Aetherglow

I hope he's found safe and sound soon. Fingers and toes crossed...

When I was looking for a rental for my OH recently we came across many places that were no pets, and at least one that was specifically no dogs but cats ok. We were advised by more than one agent to not mention a dog on our application and negotiate if we got the call-back. I know of a person who was refused permission to have a pet turtle in a tank, and was sprung a surprise inspection a couple of days after she asked just in case she was asking permission for a turtle that was already there. How much harm can a turtle do, for goodness' sake?! I also know of people who have rented their property out through an agency and the agency's policy was no pets even though the owners were ok with it. I even know at least three sets of people who have owned their own places in properties with a body corporate which disallowed dogs in two cases and any pets at all in one, even though they were owning not renting. It's not as easy as all that! I like the idea of a pet bond.

Doesn't bother her, she just goes to rescues for her dogs. She does pay out on me every time I mention a show experience though, as she still thinks it's all full of nutters. Trouble is, when people are so rude to the public they don't know who that person is in 'real' life - offending people who may have policy and regulatory influence is not smart when dog breeding is already under pressure. Best to treat people with common courtesy and retain credibility. Exactly. Plus, being rude to you was a bit idiotic considering how hard it is to find good, well-informed, homes for sighthounds. It was actually an exhibitor at the Royal Melbourne Show many years ago who first introduced me both to her dogs and to the idea that Greyhounds are not vicious beasts that can't be trusted because they've been trained to chase and kill. Some good PR

Even a dog that loves people needs a break after a while. My girl loves meeting people, but a Royal show day is a long one and I try to position myself so she can go to sleep behind me when she needs a rest, and I'll happily watch my fellow competitors' dogs so that they don't get bothered when they are resting either. At a Royal I feel that introducing my breed to the public is part of the day, so if the dog is taking a break I say so politely and nicely but otherwise I'm okay with supervised pats, and we tend to all work together so that there is always someone supervising. The set-up at last year's Royal Melbourne the day we were there was abysmal, though - because of the weather the entry to the marshalling area was in the main public walkway and random people could just walk past and pat dogs fully groomed and getting ready to go into the ring and there wasn't a lot you could do to stop them.

The nerve of the pair. What's the Letterbox Technique? Picking up and Returning to Sender. Suitably bagged, of course. Although that's not really my dad's style, he's much more polite and probably would have talked to the kid's dad. I have friends who find it not just weird, but actually insulting that anyone should pick up after a dog, and are also the school of people who will always walk the dog off their property to let it do its thing. The second is no bad thing, but I cannot fathom the reasoning behind the combination - my dog, but everyone else's crap?

I once looked after a dog that would give no signals when he wanted to go, he'd just stop when he needed, including once on the path of a major shopping and cafe strip and once in the middle of the road (he got dragged to the side of the road quick smart!). I can't believe that anyone would think it acceptable to not pick up on a footpath - ew! I always carry bags, but sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in my local park who does. To make it worse, the only bin available is right on the far side of the park from all the amenities and by a busy road with no footpath, which probably makes some people not bother, especially when it means walking through long wet grass and mud. To me it seems sensible that if you have a toilet block, playground, sports stand, footpath and carpark on one side of the park that it might be a good idea to provide a bin there as well, but the council apparently don't agree with me It also means that rubbish of various sorts tends to get left around. When I was a kid we had a neighbour whose teenaged kid for some reason decided that the place for his bearded collie to relieve himself was our nature strip, and would actually walk him back and forth outside our place until the dog did his business. I have no idea what we had done to incur this, but it fortunately didn't last for very long. I wonder now whether my dad used the Letterbox Technique!

I'd have thought staffordshire x coolie, with those markings, ears and eyes. With lots of other things, including gorgeous! Maybe some shepherd, maybe some dingo, maybe some kelpie. I'd think a koolie would be more likely to be in the background of a crossbred than an Aussie would, especially with those ears as well. That blue eyed boy is

I once got a death glare from an old man pushing his wife through the park in a wheelchair with their off-leash tiny terrier which took a dislike to my on-leash, behaving herself and not doing anything dog. Somehow it was my fault that his little dog was snarling and snapping and charging my dog I have only seen them once, fortunately, as even if I was in the right it wouldn't be a good look to get involved in an actual altercation with an old man, an old lady in a wheelchair and a tiny dog and I couldn't see things going any other way if I bumped into them again but, say, coming around a blind corner. The little dog had perfectly serviceable teeth, and appeared to be ready to use them had we been any closer.

Alkhe, I'll have to bring my black and tan Lapphund down to your park one day so I can hear your boyfriend call her a Dobe cross! I can add it to the list of things people have thought she is, my favourite being 'Really Big Pomeranian'. The best guess I've had for Tarja, Samoyed x Kelpie, actually combined origin, looks and function pretty well. My boyfriend is not terribly familiar with dog breeds, and has come up with a couple of clangers :laugh: He is slowly being edumacated! The breeder my family got our first boxer from used to board her puppy people's dogs and we once went to collect our girl and saw a large all-black smooth coated bitch which looked, if anything, perhaps like a lab x pointer. It was our purebred boxer's older half-sister, courtesy of some unknown dog jumping the fence one night while her owners (not the breeder) had her with them on holiday. There was no way anyone could ever have guessed that this girl was half boxer. ETA I assume that most people haven't heard of Lappies, so I explain what she is if people ask. I try not to assume that I know what other people's dogs are, but will ask the owner to confirm, it tends to go down better.

Well, my Lapphund is also a laphund, or she likes to think so :) I think it's Norwich.

The first time I ever went to a dog show a small dog and his owner happened to pause next to me, and the dog christened my leg. The owner didn't notice, but my very tactful father made a joke about me having legs like tree stumps, which did not improve my mood I'd be quite curious about this as well, I've seen an entire male in a foster situation pee on a puppy, presumably as a dominance/I'm not certain what's going on here signal.

In a lot of the traditionally docked breeds it was to serve the purpose of avoiding injury while hunting, herding or working as a guard dog. At least that was the theory, and I have heard that people who hunt with pointers or spaniels would prefer to be able to dock still for exactly this reason.

They have very expressive faces - a full black-masked boxer smiling by pulling her lips up to show her teeth is most definitely a sight to behold! Such happy dogs, too :)

I'm not sure about Rotties, I think the gene has been in the breed for decades but never really selected for. Boxers with natural bob tails were deliberately created by crossing out to corgis.

We bought a "female" rabbit which I named Sweet Pea, and a "Male" Guinea Pig which my brother named Coloured. Sweet Pea and Coloured were more than just friends IYKWIM and would hump on the odd occasion, and one day we woke up to find itsy bitsy baby Guinea Pigs in the hutch.....of course I thought that they had babies together (I was about 7) but then Mum informed me that Coloured, who was obviously a girl must have been pregnant in the pet shop :laugh: We called the babies Snowy (white) and Coloured No 2 (coloured) :laugh: It's entirely possible that Sweet Pea was a girl. Rabbits use humping as a dominance tool just like dogs do but more so, and in rabbits the girls are often the bosses, and bigger and stronger than the males. They will also hump cats, chickens, corn-on-the-cob (hump one end while eating the other - efficiency!), legs and just about anything else. I used to keep rabbits, and Jane Doe, my alpha, was most definitely queen of the yard and made sure the boys knew it by humping them frequently, while she made Juliet the omega doe's life so miserable that I had to keep them seperated. Both boys were desexed in adulthood when I adopted them and both were completely mature and "male" in outlook, but Jane completely dominated. Oliver BunBuck, my second boy, was rehomed to me because he spent too much time humping his rescuer's chickens and the poor chickens were getting stressed. Non-desexed male rabbits and guinea pigs are usually VERY obvious when you look :laugh: Come to think of it, I did get some odd reactions from people when I told them that my original two rabbits were named Jane Doe and Buck Rogers. When I was building them an awesome new hutch I got a most disgusted reaction from the girl at the hardware store, who thought I was a psycho

Graham, that is a pity. In that case the ANKC should clarify that on their website, as I have taken the first thing I found, which was under a very accessible link on their main breed standards page. I assumed in Vic that the ANKC policy would apply as I couldn't find anything further on their site, but if ANKC have different advice in different places, any wonder I was confused. I still am! I'd still choose a brindle boxer personally as I like the colour, but I'm glad at least some whites are out there leading a happy life, hopefully from reputable breeders who made an ethical decision to go one way of the argument :)

Ah yes, the problem of not knowing how to identify the sex of a rabbit led to my early childhood rabbit, Arthur, being renamed Martha after she got out one day and met up with the rabbit down the road, and kindled nine kits some weeks later. I suspect that was and still is a fairly common problem! Did Harry become Harriet?

I met a cat named Bruce today. He was a very handsome fellow. I had a friend at school who had a horse named Tristan. And I know someone who got a sheep for Christmas and called him Shank. When my Mum was a kid the family cat, a white female, was named Tiger, but her original name was GreasyPaw.

I don't believe that breeders lose their standing for raising white boxers anymore, it "wasn't done" in the past and I believe it USED to be that white boxers could not be registered, therefore you could theoretically lose your registered breeder status for selling unregistered dogs. I did a bit of research on the ANKC site and there is no longer any restriction on registering non-standard colours on the limited register for any breed. It therefore is possible to register whites on the limited register only, which therefore means that boxer breeders will not risk their registration by selling whites as pets. Which of course totally answers my question about why whites can't be registered - these days they can! PS, I got lovely boxer cuddles last night :) What about White German Shepherds? One assumes that the same applies - they can be registered on the limited register only, if the parents were main registered.

I don't believe that breeders lose their standing for raising white boxers anymore, it "wasn't done" in the past and I believe it USED to be that white boxers could not be registered, therefore you could theoretically lose your registered breeder status for selling unregistered dogs. I did a bit of research on the ANKC site and there is no longer any restriction on registering non-standard colours on the limited register for any breed. It therefore is possible to register whites on the limited register only, which therefore means that boxer breeders will not risk their registration by selling whites as pets. Which of course totally answers my question about why whites can't be registered - these days they can! PS, I got lovely boxer cuddles last night :)

Pheebs, I've always admired your boxer-ish dog's photo. Gorgeous face :-)

Oh, Miz J, that's a brilliant shot! I just got home from getting some boxer cuddles from my parents' big boy Rufus. He very kindly brought out his favourite toys to show me, I don't think he remembers that I bought one of them for him!

That is interesting that Boxers have two white genes Steve, does that mean that dog breeds that are normally white..Malts, Samoyed, Bichon Frise, Maremma and of course Westies have only the one white gene?...I was wondering about this as I don't know of any problems of hereditary blindness in these breeds. This forum is interesting, especially when DOLers who are breeders or have knowledge of genetics are posting.(the other posts are interesting as well :) ) I think all of those breeds are genetically yellow (called cream in Lapphunds and probably has other names in other breeds), not white, but bred to the extreme light end of the range. This is the same gene which gives yellow labs, and at least in Samoyeds 'biscuit' is still an allowable colour. These breeds all have dark pigment in their skin under the white fur, so don't suffer the same risk of sunburn and have normally pigmented inner ears, so no deafness - or at least not from the same cause as white boxers and dalmatians. Thanks for the info re: the extreme white gene, Steve, if I had read to the end of the thread instead of coming back to where I had left off I would have seen that you had already added more up-to-date info than I had! :) And it just goes to show that avoiding white puppies in boxers is indeed harder than it first appears. The case of the physically flashy but genetically sisi plain boxer is fascinating, Jed.

A quick look through the DOL pointscore showed only one dog that was truly a 'plain' boxer. Most of them had at least two feet white well above the paw and some white on the face, and a lot of them had four stockings and white on the neck even if they didn't have the full or half collar. Genetically, that's flashy, although probably with some modifiers which may reduce the overall chance of fully white pups if bred to a really flashy, white collar, high stockings and face blaze dog (the genetics are not fully worked out for that). There was only one dog with a complete black face and white only on throat, chest, belly and toe tips, and it was a natural bob tail which is a whole other controversy :) You can breed flashy to flashy and get plain dogs. You can breed moderate flashy to moderately plain and get white pups. There's more than one gene involved, I think. Incidentally, to Espinay, I applaud what you said. I would like to see some things in boxers, but as I have chosen not to breed this particular breed I hope I confine my opinions to that only, and leave the harder decisions to those who actually do the job. It's not easy being a breeder, particularly if your breed has dilemmas attached, and I don't feel that my opinion should force boxer clubs in this case. It'd be nice to see some changes, but even that is not going to eliminate this particular issue in this breed and sometimes breeders will have to decide between two undesireable outcomes. That is something that will happen to any breeder for some reason or other - I have bred cats, and I've been through the dilemma of whether to euthanise a sickly kitten or treat and cause suffering which may not in the end save a life. A boxer breeder who has come to an ethical decision to euthanise white pups will not find me standing outside their door with a pitchfork and flaming torch, and neither will one who homes whites. I still don't understand why whites can't be limit registered, though! If you read the genetics info you will see the dogs with white chests and legs are sisi or plain, and the dogs with full collars are sisw flashy and these are the dogs that can produce swsw extreme white. Two sisi cannot produce white. I did read the article, and have read it before. As far as I understand, as boxers don't breed true for 'collie' or Irish spotted markings, it may be some other gene than the white spotting gene responsible or working in addition to it, but that has not been confirmed according to this article: http://bowlingsite.mcf.com/genetics/colorgen.html. In any case, a true sisi dog with white on the legs will only have white on the toes, not above the paw. All those dogs bar the NBT have white up to at least the top of the pastern on at least two feet.

A quick look through the DOL pointscore showed only one dog that was truly a 'plain' boxer. Most of them had at least two feet white well above the paw and some white on the face, and a lot of them had four stockings and white on the neck even if they didn't have the full or half collar. Genetically, that's flashy, although probably with some modifiers which may reduce the overall chance of fully white pups if bred to a really flashy, white collar, high stockings and face blaze dog (the genetics are not fully worked out for that). There was only one dog with a complete black face and white only on throat, chest, belly and toe tips, and it was a natural bob tail which is a whole other controversy :) You can breed flashy to flashy and get plain dogs. You can breed moderate flashy to moderately plain and get white pups. There's more than one gene involved, I think. Incidentally, to Espinay, I applaud what you said. I would like to see some things in boxers, but as I have chosen not to breed this particular breed I hope I confine my opinions to that only, and leave the harder decisions to those who actually do the job. It's not easy being a breeder, particularly if your breed has dilemmas attached, and I don't feel that my opinion should force boxer clubs in this case. It'd be nice to see some changes, but even that is not going to eliminate this particular issue in this breed and sometimes breeders will have to decide between two undesireable outcomes. That is something that will happen to any breeder for some reason or other - I have bred cats, and I've been through the dilemma of whether to euthanise a sickly kitten or treat and cause suffering which may not in the end save a life. A boxer breeder who has come to an ethical decision to euthanise white pups will not find me standing outside their door with a pitchfork and flaming torch, and neither will one who homes whites. I still don't understand why whites can't be limit registered, though!