all-out attack on the first animal in the area that so much as moves (which animal is all too often a human one). Incidents with humans and children show that these dogs have an unpredictable hair trigger (which, if you are lucky, you may never accidentally touch, in which case you might think you have a ‘nice’ pit bull, American Staffordshire terrier, Presa Canaria, etc.). " Guess I was just lucky with my old stafford boy and never touched his "trigger", since he never as much as growled at me or any other human in his life. Or perhaps she just has no idea about aggression or prey drive, or about the difference between aggression directed towards dogs and towards humans? Paragraphs like that make me think she just wants to write any canine aggression off as being bad and unnatural, instead of analysing the different ways and reasons that any dog can be aggressive. She also claims that the dog isn't a hunter or true predator, which my girl sitting in the yard would like to raise a paw and dispute. Sure, she likes to scavenge, but she loves to hunt, bite and chase. It's a pity, since some of the rest of the website is interesting and some of the articles are really well thought out.

Bumping this to ask... did anything ever become of this?

My other concern with natural remedies is, how long before bugs start becoming resistant to them as well? Take manuka honey for example - great product, very effective, few/no side effects, and I'm seeing more and more vet practices using it. But it's not like manuka honey has some magical property that prevents bacteria evolving, so I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before we get more and more bugs with a genetic resistance to the active compound. Just realised that thought is kind of irrelevant to this thread, sorry. But it's something I've been wondering about for a while.

Staffords are sadly similar. I remember being told several times that my old boy was "skinny", since he had a waistline and you could (*gasp*) see his last rib. I don't know where people get the impression that staffords are supposed to look like little balls of lard, but I suspect they're somehow confusing "muscular" with "solid" with "fat". I would guess that if a dog has inherited perfect joint structure, then he can probably carry a lot of excess weight and not be at high risk of damaging his joints. But it's a fact that most pet owners have no idea if their dog has great, average, marginal, or shocking hips and elbows. Even x-rays are only partially predictive of how well a dog's joints will age. IMO keeping a dog lean in case he has less than perfect joints is far better than waiting until the dog has already shown signs of damage to the joints and then telling the owner to keep the dog leaner. Also, my understanding is that the risk of cruciate tear does go up as dogs get heavier, even in dogs with apparently perfectly healthy stifles. Perhaps the argument needs to be turned back the other way. Is there any evidence that keeping a pet labrador plump is in any way helpful to his health? If not, then why not keep him lean and avoid stressing his joints and ligaments any more than they have to be?

Hey, not like I've analysed this or anything, just glanced at it, but please don't forget organs. They're not optional! The liver especially is really important to feed. I'd prefer to see 5% of the diet (by weight) as sheep or beef liver, and 5% as kidney, some green tripe if you can get it would be good too. Organs don't need to be fed every day, e.g you can just feed liver a few times a week to make a total of 5% of the diet. I'd be happy feeding half the diet (by weight) as chicken bones since he's an adult, as long as he's getting the remainder of his meat portion as red meat, as you are doing. I'd check the omega oil has vit E added, if not I'd add a cap of vit E every few days. Otherwise, at first glance, it looks good. Although the best test of that is how well your dog does on it, over the long term.

Perhaps it's just me, but I can't even imagine leaving my girl all by herself in a situation with strangers where she was terrified of them! I'm not saying the death is the owners fault, I don't think it is at all, if the story is correct then clearly the groomers were negligent, but still... leaving my dog like that is not something I'd ever do. Both for her sake, since I really don't want her developing a fear of strangers after being forcibly muzzled and groomed, and also to stop the groomers being bitten by a freaked out dog. Did the owners not realise their dog was so scared?

I think that's the big question though really, isn't it? Is it "better" to treat this as a pure obedience exercise, with other people simply as just another distraction, and correct the dog for not performing, and hope the dog starts to feel more comfortable in the situation after his behaviour is under control? Or is it "better" to use something like food to change the dog's expectations and emotions about the situation to start with (classical conditioning), and hope that since he feels differently about the situation, he won't feel the need to lunge anymore? I think both ideas have merits and drawbacks, and have used both in the past.

I don't completely agree, particularly with possessive aggression. In observations of wild wolves a more submissive wolf will resource guard from a more dominant wolf and this is frequently accepted by the more dominant wolf. I guess that's where Pats comment that "possession IS the law" comes in Berri never tries to take anything from Mango, even though he is Mr Alpha Wannabe and she's so soft and submissive. I read somewhere (can't remember where for the life of me!) that dogs seem to understand that others have the "right" to defend what's in their possession at any one time. Where status comes in is that more dominant dogs have a bigger circle of possession, so to speak - a dominant dog might exert passive control over a bone a few feet from his paws, with no one daring to take it, whereas a submissive dog might have to have the object actually in his jaws in order to prevent it being stolen. Like I said, I can't remember where I read that, so have no idea how credible the source was. But it matches well with what I've observed myself. I guess when I tell my dog to leave stuff alone that's over the other side of the room, she must think that I think that I'm really super dominant. I've also noted that my girl is much happier bringing a valued possession to me on command than having me walk up and take it. She'll let me do it, but you can see the tension coiled up there waiting to explode (I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone else try to take a bone from her!) No idea why she feels more comfortable bringing me things on command rather than me taking them from her, since the end result is exactly the same, but it fascinates me.

Yes, the first two or three chapters in the first Koehler book are OK. I trained my last dog to loose leash walk using similar methods and he had a very reliable loose lead walk. There are other, more modern, methods you can use to get similar results, but the Koehler ones are still valid and can work well. One big downside of the Koehler method is that it does need a check chain, and you do give leash corrections, so you can't do it with a young puppy. All those months of training wasted until the dog is "old enough" to train! You can start clicker or drive training the minute you get your new puppy home. I don't particularly like the Koehler methods used for teaching the other exercises (sit, down, recall), they work OK, but in my experience you can get better (faster, more precise, equally reliable) results using more modern positive methods. Marker/clicker type training is IMO the best method for teaching these things, as it allows you to communicate to the dog precisely what you want, without even having to lay a hand on the dog. And I've never seen a recall that beats a recall in drive. The "problem solving" section at the back of the Koehler method book is archaic and IMO should not longer even be published. Some of those methods for solving behaviour issues might have been acceptable in the 50s when there were no commercial dog behaviourists and people had no other options, but now days you'd be better off seeing a professional instead of opening that chapter.

That's sad. I'm glad she got her staffy smile going again! My old boy was a staffy too. They're lovely dogs. I think a balance is needed, and that balance will be different for different dogs and different owners. I've got to say that I've seen many silly things going on in schools that hate the whole idea of dominance, as well as with instructors that overuse the concept of dominance. At one point, my old boy and myself attended a volunteer run, positive only obedience school - it was pretty much clicker and treats only, toys were discouraged (disruptive!), dominance was a bad word, and corrections were a huge no-no. My boy's dog aggression and manners didn't improve with their methods, so I eventually left to experiment with training him my own way, but we went back a year or so later to sit the CGC. My boy passed cheerfully with flying colours - but the instructors dog, which had a bad reputation for being unruly and rank aggressive to both humans and dogs when I first attended the school, was still aggressive and uncontrollable after an additional year of clicker training. The dog was smart and bold and drivey, but he was also a rude, aggressive PITA with absolutely no respect for his owner. He needed to be taken down a rung or two, but the owner apparently just couldn't see that her dog ruled the roost since she didn't "believe" in dominance. I have no idea what ended up happening to the dog, or owner, but it wasn't heading anywhere good.