sandgrubber

In my experience, obedience clubs vary greatly. Some are for obediance competition, and not much good otherwise. Some have a rounded approach but are social events more than dog training. Cavs are not usually problem dogs, maybe a bit timid, but not agro or destructive. You might do as well using your own good sense. Try a few dog exercise areas and look for a play group situation that has a lot of smallish unaggressive dogs. In my books, the main reason for puppy pre-school is to give the puppy buyer who hasn't had a lot of experience with pups some added rescources and experience to draw on when it comes to dealing with whatever problems arise. Some classes may not be so good for some dogs. Product labeling ain't so good when it comes to dog training in Australia

So far as I'm concerned the specifics are clear. BSL will be unnecessary when [and only when] breeds that have a history of problems are selectively bred NOT to be dog or human aggressive and an ethic arises among people owning and perpetuating the breed that promotes responsible dogs who will not attack people or dogs. FULL STOP.

Lovely photo . . . every breed has some redeeming features, and I hope (against hope) all dogs of all breeds get redeemed by good management and breeding to tone down aggressiveness. BUT, as has sometimes been pointed out on this Forum, DA and HA don't always go together. Because a dog is sweet with children that it has come to accept as members of its pack doesn't guarantee that it won't take the white fluffy dog next door by the neck and shake it until dead, or for that matter, that it won't have a go at the postie. Cute pictures are a weak defense against BSL. It isn't one sort of good deed that is required. It is consistent good [or at least socially acceptable] behaviour.

Be selective about "out" if you're opting for early socialisation. Remember that Parvo virus is the biggest worry. It is carried in pooh, and can remain resident in soil for many months.

Have a read of the crittering article on Lou Castles e-collar website (google will find it for you). 12 weeks is probably too young . . . lots of other things to train at that age.

I can imagine it works well!!! When I did tracking in SES, the dogs were completely flummoxed by suicides. A dead person smells completely different from a live one . . . not to mention that it doesn't move. Cadaver dogs are an different specialty and require different training. I would assume the same is true of snakes, and I would be cautious about training snake avoidance with roadkill.

There are some wide chain collars that are pretty much chew-proof . . .but like others, I skip collars when the dogs are at home.

Not really. Mostly, I seem to find that no one has done much, and there's not much of a foundation for knowing how to do it. It would be easier in the US, where most of the poisonous snakes are rattle snakes . . . and pretty similar in look and behaviour. But I think it requires testing to see if dogs generalise correctly, and to learn how much it varies from dog to dog. I'd expect that small terriers, who were bred to go to ground, might have different tendencies than, say, sight hounds or gun dogs. I know of Rottis and one Labrador who have killed dugites [a very venomous WA snake] without themselves being harmed. Terriers seem to have the greatest talent for getting killed. Next step, I think, is to do some search of funding agencies and see if it might be possible to get a small grant from the Lotteries Council or some such to do the study required to set a foundation for doing it right. In WA the only snakes one can keep without a rather difficult-to-obtain license are pythons, so testing to see if dogs trained on a python are also trained off tiger snakes and dugites (the main problems in Perth) will require collaboration with a professional snake handler . . . who is probably going to want to be paid. . . . and to use the e-collar on my own dogs during the blue-tongue mating season. My crew are not very nice with blue tongues . . . they bark at them and lunge until I come out and give them hell and take the poor lizard away. That behaviour should be easy to fix with an e-collar.

You might want to read look at the articles on Lou Castles website. Specifically the one on crittering and dog aggression. http://loucastle.com/articles.htm

Here's Lou Castles reply to a question about using crittering for snakes Me: Could the Crittering approach be adapted to teach a dog to ignore snakes (or reptiles in general), eg using a captive snake? Lou: I think that more than the dog just "ignoring" the snake is called for. I also think that it's best if the dog is trained on the poisonous snakes (not just any snake) that may be in his environment. I know of dogs that have been trained on non-poisonous snakes and many of them now fear rope, garden hoses and anything that even remotely resembles a snake. He goes on to say that he developed his Crittering approach to make sure police dogs wouldn't chase cats. The exercise would be much easier to set up if you could use a python rather than a deadly species. So any information on how dogs are likely to generalise from one species (or genus) to another would be very helpful.

When I was doing tracking, one of my fellow trackers had a kelpie who was awful about drinking. She succeeded in teaching the dog to drink water squirted from one of those back-pack water bladder thingies.

Apologies for an overlapping post . . . this is more specific than the question asked on the General Forum. I've been looking into snakeproofing dogs, and conclude that e-collar on a high setting (aversion training) is the way to go. I've been warned by an expert (in the US) to train specifically for the animal of concern, lest you end up with a dog that has phobias about garden hoses and other things that may look remotely like a snake. But I'm not at all clear about how well dogs generalise. Obviously, it's much safer and easier to do the exercise with a non-venemous snake. If you train with, say, a python, will most dogs correctly generalise to, say, a brown snake or tiger snake? Has anyone had experience.

Nail length also depends on the surfaces on which dogs walk. If they do a lot of walking on concrete or other gritty surfaces, they may in effect file their own nails, leaving you less to do. Several months back, there was someone who posted an article on training your dogs to do their own nails (clicker training) by scratching them across a sandpaper-board.

Personally, I found Ronnie pretty terrifying. If you want to avoid having the person from the government come to help, keep your act clean. Don't breed for aggression. Expose dog fighters, or participants in other blood sports, to the shame and legal sanctions they deserve. If your dog is spirited and powerful, make sure the energy is channeled in directions that don't bring suffering on the neighbors or their pets. Fence adequately. I think most people would rather not have BSL, but given the actions and breed preferences of the small number of drongos who consider a vicious dog to be a status symbol, a large number of people have come to see it as a necessary evil.

When I worked at Murdoch Uni, the Vet School had three or four rescue greyhounds who served as blood donors . . . and no doubt helped in laboratory practicals. One often saw them being walked around campus.

Expect colour change to continue with a choco lab. Often the undercoat and topcoat are somewhat different colours, and as the undercoat thickens and thins the coat colour changes . . . not to mention sun bleaching. None of my chocos have faded, though.

Handling does not have to be a big deal, at least with Labbies, and can easily be worked into daily routine. I have never had a problem with any of my dogs re handling. We do a 10 minute cuddle every morning. They all love it. All parts of the body are fair play, but no concentration on ears, mouth or whatever. Some of them aren't entirely calm with, say, a blood draw, and some wiggle around at first in an ultrasound (though once they get the idea that it's a belly rub, they settle perfectly, and sometimes fall asleep).

Because it's written by a vet doesn't mean a book is scientific. The way Billinghurst uses evidence would not get a passing mark in a science class. Despite people saying "too expensive", it should be possible to do a study of BARF diet outcomes without huge expence by doing health surveys of dogs who are fed BARF and dogs who are fed commercial diets. I'd say a first cut study of this sort could be done as an honours project in Vet School. Surveys are not as good as feeding trials, but they do yield scientifically valid information. Wasn't MDBA doing something of this sort?

I'm using Dogtra also . . . on gun dogs. My impression is that my dogs are pretty stoical, and ignore the stim until it gets to an annoying level on the initial testing. There may be a few quanta between perception and annoyance. I have been surprised by the range of the levels required for response, but that seems to be genuine (range of 8 to 25 with my four girls). Some of them need a relatively high level, some, a much lower level. When they get the idea that the stim is a communication coming from you, equivalent to a scolding, they drop 10 or 20% in the quanta required to ellicit a response. Eg, Molly on initial testing ignored 7 and took 8 or 9 to respond. Once she clicked on the idea that 9 was a correction, she began behaving to try and avoid the stim, at least when she wasn't distracted by something like yum yum kitty crunchers. When not distracted, she will now respond to a 6 or 7. But sometimes it's hard to tell, cause she's very clever at anticipating the command and complying before the command is given. I think her anticipation is fairly complex. She may notice that I have the controller in my hand, and whether it is held up for use or hanging loose. I think that, despite my attempts to decondition her, she associates the stim with the collar -- and the situations in which she has gotten stimmed. Dogs aren't as smart as we are, but sometimes they have amazing intuition. btw, not that it matters, but Dogtra has 128 levels of quantization. 0 is a level . . . from a Geek perspective. Most electronic gizmos work on a binary system, and the most efficient way to increase is to double. Thus, devices are likely to work on 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 levels of quantization, with nothing in between.

I find that when my girls are anticipating a stim they will feel a stim that is a couple notches above their tested minimum perception level. In my case that's 6 to 7 as opposed to 8 to 9 in the initial tests. Under high distraction, they may ignore something that is more than two levels higher than "ordinary".

Look at K9 Force's Puppy Development Calendar, pinned at the head of this forum. It is excellent.

depends on what sort of soil you have. In soft sand like we have in Perth metro you can get away with ordinary bamboo garden stakes . . . the electric fence posts are great, but somewhat expensive if you use a lot of them. At one point I had a metal worker make a pile of stakes made from thin (~2 mm) rod sharpened on one end. These lasted forever and were quite cheap. They were ok in heavy soil.

I have had three or four dogs come down with tick infestations (brown tick, I think) in boarding kennels: a couple of them were really covered. The surprising thing to me is that the numbers are so small /uneven . . . I'd expect all dogs to get hit by an infestation. Also, the period of infestation seems to be very short . . . a few days, then no more. I'm not keen to get out the face mask and gloves and spray poison all over the place, but if it's the way to avoid a later build up in numbers, I'll do it. I must say, I'm skeptical if I'm spraying grass, and the ticks have some way to sit out the autumn and winter, to re-emerge in teh summer. My guess is the spray will do nothing . . . or tick instars will be able to re-infest from the surrounding areas. I suspect that they buggers only reproduce on hot nights, and we haven't had many of those this year. I'm told that around here the bandicoots, blue tongue lizards, and roos carry them. Not sure I want to try keeping them away. Can anyone tell me why ticks come and go in such a spotty manner? And whether spotty infestations are likely to be a prelude to constant/heavy infestation?

Looks like a juvenile cockroach.

Thanks, everyone, for advice. I'll try a few things . .. more time with the collar on but inactive, varying time at which stimulation is applied, alternating recall with other commands, and patience. If I can get my Yahoo acct working, I'll also have a go at the e-collar discussion group. It's better to have her a bit velcro than all over the place . . . hopefully soon she can return to off lead walks. If that's the only thing we accomplish with the e-collar, it's worth it.