sandgrubber

In the USA you can do your own vaccines, though in many states you can't buy rabies vaccine (required by law everywhere) and you have to have a prescription to buy Heartworm meds. The vet does a test, generally costing $50 plus a consult, before they'll give you a script. In Florida, where I'm living now, almost everyone who keeps dogs has lost one to Heartworm, so the Heartworm thing is no joke. Some breeders get around it by using horse or cow Ivomectin in large doses, but that's not safe for all dogs, and pretty complicated for the average pet owner. The thing you do see here, which I'd think would work in Oz, is public vaccination clinics. These are commonly done on a monthly basis at feed stores, or other animal friendly locations. No appointments ...just wait in line. The dog gets a brief physical exam and shots for $10 to $30, depending on what jabs you get. The vet makes a little money cause there's almost no overhead or wastage of vaccine and they can serve 10 or more patients in an hour. You get stamped vaccination cards, as required by boarding kennels, clubs, etc. unfortunately this doesn't help for Heartworm, cause the test requires a blood draw and some lab work.

DOLers might find this book interesting...both for their kids and as a possibility for fund raising for breed clubs. http://www.thedogpla...he-Dog-Show.pdf P.s. I haven't seen it yet....but it seems to speak to one of the big problems facing the dog world ... How to enlist the next generation. If anyone has seen it I'd love to hear what they think.

Tomorrow morning, May 1, in the 7:30–8 a.m. EDT half-hour timeframe, NBC's Today Show will be airing a segment by NBC reporter Jeff Rossen — @Jeffrossen#RossenReports — which we expect will be a biased, critical, and misleading portrayal of the AKC. Please watch the segment live or on the Today Show website and then go to Rossen Reports and Today.com and NBCNews.com to post your comments in support of AKC and all the responsible dog owners and breeders in this country. We will be watching the segment too, since we are curious to see if picking on animal lovers really helps their ratings! Also, watch for AKC's immediate response to the segment on akcdoglovers.com.

Are you confusing the CKC (continental, not Canadian) with the UKC? The CKC in the US is pretty bogus. No pedigree needed, just some photos and a couple people's testimony. I don't know much about the UKC, other than 1) they register some breeds not recognized by the AKC, and 2) they do require pedigrees and keep closed registries.

Good spoof.Dogs can do well in some shops.Our local big box hardware allows dogs in, as does PetsMart. My two enjoy shopping about as much as the dog park. It's fun taking them in, particularly to the hardware. Almost everybody smiles at them. Bonza seldom gets out with fewer than four tummy rubs.

This isn't AR, but how'd your critters like having one of these things overhead? http://m.youtube.com...p&v=zvyJpuuwcas

Scary crazy people, but it looks like they have some nice working conformation GSDs

I hope there will be better tools available for guiding breeding decisions in the coming decade.The problem with inbreeding, including line breeding, is that it increases homozygosity, and thus increases the likelihood of deleterious genes being expressed. The problem with this statement is that all homozygosity is not equal. Most homozygous pairs are harmless. But the harmful ones can be quite bad, causing blindness, deformities, stillbirths, etc, etc, etc. I think there's general agreement that the genes in the Major Histocompatibility Complex, with dogs, the region known as the DLA, are especially important to health. Tests are coming available to measure the homozygosity / diversity in the DLA. see, eg, http://shop.genoscop...m/en/tests-dog. These tests are new and not cheap, and the methods may change over time. However the y should eventually spare us the difficulty of assembling 10 to 15 generation pedigrees to get a meaningful measure of the COI. And the information they yield will be more relevant to health than the overall measures of genetic diversity.

Inbreeding can cause problems. Look at the wolves at Isle Royale National Park. http://www.mtu.edu/n...story87157.html

I think you can also breed father to daughter but not mother to son. Correct me if I'm wrong. Father to daughter and mother to son do the same damage to the coefficient of inbreeding (COI). Getting an accurate sense of the amount of inbreeding requires ten or more generations of pedigree history. For example, many standard poodles show low genetic diversity due to the 'Wycliffe effect' ....the very major role played by a handful of dogs In the 50s and 60s. Dogs who look fine on the three or five generation pedigree may be strongly inbred due to things that happened in their great great great great great grand sire's time ...or throw in a few more greats.

From my behavioural genetics textbook "Hybrid Vigour or Heterosis is the increase in viability and performance when different inbred strains are crossed." When was the book published, and how much credence does the author have? :) Cattle breeders use it to get up to 50 kg more weaned weight in the F1 calves, you have to use an entirely different breed againif you want to do a second outcross. But it isnt usually worth keeping the heifers from the second cross as the advandage is downhill from there. Most breeders who do this either keep seperate their purebred herd and buy in the outcross bull or have two pure herds and only cross a percentage to keep the rootstock for the future. Do you really want to do that with dogs? Best answer! Everything I learned in biology says hybrid vigor is real. But that doesn't make it something you want to do with dogs. Vigor doesn't necessarily translate to health, and sacrificing breed characteristics isn't something we want to do.

.??? I thought the term originated in botany, where F1 hybrids are usually varietal crosses, and are often robust due to increased heterozygosity. Seed companies love them cause they mess up seed savers...the F2 rarely runs true.

I was talking to a guy who is trying to make it as a Labrador breeder the other day. He said he left what he thought was a dead pup with the mother overnight and came back in the morning to find all pups alive and suckling.

Has anyone ever seen any estimates of how much councils spend on dog issues? I mean including pounds, rangers, pooh bag provision and cleanup. I doubt dog registrations cover the cost, especially in places where the minority of dogs are registered.

The Group 3 classification that gets ne is that American cocker spaniels ARE considered gun dogs. Sure, old time clockers were used as gun dogs, but I doubt that anyone uses the derived breed for hunting. I'd love to hear about it if I'm wrong. When I see those little guys trotting around the ring with their hair brushed out so it sweeps the ground, I can't help thinking what a mess of burrs they'd become if anyone took them into the field.

She got a lot of publicity....US National Public Radio carried the story on the morning news today. Their take was that its just the beginning of the battle between brick and mortar stores and e-marketing.

Why are oldies succeptable and not young children? Given the way puppies serve as kid magnets, you'd think that kids would get Campylobacter infections on a regular basis.

A couple years back I was looking into the safety of using glyphosate. Found the actual trial results. They fed a bunch of beagles straight glyphosate at absurd doses over several weeks and got no immediate effect and some possible organic (kidney?) problems from long term high dose exposure. There are people who seem to enjoy making mountains of molehills...and probably some mountains that have been made into molehills for wont of attention. Glad your boy is ok.

I'd suggest re-posting this in the Breeder's Forum for best chance of feedback from people who have encountered similar.

I don't doubt that such things happen. But how often do we hear about the more common event, that the dog just stood by when the owner did him or her self in?

As I understand the Philippines, there's a serious problem with excessive wealth of the few, extreme poverty of the many, and dogs being used to keep the poor from stealing from the rich. The county I lived in in California had a couple of problematic imported Belgian Malinois. These were police dogs, imported from Europe as trained adults. They escaped containment and killed a few dogs. As I remember, both dogs were PTS after killing other animals. It would be interesting to know if the dog in question was an imported guard dog owned by a rich family. I don't think it's a breed specific problem, but I think there may be a few irresponsible breeders out there putting dogs with unstable temperament, or selling dogs as guardians who have not been properly trained. Given popular distaste for the modern show standard GSD combined with desire to adopt the 'new' alternative has put the Malinois in a position to suffer from people capitalizing on inappropriate breeding/training of guard dogs.

I am no expert on Borzoi, but know that many breeds make claims for long-standing breed standards, eg, Pekingese claiming to date back to some Chinese standard written thousands of years back. These usually don't stand up to critical review. Google fails to turn up the 1650 standard. The most detailed description of Borzoi history I could find says:"It is sometimes said that the first Borzoi standard was written in 1650, but this is more of a description of the breed than what modern day dog fanciers would consider a Breed Standard. " It would be interesting to see a translation of the 1650 "standard".

Long ago I worked for a biochemist whose cats were named Estrogen and Androgen...shorten to Ester and Andy.P.s. both were neutered.

Was a Pointer called Major the world's first pedigree dog? Historians uncover the earliest attempt to define a canine breed standard Major was described by John Henry Walsh in an 1865 edition of The Field It is believed to have been the first attempt to define a dog breed standard Walsh was aiming to end disagreements over the judging at dog shows Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2288465/Was-Pointer-called-Major-worlds-modern-dog-Historians-uncover-attempt-define-dog-breed-standard-based-physical-form.html#ixzz2Mis0hoX3

I once bred a bbEe bitch to a dog who was had been genetically tested for color and came out as BbEe. In a litter of 10 there were no pups that were bbEe or bbee. I calculated the odds of this at 1:1000 and contacted a different company, who agreed to do an independent test. When retested, the dog came out as BBEe. I don't remember what companies they were. Point is, sometimes genetic tests give wrong results. No one seems to be monitoring them, so lapses in quality control are possible. Reporting to OFA and CHIC are a good idea and do provide some protection. But it could cause a lot of problems if a popular sire got reported as CLEAR for a recessive condition when he was, in fact, a carrier. We don't know how often this has happened.