Clover and I attended our first NW2 trial at the end of March 2022. Thanks to our early successes in canine nosework, we had high hopes for getting this new NW title on the first try as well. Alas, I botched one of the first two searches of the day (mostly because of how trauma from the November dog attack has affected my heart, so I wasn't feeling well). But, we rallied the entire rest of the day -- with Clover getting 4 of the 5 searches, 7 of the 8 hides, so still an incredible success for us. Check out the videos of our searches and other details on how the day went and what I learned from our failure and our successes. We ranked 18th overall (of like 45 dogs) for the day. 

We don't try to be fast, though. I'm really only looking for confident / clear / happy NW searches from Clover.

Honestly, I cannot fathom that our Champion of My Heart  site is celebrating 15 years. This little indie site keeps on chugging along. Forget so-called DOG YEARS. That's way more than an EON AGO in publishing. The first post went live on April 13, 2007, which was a Friday the 13th. It's funny looking back at early content. Apparently, I had more time for my craft and was much more lyrical back then. Lately, I focus on providing interesting and practical information about dogs and veterinary topics, with the occasional more personal post about my current generation of dogs. Take a look back (and ahead) with me, won't you?

Nationwide Veterinary Analytics released the second of three white papers with important canine cancer risk data in March 2022. Here's a video talking through the headlines and showing the main charts and much of the same information in text below too. They focused on the 25 top / most popular dog breeds, so many of us don't get information for our own dog breeds. It's still really interesting, though. Let's take a look at what we've learned. 

One of the things we're most famous for are FREE audio/video files that make the canine relaxation protocol easier to do. It might look like simply a way to teach dogs to stay, but the RP is much more complicated than that. It's meant to teach dogs prone to fear, stress, or over-arousal to defer to you and relax no matter what weird stimuli happens (noises, movements, etc.) Hard to believe I never made a canine relaxation protocol demo video before, but here you go. Below is a video of what it looks like when I do it with a behaviorally normal dog. In this case, first Clover and then a short snippet with Mr. Stix. 

Happy Chonksgiving from all of us! I plan to write some posts soon about what it's like to foster tiny puppies for our local animal shelter and the kinds of supplies you'll need in bulk to survive, if you want to add a similar volunteer gig to your life. But, I'm getting ready to take an extra-long Thanksgiving break (Nov 19-28), so instead please enjoy pix and videos of our latest foster babies that we're calling TATO (like mashed potatoes) and GRAVY. They are just 2 from a litter of 9 puppies born at our shelter. We went for sanity over heroics and offered to foster just 2 of them. #ChonkyPuppies

I started ordering groceries online for parking-lot pick up long before the pandemic. Most of the time, the staff shoppers at our local grocery store do a good job getting me everything on the list. Sometimes, though, I get weird substitutions and don't realize it until I get home. It's a 45-minute drive each way from our place to the store, so going back to correct weird or missing items is a real pain. So, I make do or try to find something to do with what I get. Guess who ended up with pounds and pounds of LIVER recently? Rather that just giving the dogs cooked liver as a treat, I made up a liver dog treat recipe. Just winged it, and they turned out pretty well. See what you think. 

I recently ditched my affiliate relationship with a major / famous pet site that's owned by a huge pet products mega company -- both because I literally never earned a dime because their terms sucked so much and because I realized they sell (and lately promote a lot) shock collars (some of which now masquerade as GSP devices and dog activity trackers to mask their other purpose -- to train dogs using pain). So, if you're looking for new places to shop online, please consider K9Cuisine.com whom I have new affiliate relationship. Ditch the megastores. Support small biz.

Through my long-time work as a journalist, I get access to stats and other information not always available to other dog folks. When I see something of interest (or that scares me), I'm going to start telling you about it. Here's how the trend toward people preferring smaller dogs may affect you.