kelpiecuddles

Not with advocate but one of my dogs reacts badly to Advantix. It seems to oversensitize her skin to the point that she snaps and snarls if the other dog touches her!

:laugh: Sorry haredown, in my mind when i say hounds I see tricoloured critters in a flock baying after their quarry, not sleek speed machines :D She basically barks when stuff is happening to tell you about it. For example when my kids were carrying a snack down to the outside table and chattering amongst themselves she was woofing away but once they sat down and settled it was easy to tell her to stop. I guess my worry is that she'll start up when i'm not home and then just keep going! We do have a citronella that we used quite successfully on our girls during a period when a neighbours dog was winding them up but should i be waiting a little while before implementing methods like that?

Something else to consider OP is whether that crate will be of use to you. We discovered afterwards that the cost to buy the crate was almost the same as hire and we wished we'd just paid the buy cost and then kept the crates for vet visits, etc!

I'm just wondering if anyone has any tips. The new dog we will be hopefully adopting later in the year is a bit of a barker and I want to start dealing with it fairly quickly after she moves in as i don't want her upsetting any neighbours. She's a basset so they can be prone to being barkers as with all the hounds and it's more of a wanting to tell everyone type bark but ongoing rather than just a single woof or two. My two girls will have a bark if there's a reason but persistent nuisance barking is something I don't tolerate in them so I worked on barking from the day they came home as a tiny puppies, have never had to deal with it in an older dog who's well and truly got a habit.

I haven't had a spleen for nearly 14 years now :) Humans and dogs live well without a spleen, it's a useful but not compulsory part of our anatomy LOL. Basically it is part of the immune system, the result of not having it can make you more prone to infections, especially bacterial ones, which means vaccinations are even more important. Apart from that it's not a huge deal really! Jules3cavs that medication would be a long term antibiotic, generally recommended for the first year or two after splenectomy.

I'm curious why it would make you question their skills as a vet Gillbear?

Where are you JRT? Maybe there is someone local to you with dogs you could go and spend a bit more time with to see whether they'll suit.

Glad to hear Koda is doing well. :) I wonder how this will affect him longer term and whether he will be able to return to his work fully...

How hard are the antlers? I feed my girls bones in the form of lamb flaps, etc but i won't feed large bones like marrow bones, are these softer or hard like a marrow bone?

Wow, we paid $4000 for two dogs, 1 cat, 6 large parrots and a budgie to get from home to the airport in Melbourne then to Sydney and then driven to Nowra including crate hire and boarding for about 3 weeks so that much just for the trip seemed like a lot to me.

Yes Lhok. My daughter was bitten on the face by a maltese terrier when she was about two years old. She did nothing at all to cause the dogs reaction it simply lunged at her and luckily just missed her eye. In hindsight i wish I'd reported it but as it happened at the shops i would have had no way of tracing where the man who owned the dog lived.

That's huge Zombie! Was that through a dogtainers type company or direct?

It's interesting isn't it. Funnily enough I have found that it also extends to humans. I have three children, one brown hair brown eyes olive skin, one very pale with blue eyes and hair that was blonde as a littly but has darkened and one with blue eyes and light brown hair. The two lighter coloured ones have always recieved lots of complements from people about how cute they are but the oldest tends to get overlooked in that regard, he's a handsome fellow but people do seem to go for the pale haired, blue eyes kids more!

Although I agree with you BDJ I think it's important to recognise that this scenario is different in that the OP is using her house as a place of business so theoretically this situation isn't really any different to any other place of business where the owner's dog may come to work with them. If you walked in to a shop and the owners dog was wandering around you'd be pretty safe to assume that the dog was friendly or the owner would be pretty dumb to have it there. If you ran a business you wouldn't leave dogs in the yard that were likely to attack anyone that walked in!

I'd like to think i'm pretty good at reading dogs but I'd still be hesitant to enter a yard with a large un known dog. That said if I was a client of yours and knew I was expected at the house I'd probably be pretty comfortable assuming that if there was any reason for me to be scared of your dogs you would have put them away before our meeting.

Oh yes, they adore kids, I'm yet to meet a basset who hates kids(I'm sure they exist, just haven't found one yet!). Even her other basset who isn't very outgoing and wouldn't come anywhere near me was happy to go and check out the children! Alex likes her and got a demo on how it's done :)

I have one of them but it's not big enough for both dogs(they don't like to cuddle up) and too big for their sleeping area to put two of them... Plus they like to sink down into a nest bed :D

They were very cute on the beach, I think 'must be absolutely insanely in love with kids' should be part of the breed standard, they had to say hello to every kid the met on the beach and Josie even went and stood right in the middle of an 'island' that some kids had made by digging out a circle of sand, the kids thought it was hysterical :laugh: There were many smiles on the beach at the sight of a stack of bassets and one kelpie who i'm sure spent most of the walk rolling her eyes at her ditzy walking companions :

The Reject Shop has the grass toilet trays for sale at the moment for $25 :)

On the east coast you should be able to take them within your luggage allowance with Qantas so you could pack all your clothes in your carry on and check the pup as your luggage allowance and have a trip up yourself for that cost :p Unless that has changed and you now have to pay Wayrod?

Went well :) We got back from the beach and realised neither of us had thought to take a single photo LOL The girls were great though and Angelica happily trotted along being led by my 9 year old and 4 year old, the little girl child had her all sorted, she's more stubborn than a basset LOL We thought we'd make up for it by taking a pic when we got back to the house but we couldn't get the dogs to stay still AND face the camera :laugh:

That's a cool idea mac'ella but my I don't like to let my dogs pull against the lead so as soon as they felt the pressure from the stretch they'd stop anyway. Thanks for the tips guys. I'm not too worried about the maximum length to be honest as the places we go are mostly practically deserted anyway, it's just a bit of a safety net to reduce the chances of us getting in to trouble.

LOL. I don't get the pop ups??

Don't feel bad. You were wearing jeans, just think how bad it would have been if you were in shorts! Any dog that bites like that needs the rangers to go and talk with the owners to ensure a solution that will keep people safe.

Another one you might consider is a basset, all the happy of the beagle with a little less of the crazy and they don't jump fences, I have also found them to not shed as much as beagles.