sandgrubber

When threads run beyond 20 pages, they often wander away from the OT and bring in some emotional exchanges. So? As in much face-to-face communication, a lot on DOL is not true dialogue, but response to triggers. If someone says something that pushes your buttons, you respond to that statement. Deep listening is pretty rare in any format.

You might try putting up an add at on the bulletin board at Dogs West . . . there are lots of people who have trailers and don't use them that often. Never heard of commercial rentals in Perth.

Well they should buy up some of our agricultural land like many other countries are doing - we don't know how much has been sold off though because our wonderful government does not bother to keep a register. off topic . . . but inappropriate finger pointing needs to be noted: The Brazilian government has historically, hastened deforestation by building roads and making land grants. . . .like the Australian and US governments (to name a few), Actually, Brazilian land grants in the Amazon generally required that half the forest be left intact, though little was done to enforce the law. This is more than can be said for Oz or the US. The Brazilian government has not played a major direct role in deforestation. In the last decade (since Lula was elected), Brazil has made a lot of progress in decreasing the rate of deforestation, mostly by enforcing the law. As for land destruction, Australia has outpaced Brazil in causing extinctions and in land area cleared of woody vegetation. The rape of the southwest was not so dissimilar to Amazonian deforestation (or the clearing of savannah lands to the south and east of the Amazon). Main difference: more endemics in Australia and much more rapid land clearing. What was done, mostly, with chainsaws and machetes in Brazil was done with huge Catepillar dozers in Australia.

Given that people have been know to lie/cheat (eg, by substituting one dog for another), I don't think any lab that allows people to take their own swabs should be certified. For that matter, you could end out with false results just through poor record keeping . . . you don't need dishonesty. Someone has four or five dogs done at once and the labels get switched somewhere. There is a reason for certification procedures. Think of the harm that might be done if a popular sire was actually Optigen B and his test results came through as Optigen A.

Personally, I think this is a snobbish and ambiguous part of the code of ethics. I also think the attitude that often goes along with it is a major reason that pedigree registrations are falling and designer dogs are increasing in popularity. People want a good healthy dog, with predictable temperament and look. Not many want a show dog, and a lot of the people who think they want a show dog go to one show and decide it's not for them. You can rationalise most anything under the rubric of 'improving the quality and/or working ability of the breed'. For a lap dog, being a good pet may equate to being a good working dog! Try and breed away from extreme conformation for health reasons and avoid popular sires . . . say so openly, and you'll be in for a lot of criticism.

I've been true to one breed . . . thinking about switching cause I'm getting older and I am a little comfortable owning dogs I couldn't carry back home if something went wrong on a hike. Hope my next breed will hold me through for the rest of my life. Currently thinking Boston, as they are fairly common in the US and I like the temperament. I don't see how people cope with multiple breeds. Perhaps my social skills just aren't up to dealing with the ins-and-outs of breed clubs, politics, etc. for multiple breeds.

I'd say this is a good issue to use to attack the [stupid] ban on e-collars. I don't see how anyone can say it's inhumane to aversion train dogs to make them avoid snakes. Maybe push the RSPCA to do something useful and offer this sort of training! Nobody gains when a dog gets killed by a snake.

17'5 =LY 4M4Z1NG WH47 W3 C4N MIZUND3R574ND 1F W3 DONOT 7RY. DOL has a little of everything . . . people who shoot first and ask questions later, people who have trouble putting a paragraph together, people who express themselves well but can't spell, trolls, gospel-touters, skeptics, comics, people who are too serious, people who are a bit saccharine, people who are on the dry side, the occasional wacko. Not so different from the world in general.

I've been reading dog blogs lately. It's shocking how nasty people get. Maybe the deeper question is why so many animal lovers don't like other people? Do we have so many DA and HA dogs because there are lots of DA and HA owners?

To answer the question: If you think someone is breeding unethically, how about approaching them personally and finding out what they do and why they do it? Maybe you can teach them something . . . or maybe there's a reason for what they're doing, and they can teach you something. Backstabbing and policework are not effective tools for behaviour modification. Honest, non-judgemental communication does sometimes work.

A century ago, the kitchen was a sort of little factory . . . you couldn't buy ready made . . . many people made their own bread, canned fruits and veg, etc. The food industry expanded and took over a large share of the household tasks associated with food prep. Our food is probably more sanitary for this change, but I think it plays a major part in the syndrome of eating too much processed stuff, too little fresh food, and getting fat. That's progress for you. Gotta watch 'em, or the pet industry will push through the same sort of progress in dog breeding: Taking the job out of the home, insisting on sanitation and portraying the industry as an improvement; making home-bred dogs seem inferior, inconvenient.

My guys love their HeartGuard chewies. My vet says you can skip every other month and still break the life cycle of the parasite. With this strategy, oral is cheaper than the injection. The only snag is you must buy from a reputable source. Apparently there are some counterfeit meds showing up online.

I think the jury is still out on speying and health . . . Diva posted an interesting article in the 'studies about dogs' part of General Discussion (its in the 5th page of the topic). It was published in Aging Cell, a peer reviewed journal. The authors studied a large number of life histories for female Rottis . . . separating out the girls who were speyed young and those who were not speyed or speyed late in life. The results associate early speying with a 30% reduction in life expectancy! for the article see http://onlinelibrary...009.00513.x/pdf p.s., please don't take this as an endorsement for back yard breeding of unspeyed bitches. There are good reasons to spey.

bump

Agreed! The flatcoat and golden retriever would be one and the same breed but for people breeding for colour. . . . and black Labs would far outnumber yellows.

The various codes of conduct are subject to many interpretations. I can see policing welfare. I think it would be a big mistake to police 'improving the breed', and caution is required on 'striving to eliminate hereditary diseases'. One person may feel they are improving the breed by using a Gr Ch stud or line breeding on a particular dog. Another person may believe that the popular sire syndrome, and breeding for extreme conformation, are major causes of health decline in breed health/work performance. As for eliminating hereditary disease, one person may insist on testing for heterozygosity in the MHC/DLA, another may insist on MRI, another annual CERF . . . we'll be seeing many more options for genetic testing, some of which will be largely irrelevant for some breeds.

see, eg http://iditarod.com/ for official coverage http://www.alaskadispatch.com/slideshow/photos-iditarod-2012-begins-sunny-willow has good pictures On Sunday, years of preparation, trial and error, defeat and victory culminated on a frozen lake in tiny Willow, Alaska, about 70 miles north of the state’s largest city, where Iditarod XL was officially under way at 2 p.m. beneath breezy, baby-blue skies and in temperatures hovering around 10 degrees F. Thousands of people from across the state pulled into snow-choked parking lots early Sunday morning, while who knows how many thousands of others watched on glowing computer screens and high-definition TVs beyond. MORE: "Mushers stream out of Willow as the real Iditarod racing gets going" Should temperatures remain low and storms steer clear, mushers and dog teams may be in for another race contested at a blistering pace. Perhaps another speed record will fall, one year after John Baker of Kotzebue shattered the old race record by reaching Nome in just over eight days and 19 hours? Athletes to watch this year include Iditarod legends and upstarts. Everyone knows the fan favorites: two-time runner-up DeeDee Jonrowe from Willow; four-time Iditarod winner Lance Mackey of Fairbanks, who hopes to join Rick Swenson in the elite, five-time champion column. And then there are the Seaveys, another family whose name is as synonymous with Alaska dog mushing as the Redingtons. Dallas Seavey, 25, son of 2004 winner Mitch Seavey, is back along with Dallas' grandfather Dan. He will be leading an elite group of young guns that also includes Ryan and Ray Redington Jr., Rohn Buser, 22, and Pete Kaiser of Bethel, who finished an impressive eighth last year. Many former champs and Iditarod race watchers believe young Dallas, winner of the 2011 Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, has a chance at upsetting the veteran field -- a field that’s perhaps as deep and competitive as any in Iditarod history.

http://www.wildlifee...des2012.html#cr Dogs help track down Everglade's giant pythons photo in original INVADER: Dog handler Jason Dewitt, researcher Christina Romagosa, doctoral student Melissa Miller and dog trainer Bart Rogers with sniffer dogs Ivy and Jake, with a large pregnant Burmese python. Picture: Ches Smith Burmese pythons can grow to 20ft February 2012: The scenario sounds like a low-budget movie from the 1970s: humongous snakes are on the loose, eating everything in sight. But this is real - a problem that an American university and its canines are helping to combat. Auburn researchers used detection dogs in the Everglades National Park to find Burmese pythons during a recent study on ways to manage and eradicate these non-native, invasive snakes, which are eating native wildlife, mostly mammals and birds. 'The ultimate use for detection dogs is to suppress the expanding python population and to eliminate them in small areas, such as on an island. Our main concern is their impact on other wildlife,' said Christina Romagosa of Auburn's School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. 'Interraction with humans is also a problem. The snakes, like alligators, can get in swimming pools, eat small dogs and cats, and could injure a human.' Auburn worked last year with the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, or ECISMA, to test how well dogs could pinpoint the snakes' locations so wildlife agencies could remove the snakes. The problem started years ago, and was probably a result of irresponsible python owners. Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons now living in Florida The first Burmese python was spotted in Florida in 1979 and the number is now estimated in the tens of thousands. In January this year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service made it illegal to import Burmese pythons or transport them across state lines. 'Irresponsible people released these snakes because they became too large and difficult to care for,' she said. 'Now they have reproduced many times over. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 probably didn't help when a warehouse containing pythons was destroyed.' The Army Corps of Engineers contacted Auburn's EcoDogs program in 2010 about the possibility of using dogs to help find the pythons, which led to the pilot study. EcoDogs is a collaborative project between the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and the College of Veterinary Medicine's Animal Health and Performance Programme, where the dogs are trained and maintained. Dogs are used as part of a rapid response team Jake and Ivy, both black Labrador retrievers, helped the researchers capture 19 pythons, most between six and eight feet in length, including a pregnant one with 19 viable eggs. Burmese pythons in their native range in South East Asia have been known to reach up to 20 feet and weigh almost 200lb. The National Park Service has counted 1,825 Burmese pythons that have been caught in and around Everglades National Park since 2000. 'We found the use of detection dogs to be a valuable addition to the current tools used to manage and control pythons,' said Romagosa. 'Dog search teams can cover more distance and can have higher accuracy rates in particular scenarios than human searchers. We suggest that dogs be used as a complement to current search and trapping methods.' The Auburn study found that dogs and their sense of smell were two-and-a-half times faster than people visually searching, but people did have the advantage in extreme humidity. Searches by detection dogs are ideal in the cooler months, Romagosa says, when dogs can work longer periods of time without overheating. Can track pythons that were in an area hours earlier 'Dogs can also be used throughout the year as part of a rapid response team going to a python sighting, which can be helpful in an urban as well as natural environment,' she said. The dogs are trained to 'alert', or sit down, when they got within five meters of a python. 'When the dogs alerted to a python's presence in the field, we would put them in the truck so they would not come in contact with it,' trainer Bart Rogers said. 'The dogs could even track pythons that had been present in the area hours earlier. They did not pay attention to 'gators and other snakes, which would also avoid the dogs.' Interestingly, the Labrador retrievers, which love to get wet, had to be trained not to go into the water. 'They love the water but in the training we reward them for staying out of it,' added Rogers. 'We could train them to find pythons in water, but we are limited in that we couldn't easily capture pythons if they are under water.' The snakes found by the dogs have been sent to Skip Snow, a National Park Service biologist at the Everglades National Park. Some snakes were euthanized, some were tagged with radio telemetry devices for further study and tracking, and some were donated to the Nature Conservancy for use in training personnel how to catch snakes.

Look at the pedigrees of the dogs running the Iditarod (yes, they just took off, GO MUSHERS!!!!). Not much purity. But they do the job.

If someone cannot have children and decides to get a dog and treat it with as much importance as they would have done with a child, what is so bad about that? It's when they treat the dog as a person. A dog is a dog and treating them as a child does no one any good. I have a friend who treats her dogs as children and they behave like spoilt bratty children Oh I agree with that, I was just meaning the importance attached to them, as in "my dog is as important to me as a child would be, because I can't have them", kind of thing. Hope that makes more sense! Are you saying that a spoiled dog is worse than a spoiled child? No way! The simple fact that the child will almost always live longer, has more rights, and consumes more resources makes the spoiled child a bigger negative to family and society than a spoiled dog. If someone is going to do a rotten job of balancing nurture with teaching of social norms, I'd much rather they get a puppy than take the baby bonus.

I don't have an answer. But if the best diagnosis you have is "spider bite?" you can be pretty sure the treatment offered is hit or miss. I, personally, get nasty histamine reaction of some sort that creates swollen festering sores. They go away without treatment, though I dob them with various stuff (eg, peroxide, rubbing alcohol and other 'drying' and 'sterilizing' stuff). Tick larvae (or maybe 1st instars) have also caused pretty bad reactions for me (after pulling the little buggers out I get nasty swelling and hard spots). Hopefully Abby's problem will clear up on its own. If it doesn't, I'd say keep looking until you find good understanding of the cause of the problem. I'd try web searching before going vet to vet. If it is a spider bite, I doubt antibiotics are helping as the problem is more likely a response of Abby's body chemistry than a bacterial infection.

Anecdotes don't make science. What about the large number of people and/or families who have been wiped out because a crying baby alerted a predator or enemy human to their existence? Infants of most species are pretty much silent. Not all human cultures tolerate loud, demanding children, including, for many of us, the cultures of our parents, or great or great great grandparents (depending on our age). I'm older. My mother was raised in a well-off family under the mantra "children should be seen and not heard" . . . she was given stale bread when fresh bread was available to avoid excess eating. The rules of her childhood included strict enforcement of correct posture and deportment, and thorough mastication of food. I remember talking to an old Irishwoman who raised 12 kids in poverty. She said people used to ask her how she fed all those kids. She said "I find out what they don't like and feed them lots of it." Not to mention "Spare the rod and spoil the child". Can you imagine raising a modern kid in such fashion? Looking at responses above, it sort of looks like people don't hate children. They simply can't tolerate what children have become, and find it easier to devote their nurturing energies to animals of various sorts.

Lovely video. Unfortunately, photos seem to be the only acceptable way to question breeding for extreme conformation on DOL. Don't expect tolerance if you go further. I was thrown off the Breeders Forum shortly after questioning the Peke who won at Westminster and the system behind going for such extremes. I was given no warning or explanation, and have sent three emails to list administrators and posted a question on Forum Suggestions/Help/Messages. No one will tell me why I was thrown out. I understand how much show people invest in creating their winning dogs, and am not surprised to get vituperation in response to questioning the foundations of the show system. But the discussion is badly needed. So sad that it is silenced. No doubt this post will be removed.

The Border Wars blogsite posted alternate roots to download (http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/) There is also a torrent available for those of you with file sharing experience where you can download the complete HD video to your computer. If you are not familiar with torrents and winrar, don't bother. Another means of watching the documentary is through the BBC's online video website, but you have to be in the UK for the video to work. You can get around this with a proxy. Here are some simple instructions on how to do this: - Use Internet Explorer. - Open the Tools menu (upper right, looks like a gear) - Internet Options > Connections Tab > LAN settings - Under Proxy Server, check the box [x] Use a proxy server - Address: 109.123.110.151 - Port: 80 - OK - http://www.bbc.co.uk...Three_Years_On/ When you are done watching, turn off the Proxy server by going back into the same menu, unchecking the box, and hitting OK.

For people (like myself) who don't have access to high speed internet, there's a long verbal synopsis of the program on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_Dogs_Exposed_-_Three_Years_On corrected URL