dancinbcs

Dr Anne Neville in East Bentleigh. She is a vet who does Chinese Medicine as well as conventional treatments.

You need completely edible bones as the basis of a BARF diet. Lamb necks are cheap and readily available from most butchers and great to feed alternated with chicken frames. The marrow bones are more for chewing exercise than forming the main part of the diet.

Another vote for a Collie Rough. Some Aussie Shepherds and Border Collies would suit. Samoyeds are another possibility.

Get a chest x-ray done asap to see if it has spread. One of my girls had an mammary gland removed last year because it had a small cyst on it with a tiny pre-tumourous growth inside the cyst. I wasn't overly worried because the vet took such a large margin around the cyst. I lost her suddenly to extensive cancer in the lungs, chest cavity and brain 9 months later. She only lived a week from diagnosis so there was no time to treat her. In hindsight there were odd little things that indicated all was not well over those 9 months but she was never ill at all. It seems the mammary lump may have been a secondary tumour to the main one in her chest and if we had found it last year she might still be here.

Ok, I was wrong. I checked with the owner and the dog on the left is not the dog I thought it was. Looks very much like him but the ears are a shaggier and darker.

My vets only charge about $150 to desex a medium size male. Have you asked around other breeders for prices to find out if this is a typical price the breed? Maybe it is or maybe this breeder is charging inflated prices. There are still plenty of breeds around $1000 or less from the best breeders who do all required health testing etc.

Great Now we have the PM endorsing puppy farms by buying a designer mongrel. :mad :mad :mad

Am I reading this right? She has had number 5, 27 hours after the first one? I hope she is finished. That is an extremely slow whelping for just 5 puppies.

Food takes about 9 hours to go through a puppy so you need to feed later, not earlier. I always give the last feed an hour before I go to bed and have very rarely had a puppy that ever needed to poo during the night. As they get older you can bring dinner forward.

Good to hear that he is improving and hopefully it is a just a one off illness. You have to wonder though why one puppy has an infection when the others don't. I wouldn't be selling this puppy any time soon, just in case he has some sort of immune system problem that allowed him to pick up the infection. Also check with other Cairn breeders to find out if anyone else has had puppies picking up infections. There was a very long thread on DOL about 7 years ago about a Border Collie that was sold at 9 weeks after being ill with an infection at 6 weeks. The vets gave the all clear for the apparently recovered puppy to be sold but the puppy became ill again a few days after being sold. The whole mess ended up in an 18 month court case which the breeder eventually won but she was still out of pocket a lot of money and had all the stress of the whole ordeal. The puppy turned out to have what we now know is TNS, a faulty immune system that is eventually fatal. This case led to the development of the DNA test for TNS in the Border Collie, so no breeder will ever have to risk selling a puppy with this condition again. It is similar to faulty immune systems in many species so it is highly likely that also occurs in some other dog breeds.

I had it done on a dog that had arthritis in her feet. I was having trouble keeping the nails short enough to stop them adding to the arthritis pain but cutting them caused even more pain. They were trimmed regularly but I just couldn't get them short enough. The dog needed a general for some other procedure, so I got the vet to cut them and cauterise. This makes the vein in the centre shrink back futher so cutting the nails in future is easier and hurts a lot less.

Go and see Dr Anne Neville in East Bentleigh. She cured one of mine who had yeast infections in her ears on and off for 4 years.

The dog on the left is the pound mutt that does a lot of TV ads. The other one isn't any recognisable breed either.

Can they have fish ? The only fish that is high in purines is sardines. Everything else is suitable for a low purine diet.

It is never acceptable for an off lead dog to rush at any person or dog(on or off lead), uninvited, no matter where it is. Doesn't matter if it is an offlead area or not. Effective control means that you can keep you dog away from all strange dogs and people with voice control if they are off lead. I am sick to death of people thinking that dogs can do whatever they like in an offlead area.

What a ridiculous comment - the dog was under control and was (in its mind) rushed by an out of control rude little dog. That is not a friendly advance. As the OP has already pointed out the right thing to do would have been to have her dog under control in the first place. This sort of ignorance really gets me cranky - if your dog runs up to another dog that is minding its own business in an area that is meant to be ON lead then be prepared to take responsibility for it - just like the OP has. Thanks Agility Dogs, i do take full responsibility. I don't even blame Gus. Sure he ran up to the other dog but I should have had control over him in the first place and I took him to the park and let him off lead. Believe me, lesson learned! ;) I'm not so sure the other dog needs to be muzzled. As other people have said, he was in the right, I/Gus were in the wrong. He shouldn't be punished for doing something I wouldn't blame my dog for doing if he were in the same situation. The other thing to try and remember, is that many dogs will put an obnoxious one on the ground and old them down by the throat, to teach them some manners. To me this sounds like what happened here. You dog rushed into the other dogs space and he pinned him by the throat. The fact that your dog was uninjured tells me that if the other dog had been truly aggressive, he would have done some damage. Most dogs will not do any damage if the other dog gives in and lies still so the only thing you need to do is wait for them to let go. Sometimes just flicking the dog on top, on the side and calling them is enough to break their concentration so they let go. Only truly aggressive dogs and those bred to fight will continue to bite another dog once it gives in. If the dog doing the attacking is actually biting (drawing blood) then you need to intervene but if it is just pinning the other dog down, interfering can cause it to escalate. It is very normal dog behaviour for one dog to pin another down especially when adult dogs are teaching manners to youngsters. I had one bitch who was top dog here and she would pin down any new dog that entered the yard. She never put a mark on any of them and once they submitted she would let them up and play with them. None ever challenged her authority.

A lot depends on how much effort the breeder put into toilet training the litter. Mine are about 80% trained when they leave me at 8 weeks. A couple of weeks vigilant follow up by the new owner sees them 100% in a few more weeks. The females take longer to get bladder control so usually take about 2 weeks longer than the males and this only applies to puppies that sleep inside. It is harder to train them if they sleep outside. If they haven't been trained at all when you get them you are already about 4 weeks behind. If they have lived in a glass box in a pet shop then toilet training can be a nightmare. Keeping a puppy confined in such a small area destroys their natural instinct to toilet as far away from their bed as possible. People do eventually manage to toilet train pet shop puppies but I know I wouldn't have the patience to do it. Remember every time you let the puppy make a mistake you are in fact training him to go inside the house. Then you have to undo the what you have taught. Never let them make a mistake and things progress much more quickly.

I think the number of vaccinations depends on the brand but usually there are only 2 puppy vaccines given if you use just the C3. Two doses are required for a C5 so if the first is a C3 and the second a C5 then an extra shot needs to be given to activate the Kennel Cough part of the C5. Most breeders I know only give C3 for the first vaccine and many of us only use C3 after that. I haven't had a dog vaccinated with a C5 for about 20 years.

Vitamin E is deficient for optimal health in most human and animal diets these days. Many greyhound people always use Vitamins E and C on all their dogs for all their lives and I learnt it from some of them 30 years ago. After further studying Vit E, I also take it myself.

Why Koolie. Plenty of BCs have blue eyes ?

I am working on the theory of a hereditary tendency to a Vit E deficiency. I supplement all my puppies from weaning with Vit E powder and they get it daily for all of their lives, so my breeding dogs have always had it. The bitches stay on it while pregnant and their babies get it from 4 weeks. I have never bred a puppy with undescended testicles, none of my stud dogs sired, and neither has another breeder that I mentored 20 years ago, who also uses the Vitamin E. I cannot think of any other breeder in my breed who has not bred puppies with undescended testicles. It used to be just one line we thought was a problem but over the years it seems to be all lines. Just a theory at this stage but one worth trying.

Hard to tell from that photo but the head coat and markings are definitely Border Collie.

This. If I couldn't afford treatment I would euth not palm the dog off. I love mine too much for that There isn't really any need to immediately put to sleep a dog with a liver shunt. There isn't any special medication. It is a matter of treating symptoms as they arise. So antibiotics if the dog develops a UTI. Diuretics if fluid is in the belly. The Hills L/D food is pretty pricey but you could do a home made diet. The tests are expensive. $500 for a ultrasound (50-70% chance of finding the problem). CT scan $1500 (needs a general so dangerous for dog with liver problem). $4000+ to inject dye whilst dog is open + liver biopsy. Then after all that a lot of the liver problems can't be operated on and you have to treat with medicine anyway. The operation to fix a single shunt also has a 50-70% chance of working with a 10-20% chance of the dog dieing in the first 24 hours due to hypertension. My local vet didn't push me to go to the specialist. I was given the option of treating medically straight away. The specialist also didn't push for the tests. I guess because Amber's symptoms suggested she wasn't in a great way anyhow. Might be the same for this pup. Luckily the ultrasound picked up Amber's shunts. It still cost me $1400 in tests to find out what was wrong. I don't have pet insurance but have a line of credit account for such emergencies. Not everyone can come up with this sort of cash. Can't say I thought about giving Amber away as an option though! It is disappointing when a breeder does not offer support. Very disappointing. Makes you wonder why you bother doing the whole registered breeder thing. Undoubtedly there is an element of the breeder feeling defensive but suck it up and be there for your puppy buyer. I don't think the breeder needs to offer monetary support or even to replace the pup but emotional support would be a good thing to offer. Absolutely Jules. Any dedicated breeder will want to know about strange health issues with any dog they have bred. They should be there emmotionally for the owner and do their own research to find out what has happened. Personally I would refund the dog's purchase price to help with the testing expenses, especially with a puppy. No breeder should be blamed for breeding a dog with a health issue unless there is readily available testing to avoid that particular problem. If you breed enough puppies you will always breed problems sooner or later. How a breeder handles the situation when problems do occur, sorts out the truly dedicated from those just producing puppies.

Definitely possible for a very aggressive puppy to be obvious at that age. I know someone that had mated her bitch to a really old dog from a line they were trying to keep, and then a terrier crossbred jumped the 7' fence and mated the bitch a couple of days later. It was so aggressive that she couldn't get a lead on it before it jumped back out of the yard again. The first mating was the last chance with the old dog so they opted to let the bitch have the litter and DNA test the puppies. The normally devoted mum wanted nothing to do with the puppies at 3 weeks as they were becoming increasingly aggressive. By 4 weeks it was obvious that they were all crossbred, even though the DNA results weren't back but the worrying thing was the aggression. They spent every waking minute fighting and if picked up they just kept trying to bite. After consulting a very well known trainer/behaviourist, the breeder put the whole litter down at 4 weeks and the DNA results confirmed they were all by the crossbred dog. There was no way she would have tried to find homes for puppies with that sort of temperament. In times past breeders routinely put down any puppies with unsuitable temperaments. I know of one particular breed that was being resurrected, where a lot of puppies were put down due to temperament issues. Over 20 years that breed went from dangerously unpredictable to very stable and biddable due to breeders making the hard decisions to not settle for anything less than the temperament they wanted. These days the BYBs in particular just breed from and sell anything no matter what the temperaments and so we end up with lots of unstable dogs in out society.

I have just re-read the original post and it states that the puppy has a possible liver shunt. So they don't even have a definite diagnosis and they are trying to palm the dog off. He could have any number of conditions which may be congenital or not. Vets are notorious for getting diagnosis wrong so until they see a specialist and find out exactly what is wrong they are being very hasty in making any decision. If I was the breeder I would want to be informed of the test results and would only offer a refund if the dog was definitely confirmed with a congenital defect. If the owners were not prepared to have the testing done, I would want the dog returned so I could find out what the problem was.