sandgrubber

My late mother had a rule that she didn't want to own a dog she couldn't lift. I see that as sensible guideline. I'm 63 now and can still lift my Labbies, but I've got my eye out for a smaller breed next (thinkng Boston . . . they're easier to come by in the US than in Australia). Of course it was always understood that the kids would take the dog if she passed. As it turned out, she was looking after a foster when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the dog went back to the rescue organization.

Your "facts" not supported by science. See, eg: http://www.leecharle...packleader.html Quoting from the beginning of that article: Myth #1 - Dogs Obey the Pack Leader The biggest myth is that dogs have an instinct to obey the "pack leader." New research shows that wolves live in extended family units, not dominance hierarchies. Even more surprising, however, is that wolves who settle near garbage dumps don't form packs (Coppinger), and that coyotes also form packs, but only in the winter when small prey is scarce. This suggests that the pack is neither a dominance hierarchy nor an extended family, but exists solely for the purpose of hunting large prey, a dangerous enterprise that requires intense commitment and cooperation. It also requires a group of like-minded individuals who share a common purpose, but who also possess strong differences in temperament. It's these differences in temperament - long thought to be an integral part of the pack's hierarchical structure - that enable the wolf's pack-style of hunting to succeed. And while it's true that only one animal leads the pack when they hunt, that animal is not the pack leader: it's the prey. There's no question that dogs and wolves will gravitate toward anyone who exudes confidence, who gives clear signals on what you want from them, particularly if those signals and behaviors are in-synch with their instincts for group cooperation. But they clearly don't gravitate toward someone who's intent on dominating them or pushing them around. In fact, they don't like that at all. But don't just take my word for it. Here are some links that will help you understand the real pack dynamic: . . . article proceeds to quote several sources who have studied wolves or wild dogs

I am 63 years old and have four retained canines . . . because my permanent teeth never came in. The canines are worn down and puny, but better than nothing. Not sure if dogs are the same as people, but in people, the tooth falls out because the adult tooth comes in and gives it a push. The retained tooth is not a problem.

The most tragic fat dog stories come from dogs like Obie who are companions to old people suffering dementia or other debilitating problems. You can hardly condemn an oldie who is loosing it for taking joy in giving treats to the dog . . . nor can you be too hard on the extended family, who see that the dog is a major source of joy for an oldie whose ability to deal with day to day realities is falling apart. It would be more compassionate to praise the people who recognized the problem and convinced the old couple to give up their dog than to blame the owners. Hey guys, what happened to positive reinforcement! p.s. I'd rather be killed by kindness than by cruelty and neglect.

My two cents . . . the quote: "He said it wasn't Jack, didn't even look like Jack. He yelled but he didn't flinch - his eyes were glazed over. .. " deserves attention. That doesn't sit with the picture of a pampered, dominant animal. The spoiled vicious brat of a dog shows his mettle a few times before he reaches four years. dancingbc's hypothesis of brain malfunction trumps the hypothesis of 'spoiled dog that hasn't learned who is boss'.

Killer dogs to be taken from couple Louis Andrews, Canberra Times, September 19, 2012 Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/killer-dogs-to-be-taken-from-couple-20120918-2651b.html#ixzz26reRP7Z5 Two dogs' reign of terror in a southside suburb appears to be over, with a tribunal ruling the killer canines posed too great a risk to children and animals. The ruling prompted a outburst from an owner, who threatened to ''burn down the houses and smash the cars'' of the people who spoke out about her dogs. Mira and Aaron Sarlija last week lost their second appeal against a decision not to issue them dangerous dog licences for their beloved Stripe and Kayla. The seven-year-old Staffordshire German-Shepherd crosses were linked to the deaths of four animals - three cats and a dog - in Fisher in the space of three months. In July ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal senior member Jann Lennard was satisfied the pair killed cats Sugar and Mummy, as well as Maltese Shih Tzu cross Brandy on April 2. She upheld the decision not to grant a licence, and last week appeal president Bill Stefaniak dismissed the Sarlijas appeal. The decision paves the way for Domestic Animal Services to put the pair down. But they remain in the care of authorities, as their owners have several weeks to lodge an appeal in the ACT Supreme Court. Sugar, Mummy and Brandy were killed in their own backyards. Ms Lennard said it was also likely Stripe and Kayla were involved in other attacks in the Fisher area. They were also implicated in the death of one cat and the injuring of another in February. In statements to the tribunal - some made anonymously out of concern for neighbourhood reprisals - residents spoke of a climate of fear in Fisher. Mummy's owner wrote: ''Knowledge that these dogs may be returned to the owners scares us all. We will never be able to let Sam, our cat, play outside again. We will never be able to let my grandson play outside again.'' Domestic Animal Services deemed the pair dangerous dogs and refused to grant licences to keep them. The Sarlijas fought the decision in the tribunal, arguing they would take steps to secure their yard so the dogs could not escape. In September a follow-up inspection found the dog owners had taken steps to dog-proof the yard, but more work needed to be done. In the tribunal hearings, the pair painted a picture of a strong bond between them and the dogs, sisters from the same litter who had always lived with them. ''It is quite clear Aaron and Mira love their dogs very much,'' Ms Lennard wrote. ''However, this case is not a test of how much the dogs are loved.'' When the senior member upheld the decision not to issue a licence, Mira Sarlija launched into an abusive tirade, threatening to ''burn down the houses and smash the cars'' of the people who complained. Ms Lennard said her outburst was unacceptable and ''served only to underline and confirm [the tribunal's] assessment of her reliability''. I'm surprised the owners didn't face charges of threatening witnesses . . . it's clear they are aggressive people and need to be kept on a leash.

I'd worry more about smaller spiders that get into your house and are likely to bite in daily encounters, like sleeping dog putting head down in the wrong place. Size doesn't correlate with danger in spiders. We have tarantulas here. They can get to be 100+ mm. People are terrified of them, but you'll have a hard time finding any documented evidence of dogs harmed by a tarantula bite. See: http://atshq.org/articles/found.html

This is one of the reasons you need quality staff with dog handling skills. Most dogs welcome handling, but you always get a few who don't tolerate it. It's not sufficient to have kids who love dogs. And then there's the occasional Newfie or other heavily coated large dog, especially if they come in with a matted coat with seeds and burrs, where tick checking requires skill and patience. I'm glad to be out of the business. It's too much responsibility, too much capital investment, and too much hard work for a business that's anything but lucrative.

I don't have a good foundation for answering this question, but maybe, in taking a stab at it, I'll bring on someone who knows more than I do. Look at the dry foods available to you and choose one that seems relatively low on sodium and protein .. . . then fill it out with something that has little sodium and / or protein, such as pumpkin or cooked white rice. Throw in a few micronutrients, minerals, and omega-3/6's using dietary supplements.

If you want to offer swimming, this looks like a good product. http://www.arthurspools.com/abovegroundportablepoolsfordogs.htm (be sure to check out Olla's page at http://www.arthurspools.com/ollatheswimminglion.html) I think they might want a distributor in NSW or VIC. A couple of people in WA have gotten pools from them. The shipping cost was ~$750, but there would probably be deals if you wanted to order mutiple pools.

Dogs are organisms, not machines. Annual vaccination isn't the same as an oil change every X000 km. Once immunity is established, re-vaccination may do more harm than good. Many vets are enthusiastic about sending out notices cause they want to keep their practice busy. That doesn't mean those services are needed. Expensive doesn't equal better. Vets who specialize in some procedure, cause they have expertise and good equipment, will often be cheaper than vets with more office glitz but less experience. A country vet, who sees a wound and knows from experience that the thing will heal with simple cleaning and oral antibiotic will cost much less than a new graduate who insists on putting the dog under, doing a surgical cleaning job and stitching up. Much-advertized imported dog food isn't necessarily better than figuring out how to buy 'scrap' meat through the raw foods distribution network.

I like the idea of clicker training but have always found it hard to remember to carry a clicker. I just don't like little plastic gadgets My dogs regard clapping as praise. I didn't deliberately train them in this , but I tend to clap, spontaneously, for 'good', eg., when they make a particularly good catch. Would it work to systematically replace clicking with clapping?

My dogs are social and don't need pampering; they have no escapist tendencies. I don't mind them getting some different sort of food for a week or two, so long as they get quality food, and they are healthy. So I'd look for a place that provided group exercise, didn't keep them locked up during the day . . . some place to swim would be a big bonus. Willingness to treat dogs as individuals. Having someone in attendance is important, and that someone must be skillful in handling and judging dogs . . . ie, be able to recognize what dogs are going to have problems socializing, and keep them separate. Loving dogs is not enough. I've hired many young people who love animals, but are pretty clueless in terms of predicting behaviour. Grassed exercise areas. Clean and not at all smelly (including the kitchen). Well lit, well ventilated, doors to the back of the individual kennels that open directly onto an exercise area. Good if the kennel is well enough established that they can simply turn away. I prefer feeding twice a day, not cause the dogs need it, but because it requires that each and every dog in the kennel gets looked at twice a day. I started a boarding kennel years back. I found that there's a market for many sorts of kennels. You will find that it is expensive to maintain large individual exercise areas that do not allow contact between dogs. There are dogs who will have a go at other dogs through a chain link fence. You can double the fence, but it's expensive and you end up with an area where you can't cut the grass. If you have, say 20 kennels, each with it's own run, which is what a lot of DOL people would want, you'll go nuts trying to keep the grass mowed. Gravel or cement runs are awful, particularly in hot weather. Heating and air conditioning presents serious quandries. People with apartment-style lap dogs want A/C. It's expensive and to be effective, requires closed, insulated kennels, which makes both ventilation and cleaning more difficult. Evaporative cooling is bad. Dogs, apart from the flat faced breeds, have quite effective systems for cooling themselves through evaporative cooling, and if you put them in air that is humidified by evaporative cooling, it compromises their natural cooling systems. The best cooling system is cold water circulated through the floor, particularly in the sleeping area. This allows the dogs to cool themselves like they do in nature . . . by finding some cool dirt and lying there. Look into putting a radiant heating/cooling system into the floor. You can use the same system for slab heating in winter by piping warm water.

There have been many such studies, with similar findings. I think the briefest summary is being too anal and too uptight about exposure weakens the immune system. Justifies both keeping dogs, and being lax on the housekeeping :)

This is correct, but the end game with the modern purebreds was to create something to breed 'true' and consistant. DD's do not have this goal, only financial rewards. Therein lies the BIG difference! Breeding for true and consistent lines happened, eventually. I suspect that the dog dealers in Newfoundland who supplied 'water dogs' to English/Scottish buyers were motivated by the desire to make money, not a goal to create a consistent type. It's documented that they crossed to larger dogs when the market wanted larger dogs . . . hence the Newfoundland's giant-ism . . . and who knows what else they did. When the dogs hit England, there was a lot of experimentation, generally aimed at producing better gun dogs. It took many many generations before breed standards were developed and consistent and true breeds emerged. My guess is that some of the DD crosses will sort themselves out, as the F-N generations of the labradoodle are doing, and some of them will fall by the wayside. The landed aristocracy isn't what it used to be. The way that breeds are created and evolve will necessarily change. There is large demand for dogs of certain types. If 'the fancy' doesn't satisfy this demand, people will turn elsewhere. I don't think the purebred community has a reason to complain.

I think fighting DD's is a loosing battle, and doing so vocally generally alienates the purebred dog fancy from the general public. To someone who has their heart set on a particular DD cross, someone trying to stop a breeder from producing that cross looks like an arrogant snob. After all, many of our modern breeds were created through a lot of cross breeding 150 to 200 years ago. Eg, many gun dog breeds enjoy the benefits of introducing bloodlines from the lesser St. John's 'water dog'. The modern pug looks nothing like the pugs found in 17th and 18th century paintings. Half of Queen Elizabeth II's famous corgis are, in fact 'dorgis', ie corgi x daschund (information found on the Royal website). Better to reserve energy for breeding healthier dogs, who fit in well with modern lifestyles. If you want to pick on breeders, put pressure on those who use dogs with unstable temperament or known health defects.

From all the litrature I have read a 10 year old dog is the equivalent of a 53 year old human. .... That is roughly true when you're speaking about organs (including bones, skin, etc.), but cell mutation is different. At the cell level, it is thought that the probability of mutation of a specific gene is roughly constant per year. That is to say, a year in a dog's testes is the same as a year in a man's testes, and the probability of things going haywire is cumulative over time. Dogs, being shorter-lived, don't have as much time for mutations to accumulate. See, Mutation rates in mammalian genomes, S. Kumar, S. Subramanian, Proc. of the NAS 99, 803–808. 2002. My statement may be off, as presumably inherited mutations occur in the reproductive organs. Thus it might be more accurate to start the count from the age of sexual maturity . . . making a 10 year old dog (assume viable sperm created at 1 yr) somewhat equivalent to a 23 year old human (assuming viable sperm produced at 14). Science isn't good at establishing mutation rates. They vary for different alleles and different species, and are affected by environmental factors. But as far as I know, the concept that chance of mutation is more or less constant over time has not been seriously contested. . . . and all else equal, more years, means more mutations. Ie, longer lived animals are more likely to suffer from mutations occurring in cells of the reproductive organs. Bottom line: given a choice, I will always prefer an older dog. p.s. I have taken concepts used to try and translate measurements of genetic divergence between lineages to geologic time and used them on time scales of a few generations. There may be reasons that this shouldn't be done. I'm outside my field of expertise. Happy to be corrected.

Good article. Thanks for posting. I've been interested in the Belyaev experiments for many many years. This article presented them from a different angle. At one point I considered signing up for adopting one or more domesticated foxes. Turns out that the only sell them desexed and the adoption fee was around $5k, which killed the idea. Something Goldman didn't say is that the experiments were more successful than Balyaev expected. He originally measured domestication on a scale of 1 to 5. I can't remember how long it took, but it wasn't a huge number of generations before he ended up with all his foxes in the most-domesticated group and had to rework his scale. I personally think dogs also range in the extent to which they are domesticated . . . and ongoing selection for temperament is one of the most important aspects of "improving the breed". p.s. I think he's wrong about tail-wagging. I've seen wild foxes wag their tails . . . just not at people.

Oh yes!!! Mind you - the cartoon animals were still very popular - and cute , but we knew real ones were different! :) And you, like me, probably never had to ask for a puppy . . . animals were always there. Your parents were there to yell at you, or smack you if you misbehaved around animals. Modern urban/suburban kids see puppy on cartoons etc., and beg and wheedle until their parents buy them a puppy. Mum now works outside the home, so puppy is left alone for many hours a day. The better ones do 8 weeks of puppy preschool, but don't follow up with later training. The result is poorly trained dogs, adults with few dog-handling skills, and kiddies (especially those whose parents didn't buy them a puppy, and those who ended out with a small dog with soft behaviour) with naive, Scooby-Doo expectations. My parents weren't dog-stupid, just horse-stupid, and nobody in our neighbourhood was much of a horseman. Gene Autry & Trigger . . . Mr. Ed. . . I don't know where kids caught horse mania came from in those days, but my sister caught it bad. She begged until she got a horse. We played around the horses, without supervision. I ended out with a ruptured kidney. My sister was thrown and got a dislocated shoulder.

The problem isn't Scooby Doo, it's the absence of more realistic models. It's the fact that kids get 20 hours of Scooby Doo for every hour of realistic training they get about dogs. It's the puppy pajamas they are given before they can walk or talk. It's all the media hype about puppies, that gets kids to nag parents to get a puppy, even if their family setup isn't right for a puppy. Sometimes the problem isn't kids treating dogs like humans, it's kids being mean to dogs and using them to take out all their emotions.

If I understand the mechanisms, the amount of DNA damage per year should be more or less the same for all species. This means your 10 year old dog is equivalent to a 10 year old boy. So I wouldn't worry about it. At least your old guys give you info about how well the line ages . . . and greater protection diseases like epilepsy often show up at five or six years.

Worrisome. The following add is being spread around through the US equivalent of Gumtree (Craigslist). Might be worth doing the same in Oz . . . I have no love for HSUS, but some of the stuff they do is good. 5000 REWARD (DOG FIGHTING) Date: 2012-07-29, 5:21PM EDT Reply to: see below Help Publicize THE DOGFIGHTING HOT LINE FOR THE PUBLIC - 1-877-847-4787 - sponsored by Humane Society of the US. $5000 reward for information leading to the arrest of dog fighters. 1 877 847-4787 PLEASE COPY & PASTE TO EVERY CRAIGSLIST. DOG FIGHTERS ARE FLAGGING THIS ADD. THEY DO NOT WANT THIS INFORMATION OUT THERE. PLEASE HELP SPREAD THE WORD. THESE DOGS NEED YOUR HELP!!!

If people would keep their damn cats indoors, incidents like this wouldn't happen. I don't endorse spending on condemning a dog who has the wrong look, but I fully sympathize with letting the fire department -- who have the tools and often have nothing to do -- do the job. I don't know how high up the cat was, but the appropriate cherry picker would probably be a couple hundred dollars and hour, including transit time. Rescue organizations have enough to do without being responsible for getting animals out of trees. Let the owners pay it!

Good to hear things continue to be better. When you see your vet again, you might want to have another discussion about weight loss. In my experience, vets don't generally recommend canned food unless the dog needs a specialized diet . . . dry food is usually preferred for weight loss. Dry food is more condensed than wet food, which is mostly water. Thus, a cup of biscuits has a lot more joules than a cup of canned food. Whether or not it's fattier depends on the fat content of both, and whether you look at fat per volume or fat per unit dry weight. The better a approach to weight loss, at least as put by the vets I've worked with, is to use a very high quality of biscuit, reduce the quantity fed, and maybe move to a variety with lower fat content (ie, weight loss biscuits). Ad lib works with some dogs, but many will overeat; so portion control is required. Canned food is expensive, often not well balanced, and bad for teeth and gums. Others will advise about BARF diet. This can be good, but it's a lot harder to manage than biscuits.

Why bother shopping for a second opinion if the insurance will pay for it? And if you have insurance, be aware that you're paying for people who don't bother to get a second opinion.