sandgrubber

Though sometimes timely is more important than precise. From what I've heard the kits are pretty accurate, they just aren't very precise.

If I had a neighbour who used a band saw all day every day, I'd complain. LIkewise loud band practices. There's a reason why zoning generally confines noisy enterprises to specific industrial areas.

I have 7 acres of pinot noir and if grapes were toxic to my dogs they would be dead. At harvest time they spend the whole day browsing grapes the harvesters drop. I've asked, on a vintners forum, if anyone had ever had problems with their dogs getting sick eating grapes. The answer was a uniform NO. There may be dogs who have a problem with grapes, but most dogs are fine eating them. My dogs (Labs) love carrots, apples, bananas, cucumber, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, peas, beans, radishes, daikon, cucumbers, jicama, peppers (including jalepanos), spinach and most other veggies. They don't like citrus. They are happy to eat lettuce if it has salad dressing on it. My old girl will also drink up vinegar at the bottom of a salad bowl (I often use balsamic + garlic as a dressing with no oil).

As you can see, there are lots of opinions on this. You'll probably find lots of opinions among reproductive specialists too. And amazingly, everyone gets puppies most of the time, and if you go through enough matings, chances are good you'll end out with one that doesn't take. Then you'll get lots of opinions about why it didn't take. I agree that prog tests are worth the bother, especially if you have an hour's drive to go to the dog. Being within a day or two of the peak is important. If you don't have prog testing at a local vet you may find that, as a vet nurse, you can collect a blood sample and have it analyzed at a human lab. I know Applecross Vet hospital gets their prog readings done at St. John of God (or they used to). I seem to remember, long ago, a repro specialist suggesting some meds for an older bitch that hasn't whelped for some years . . . some hormonal stuff that causes sloughing of the coating over the uterus a bit and make it easier for fertilized eggs to stick to the surface. I can't remember the details, and it may need to be done some months before the mating. Someone else may be able to fill you in on this. Good luck!

Worrying is useless. You need to be prepared to deal with it if and when it comes. 'Epilepsy' is a bit like 'cancer' in that it encompasses a wide range of conditions, some of them severe, some of them not. YOu should be aware that if you bring a dog in with 'fits' or 'seizures' of any sort, some vets will run a large number of expensive tests, often finding nothing conclusive. Other vets will listen to your description of the event and, if the situation does not seem to be life threatening, suggest that you wait to see if it is recurrent, and if so, how frequent it is. It may help you to get a useful, not-too-expensive diagnosis to have a video camera of some sort on hand and be prepared to record the next episode if and when it should occur. One of my dogs had exactly one seizure in her life, quite a severe grand mal, and never had another. I'm grateful that I didn't spend thousands of dollars on diagnosis of what turned out to be a one-off event. The fall back treatment for epilepsy, phenobarbitol, is often effective, just means two pills a day, and is very cheap. You could buy a lifetime of tablets for the cost of one MRI.

My silly girls won't break eggs. I guess it's a gundog soft-mouth thing. I just drop them from a meter up into their dishes.

It doesn't get hot here. When I'm out my dogs usually come too. They love the car.

I think there's good reason to believe late maturation is hereditary and I seem to see it in my girls. I have never had a bitch who was highly irregular . . . off by a month or so . . . but nothing extreme. So I can't say anything about patterns . .. sample size too small. In my lines, seasons do seem to go silent as a brood bitch matures and has had more litters, but that's not what you asked about.

So . . . you say . . . a farm family with some good herding dogs (say, a lot of kelpie blood but purity questionable) should not be able to breed from their working stock? I'm all for pedigree dogs. But I think there are all sorts of measures by which a dog or bitch might be found exceptional and worth breeding from. I don't think the KC's and show rings should have a monopoly on this. I don't like having a beauty show determine what constitutes a 'good dog'. Some people, including many people with degrees in genetics, prefer cross breeds. It's a moot point, though. The force (of public opinion) would not be with the KC's if they tried to push for desexing of all non-registered dogs.

This doesn't need to be a problem. The vets I've dealt with in Australia were perfectly happy to come out and vaccinate pups in the car. That works for me. Other alternative was to have the mobile vet come out. Even better. Puppy on a leash is a little hard on the breeder when you have a litter of 10 pups :D! Now that I'm in the US I can just buy vaccine and do my own injections. Still have to go to a clinic to get legal documents for the required rabies shots, but it's not likely you're going to pick up rabies in a clinic.

Whew! I'm not the only one who uses not-so-nice nicknames. Bonza, the naughty but cuddly one, goes to Bombza, Bomb, Stinky (due to a memorable incident) to Stink Bomb, as well as Rat, Little Rat, Stinky Rat, SweetiePie, MudPie, and BonBon, to name a few. Jarrah, who has little sense of humor and rarely misbehaves, just gets Jehr-Jehr or Sweetie.

She plans on keeping him outside..she doesn't trust him, but her daughter does go out there when Mums back is turned. Bet the neighbours will LOVE that.

No doubt the owner's response was: "Oh well, if that dog couldn't take down an old man with a JRT, it wasn't going to amount to much as a pig dog. There's plenty more where it came from." I hope he gets the book thrown at him.

Christina, it is a tragic society and it is not improving. People are busy, shorter fused, and more self oriented. More and more people in the same geographical area will bring more and more of these problems. Tolerance of barking dogs is pretty much a thing of the past in many urban areas. Years ago, I did not like the idea of de-barking but now I see it as pretty much as the answer and it has definitely saved the life of quite a few dogs. If you're not prepared to keep your dog in at night and you live in a high density neighbourhood, you shouldn't get a dog. Souff I don't think people have gotten more, or less tolerant of barking. They have been packed tighter and tighter, they work longer hours, and they increasingly substitute buying stuff for their dog for caring for it. I love dogs, but that love tends to disappear to when they interfere with my sleep.

I suspect dogs find their own probiotics . . . in all the disgusting things they like to eat. What could be better for repopulating your gut flora than material that has passed through the gut of another animal.

I think I read somewhere that there's an amino acid imbalance in egg whites, and you shouldn't feed dogs whites without yolk . . . but yolk without white is ok. As for whole eggs, I'd pay attention if eggs were more than 10 or 20% of the dog's diet . . . but if they're a side dish to a main meal, I wouldn't worry. Nor would I panic if my dogs occasionally got an egg white without yolk. It's not poison, just not well balanced.

Well written article, for a change. Managing dogs in high density situations where many dogs are left alone for 8 hours or more at a stretch is a big problem. Night barking, especially with a high pitched bark, is unfair to neighbours. I don't know where the numbers on 'bad behaviour' came from, but if 77% of dogs rarely misbehave, that leaves an awful lot of potential problems.

Not necessarily. Many Master Hunters are relaxed, laid back dogs-- until someone pulls out a gun. And you can find show labs who are manic even into adulthood.

You'd have no trouble finding the lankier Lab build with narrower head if you were in the US. Australia has relatively few people who use Labs to hunt, and most breeders go for show conformation. I don't know them personally, but I think Kadnook Labs in Victoria would be a good breeder to start with. They are more into functional Labs than show Labs. see, eg http://203.89.193.82/kadnook/Pages/Page_Frames/history_page_frame.htm

+1 The bottom line is the bottom line. I'm sure you'd be much happier looking after her dog if she paid you fair market price . . . which is not a small sum.

Personally, I'm bored with righteous indignation about BYB practices. This sort of thing has been going on since the concepts of 'purebred' and 'pedigree' took root. Fat chance of getting rid of it. And given the many abuses in show breeding, I think it may be good that a few people, at least, are breeding their 'nice' dogs. If there aren't a few people breeding non show conforming dogs, there's going to be nothing left to recover traits that may be lost through show breeders overemphasising a few phrases that happen to be in a breed standard that was written before much was understood about genetics.

Because BYBs are known for producing sound, health-tested dogs, right? :rolleyes: If you actually feel this site is a waste of time.. why exactly are you here? The only thing I can think of is to troll. Also.. for someone so bothered by "do gooder dog rescuers", you sure do spend a lot of time in the rescue section ;) I sure do saving worthy dogs. Not trying to save every impounded dog at any cost. Not all rescuers do that and most of the rescuers here are good people doing the hard work to help where they can. Nice to know what you think of their efforts though, my under-bridge dwelling chum ;) This is getting absurd. Totally off topic. I'd suggest you guys thrash it out personally and not bother us with this . .. or do it in general, not news.

A genetic dissection of breed composition and performance enhancement in the Alaskan sled dog Heather J Huson1,2, Heidi G Parker1, Jonathan Runstadler2 and Elaine A Ostrander1* They're starting to work toward understanding of the genetics of athletic performance in dogs. See: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/11/71 Fascinating article on genetics of performance-selected mix-breed dogs. I found lots of things interesting about this, including charts of degree of heterozygosity comparing 141 AKC registered breeds (conclusion, sprint dogs are more inbred than distance runners . . . and strangely, a few purebred dog breeds show levels of genetic diversity that imply considerable outcrossing). One thing I didn't expect comes from the pictures . . . the sprint racing dogs show sloped hindquarters that approach those of the much maligned modern GSD. p.s. I didn't put this in studies about dogs cause that part of the forum doesn't permit Topic Titles . . . which greatly reduces its usefulness.

This is a bit off topic, but Consumer Reports studies conclude that pet insurance is rarely worth the cost . . . the better way to insure your dog is to put the money you would have put toward insurance into an emergency fund. See, eg., http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/money/insurance/pet-insurance/is-pet-insurance-worth-the-cost/overview/index.htm

Wish we had more science news and less politics news :)