Greytmate

Where is Phoebe when you take Pia outside? Have you considered how stressful it would be on Pia knowing there is a dog out to kill her? Might be the reason for the toileting inside. Pia might appear to be happy to toilet outside when you are with her but she might also be doing it inside because there is less stress and/or it's safer. I think Kirty has considered that. One of the consequences of her decision to keep Phoebe and manage her is the likely continuation of anxiety-based behaviour problems in all her other dogs. Kirty, I don't mean to be nasty here, I feel for you so much, but starting yet another topic is unlikely to provide the magic and easy solution. Please don't wait for a human error to one day affect your management system, or there could be a lot worse tragedy than wee on the carpet.

I think you are going to have to make some really major changes to have success with this.

I believe this is correct. People have a legal right to access your front door. This means you are responsible if your dog bites someone who, having entered your property, is going to or coming from the front door. It was established on this very website, nearly six years ago by Jed, that a person/s can be restricted from entering your property, by having a sign clearly displaying: ACCESS DENIED. Then anyone wanting to enter your property has to take alternative steps. Trespass is a French term meaning "a path through" No trespass means no path through. Access denied means 'No! You cannot open the gate and walk up to the front door' ETA: It wouldn't hurt to have a lock on the gate as well. If you choose to set up a property like that, one of the alternative steps the police have is to shoot your dogs on the way in. It isn't acceptable to have dogs attacking police who are responding to calls for help and trying to get people out of danger.

This sounds like acidosis, very common if you over-exercise a greyhound. I knew a lady who's greyhound was ball-obsessed. Ten minutes of hard chasing at the park after a tennis ball killed her dog. Obviously poodles and other breeds should be able to handle a lot more exercise than a greyhound can. But any activities that involve hard chasing (like racing or obsessive ball retrieving) can be dangerous, because the dog's instincts override the brain signals telling the dog it has done too much. The owner has to take control and know when to stop with dogs like these.

You didn't take her to the vet when she last had ear problems. You posted about that here. You didn't follow advice. And now she has ear problems again. Sometimes people are reluctant to go to the vet about ear problems, because of the price, but really the dog does need vet treatment. It's a welfare issue. Untreated ear problems can lead to deafness, haematoma and other injuries, OC behaviour, brain damage or death. Often treatments appear to work very quickly, because they contain anti inflammatories, anti-histamines or other pain relieving ingredients. But unless the problem is correctly diagnosed, and appropriate and full treatment is carried out and things are made right in the dog's environment, ear problems are likely to continue. It can often take a lot of time to achieve success and may take a few vet visits. Please keep us up to date with how Sophie's treatment is progressing.

You could send a card and maybe a small present, but you do have to be mindful of people not wanting contact or seeing it as advertising. The present should not be too personal, something like a tiny bag of healthy gourmet treats will be fine. Your card should mention the specific personality of that dog if possible, that you remember the pup and have been thinking of it and its family. It is important not to give the impression that the card could have been written for a hundred puppies using a computer. Because that is purely a sales tactic, and doesn't show any care for the individual. Offer what is reasonable for you to offer, now that the pup is growing up. Don't offer 'free boarding', instead invite the pup to stay at your home for holidays if necessary, because you would love to have him over. You can offer the opportunity for them to call you if they ever need help or advice with the pup, and handwrite your home phone number and email address on the card. You may get a call back one day. But accept that these people are not friends, and your relationship is with the puppy. People don't have to want to stay in contact to appreciate they have bought from breeder that cares.

It's not about laying blame. I'm interested in understanding what causes dogs to attack. If we don't hear what led to the attack we can't increase our understanding of why they happen. This feeds people's fear of dogs as they appear completely unpredictable. Had these dogs been receiving protection training? Is it easy to tell that back at the pound by preventing a bite sleeve? Did the dogs have a history of aggression towards humans? Had the Council received in the past that were not acted on? There are usually events preceding an attack that casts light on the dogs behaviour. In the absence of intelligent analysis we are left with the peanut gallery shouting 'kill all dogs who look like those ones' which doesn't make anyone safer. I don't expect council pounds to have bite sleeves or use them. Council staff are not trained to do what you say is 'easy'. While analysis of the behaviour would be very helpful, there are no resources to do this at a council level, except run an investigation into the incident. Nobody wants to kill all dogs that look like those ones, but plenty of us don't have any time for dogs that act like those ones. Regardless of how they came to act that way. Some dogs are dangerous and removing them from the community does make the community safer. The 'menacing' laws that are relatively new around the country, along with the new Vic law enabling destruction of loose dogs that have previously been declared dangerous, will help make the community safer and have nothing to do with breed.

Your post history would indicate otherwise. As a preventative, I think you might need to look at how often you wash your dogs and what you wash them in. If you upset their skin balance they can be more prone to yeast infections. What happened with your male chi and his skin problems/allergies? Glad to hear that you are going to follow up with the vet. They are expensive, but worth it in the long run.

It's not you being paranoid. :D People should be careful about what they put online. But unless the place is so filthy that there is a health or safety issue, your opinion might not be wanted. They have to live in it and they don't care. You only have to look at the photo.

It depends on the health of the dog, most vets will not refuse to desex but will point out the risks. Plenty of 9 or 10 year old dogs can handle it, it is much easier on old dogs than it is on old bitches.

I hope others do come along and give their views here, give it a bit more time. This topic comes up in the Rescue forum a lot, but I think it is more valuable to me to hear about what pet owners regard as problem or not a problem, not just what rescuers or trainers think are problems. They are not always the same thing. People can join in our conversation if they like or they can go to back to the first question and simply tell us what behaviours they think are problem behaviours and whether they think they would be able to train the dog out of it or have to just put up with it. Or do they do things to prevent problems? It is good to be able to discuss dog behaviour as it is, without the bias towards modification that is found in the training forum or the emotional distress of discussing in a rescue context.

Gut decisions are actually sub-conscious decisions made by the brain. The skill is to be able to use your senses and brain to consciously recognise the signals and articulate that. There is a lot of info around on the signals that we can learn. It takes practice to do this well. Then it is as easy to work out which dog is really aggressive as it is to work out which dog is really fluffy. If anyone wanted me to prove and articulate everything I know in an effective way so that my knowledge is passed on, it will cost a few hundred thousand dollars over four or five years. I can then deliver what you ask. Or are you happy to just listen to me randomly add 20cents worth of info here on DOL? The resources are just not there to fund the necessary academic research. I would say the bottom line for knowing whether somebody is going to be good at behaviour assessments is to have that person assessed by a veterinary behaviourist to ensure that they have the skills to see and record every minute signal coming from the dog. The current good tests are written in a way that removes the need to interpret the results from the person conducting the tests. They are only required to observe signals and document that. The tests themselves should be approved or devised by veterinary behaviourists. Dogs cannot tell us how they feel, but they never lie. It is a separate skill to interpret dog language than it is to make decisions about what it all means. That is why it is quite feasible to train volunteers with no formal qualifications to do behaviour assessments. The buck stops with the management of an organisations as to whether they run proper testing, or whether they choose dogs by other means. The resources are available to help small groups do this very economically, and in my opinion they are negligent if they do not do it properly. These dogs are being placed as pets and organisations selling pets are obliged to make sure their product meets that purpose and does what they can to ensure the product is safe.

"How little was known". Yes that would be how little is officially known, and how little can be explained properly. However after doing tests for years, modifying the way I did the tests as I understood the subject better, and having to sell the dogs afterwards, I learned heaps. I chose to introduce temperament testing. I chose what went into the test and what was not in the test, based on a combination of what I knew and what fitted in with the latest official knowledge and advice I learned from from veterinary and other behaviourists. I had to explain myself and get approval for what I was doing from highly qualified people in order to demonstrate our testing had integrity. I feel for people silly enough to sell dogs without any sort of quality control. But mostly I feel for the families and the dogs that are sadly mismatched as a result of a refusal or inability to assess (breeding stock or rehomed dogs) properly. At it's most basic level, a test (controlled situation) can show that a dog would try to take another dog's head off in an attack of pure predation. It can show another dog exhibits a different behaviour. It can show this even there are no studies to prove that it can. Surely a person wouldn't want to discover the information about their dog much later in their own home with their new pet?

Tests that put dogs in situations where their tolerance will be tested, and where they are exposed to potential triggers, and observing body language to gauge the dog's feeling and emotional state. It has been proven that some tests do give likely indicators of long-term adoption success, but there are only a handful of studies done, and as you know, research of this nature is very difficult to do, and has to reduce a world of dog behaviour to one single conclusion that only leads to more questions. But from my own experiences I can say that when you get a nervous or aggressive response in a good test, it is likely that the dog will be nervous or aggressive when it has its tolerance tested in future situations in somebody's home. Working closely over time with so many dogs of similar breeding, age and of known upbringing (registered pedigree racing dogs), makes you really take notice of the ways that 'less than ideal' genetics and environment can shape a dog. To be positive, I will give examples of undesirable behaviours I believe can be modified successfully into desirable behaviours. Jumping up on people or things, mild excitability, licking people on the face, stealing food, moving objects around the place, sleeping on the bed, blocking the TV, very mild signs of resource guarding. Testing can help match dogs into homes where the owners have the skills and assertiveness levels to handle that dog. People have to be honest about their own capability to manage dogs, because not all dogs can be managed by all people. I just wanted to add that I manage my own dogs to prevent aggression or anxiety problems as much as I can, even though my dogs are fine. I feed in separate runs, I give my dogs secure places to be in, and I have a very secure yard. Sometimes people inadvertently mismanage a dog by exposing it repeatedly to things that will lower its tolerance, and that can start problems or bad habits.

This is good advice.. However, in the mean time, you must use the medication the vet gave you and keep using it until the medication is all gone or unless the vet advises otherwise. Manky ears can be frequently recurring (and worsening) problem if the treatment is stopped before it has a chance to work properly. Keep up with the medication whether it works or it doesn't work, don't just drop your vet and try to clear this up naturally.

Politically correct or not it's true. But its a lot easier to get that message across here now than it was a few years ago when Team Pitbull was active. This is very interesting news indeed. So much spin! Not much of that happened when I orchestrated the campaign to successfully change the law in QLD. One interesting note was that when it came to devising the wording of the legislation, it had to be worded so that any organisation was able to do the assessing if they passed a certain benchmark. It was the benchmark that was put into law, not our organisation. It seems strange to me that any law would be passed that allowed a single corporation to have a monopoly on testing. How does a State government give a gambling corporation the legal power to override local laws? I seriously don't understand this. As long as the current constitution is in place, greyhound racing and adoption will always be state based. The way the QLD legislation is worded gives dogs tested under Victorian GAP exactly the same rights as QLD green collar dogs. I sincerely hope that NSW enacts exactly the same law. And that it does not enact any laws to give greyhound racing authorities (gambling companies) exclusive authority over pet greyhound owners. Scary.

For me, problem behaviours would be most types of aggressive or anxious behaviours. Behaviours that showed that the dog was not at ease in my home. Escaping, extreme resource guarding, extreme destruction, ect. If a dog I already owned displayed changes I would try to fix the problem and manage it. I plan to buy adult dogs as pets in future, and so I will be making sure I only ever get a dog that had been properly tested (by myself or somebody I trust), and will not take home a dog with those problems. The behaviours I would not accept are ones that really can't be trained out of a dog. Some dogs are beyond help. Personally I would accept a dog of higher prey drive than I would be happy to see in the home of the average pet owner. I would accept any naughty behaviour not associated with aggression or anxiety, because training can easily fix it, and if it doesn't get fixed or managed then I'm the one who is going to look bad, not the dog. I have a lot of faith in good behaviour testing to identify likely problems. ;)

They can be injured very easily, some are much stronger dogs than others. I have met many iggies. Most are not affectionate towards strange people, although they are usually extremely curious. Many seem to really avoid being picked up or being handled by anyone other than their owner. They can be a different dog when just with their own family. I think the nervous trait is genetic, but is made worse by the fact that the shyer an iggy is, the more that strangers will try to interact with it, and this is counter productive to giving the dog a positive social experience. It can set up a really bad habit. They are too cute for their own good. But there are individuals that are brave, outgoing and very friendly, and if people only bred from these dogs, the breed (in general) wouldn't have this problem.

Nothing wrong with the question. It is some of the answers people are giving that prompted my responses.

In this case the breed wasn't important, and it was good that the rescue group was totally honest about what they knew. It is important to match dogs with owners in my opinion, however guessing the lineage is not going to really help with this. The way to do it is to assess the dog on its observed behaviour, and not ascribe breed characteristics to that dog. I am unaware of any dog behaviour that is limited to one breed anyway. There are thousands of behaviours and purebred breeding just concentrates combinations of traits within lines of dogs. Guessing won't help people, and could be very harmful if the guess is wrong, as Diva explained. Sometimes it is possible to tell what breed or breeds may be in a cross breed dog, as was obvious with Slinky the dog that was discussed here recently. But Slinky was a dog that if not purebred, was bred back to type, and not randomly cross bred. And we don't know all of the breeds that went into Slinky either. When you randomly cross breeds (rather than breed back to a type), you get a medium, average looking dog. Any of the rarer genes that give breeds their special unique characteristics, are prevented from being expressed (you can't see them), unless they are bred to another dog with those same genes. So it is very usual for a cross breed dog to have a common colour (black, brindle, fawn, white in common patterns) they are generally dominant colours. And these colours are in many breeds. And if a dog of that colour is crossed with a dog of a breed unique colour (if there was such a thing), the dominant colour or pattern would probably be the only one you see. The same applies to all of the other characteristics, the unique ones are not generally expressed unless both parents have them. The dog in the photo has no unique characteristics that I can see. A dog of unknown random breeding is a dog of no breed. When you breed two dogs together, up to half of the genetic material passed on is totally hidden, depending on what the particular gene is. A purebreed dog is a dog where most of the genes are certain, as people have spent hundreds of years testing their stock, culling out the undesirable ones and keeping detailed records. A cross breed dog, even a first cross, will have all of this work undone. It can be a bit like a primitive dog or a camp dog. A random mix of whatever dog genes are around. It is denigrating to purebreed dogs to take their names to use on cross bred dogs. Breeds are not something that just exist on their own, they are only as a result of many years of fairly ruthless selection. So we get to look at a photo of a very young pup standing in a way that doesn't show off its conformation well, that just looks like an average dog. It doesn't resemble any breed. I can accept a guess of cattle dog or staffy being somewhere in that dog's lineage might be reasonable. They are very common breeds. But it's still only a guess, and is just as likely to be wrong. It's the guesses of rare breeds that seem so ridiculous. Because here on a purebreed forum, I would expect people to at least have a basic knowledge of what makes all purebreed dogs different from all cross breed dogs. To appreciate why cross breeding is so deconstructive. Or are people happy to just think that the only difference is a label, (a fashion label?) and not care?

You do have an answer for their question. You don't know or care. Why not just be satisfied with telling people the truth?

Thanks for the suggestion. I think I'll keep browsing and reading threads that are of interest to me but I do appreciate your kindness and consideration in thinking of me and making the recommendation - it's very thoughtful of you. It's not in consideration of you, its in consideration of myself and other people that are criticised in these type of threads for ruining your 'fun'. But for your consideration, Diva has posted a good explanation on reasons why attempting to put breed labels on cross-breed dogs is not a good idea, even if you don't know or care about genetics.

Because they don't understand that it is impossible to tell. Once they have been told though, I fail to understand why people keep guessing. Koala, it doesn't matter what breeds or types of dogs were crossed to get the first poodle. The dogs used may not even have a recorded lineage, they may not have been proper breeds at all. What created the poodle was the selection of breeding stock for performance, and the culling of dogs that did not have the required poodly traits that they needed to perform well. Crossing breeds doesn't create purebreed dogs, many generations of performance and selection does. You might be best sticking to the chatty topics if you are not really intersted in hearing the truth about breeds or lineage.

It's not fun, or harmless. It perpetuates fallacies about breeding. It encourages people not to discover more about how genetics works but to try to identify parentage by appearance alone. To understand genetics, of breeds and breeding, we need a knowledge of phenotype and genotype. Perhaps those who have come in here to give their opinion that this dog could contain specific breeds could share with us their knowledge of this to explain how they came to their conclusion. Let us know how their guess was educated. Otherwise it seems they are just talking rubbish to me.

Yes, this is the only guess I would agree with. Although some may prefer to call it cross bred, mixed breed, or mutt. The dog is a medium sized, medium coated dog of a coat pattern and color that is extremely common and in many breeds. It's head shape is moderate, there is nothing at all to suggest what breeding happenned to create that dog. To suggest a rare breed like an akita is pretty far-fetched. Much more likely to be a mix or mixes of common breeds. But the breeding of the dog was not a concern at all when the dog was bought, so I don't see why trying to guess it now would be helpful in anyway. It is disappointing that on a purebreed forum, so many people seem to be unaware of how genetics work. Dogs all have thousands of times more common genes than they do unique, breed specific genes. The unique genes don't get expressed unless there is one from both parents. When you mix two breeds you don't get the sum of both breeds, you lose the defining characteristics of those breeds.