Fellow blogger Patty Khuly over at Dolittler garnered a slew of comments recently when she wrote about tail docking and ear cropping. Her post about an anti-tethering ordinance also got my attention. It made me realize that all of us dog lovers exist in a spectrum of good & better, bad & worse. Sometimes, it’s clear that even the well-educated, much-experienced among us have the occasional contradictory opinion. …
We found the little treasure below while digging around in search of something else last week. Tom’s dad (the late, great Ivan) tucked it away for us. For a million and one reasons, it made me cry. Here is the tale of Spike (aka The Cone Dog), who was Tom’s best friend when we met all these years ago. …
Last week, I finally got brave enough to email neighbors/friends to ask them to play the “stranger” in Lilly’s people desensitization work. As I’ve mentioned before, this is particularly tough due to our somewhat remote location. Of the 16 people I asked, 4 people volunteered and even scheduled an encounter right away. So, first of all, our most sincere THANKS to Sheila, Heather and Patrick, and Carol. Here’s how it went:
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Keeping with the holiday tradition of people asking VERY personal things in a group setting, I thought we’d do a little experiment in true confessions. Entertain me (and others) with your answers to these dog care, dog training, and dog teasing questions. To get things started, I included my own answers: …
While browsing a holiday circular, I came across a Christmas tree ornament that had to be designed by someone with dogs not like mine (or yours … no offense). It’s your typical ball-shaped bauble, but it’s filled with dog treats (they make them for cats too). I’m NOT kidding. Off the top of my head, here are just a few scenarios that sprung to mind: …
Nervous habit compels me to look out windows as I move around the house to grab a snack or whatever during my workday. My goal, always, is to find the dogs and make sure they are OK. One day last week, I finally spied Lilly sitting stock still in the upper corner of our upper pasture. When I stepped out the front door, she shot like a rocket straight to me. I was so proud. So, I tried to recreate that long-distance recall in the video below. …
While chatting earlier this week with my friend JoAnn, whose lab (MACH2) Chaos has moved from #29 to #14 in the country, I realized a point of progress. Let’s call it the Three-Step Rule. …
While on location doing research for an upcoming article in Natural Home magazine, I met a couple with a solo, young-ish puppy who is offering up some housetraining challenges. After my initial holy-cow, what-do-you-mean-he’s-still-peeing-in-the-house reaction, I realized that as a solo pup, he has no benefit of generational learning. …
After Lilly and I walked up to the road to get our mail Saturday, we realized that our pals — Belle and Clyde — from down the valley had meandered their way into a neighbor’s back pasture and seemed a bit stuck. So, once again, I became happy, food lady to the rescue. …
In our ongoing efforts to resume Lilly’s behavior modification, which got sidetracked by her rattlesnake bite to the face Labor Day weekend (and weeks of prez campaign work), we conned Tom once again into playing the “stranger” in our training scenarios. Sometimes Tom’s creativity and independent spirit overtake our work.
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