krissy
-
Posts
2,587 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Store
Articles
Posts posted by krissy
-
-
Luna just graduated from beginner obedience, the trainer said it was too easy for her
I will probably start the intermediate class in a few weeks but for now we are working on down stay, spin and crawl. She is pretty good at "paw" and I want to start capturing "shake" (full body shake) so that will probably be next
Full body shake will be neat. I always thought about that in the back of my head. The winter would be the easiest time for me to get that since they shake a lot more with coats on. In the summer they only shake after coming out of the water from a swim.
-
More core strength learning "sit pretty". I'll be honest... I wasn't sure if a greyhound could learn this one. So far so good with Kili though!
-
Love puzzle toys! Every time I see a new one I have to buy it. Keeps Kili busy and out of trouble.
-
Ah, gotta love dog training.
Nope, don't know what you want. I don't get it. I'm frustrated so I'm going to whine at you. i have no FREAKING CLUE what you want lady!
Then they figure it out and then it's a breeze to do this:
-
Where do you live? Is it really cold out right now?
Kili drives me nuts because now that it is super cold out, when I open her crate first thing in the morning she takes about 30 seconds to a minute to decide to come out (normally she jumps right out) because she does not want to go for our morning walk. It has recently gotten SO cold out that even I have decided to forgo our walks. -30C before the windchill... when nose hairs are sticking and exposed skin is painful within seconds... too cold for the hounds to be out even with coats on!
Anyway, part of it might be the colder weather if she is perhaps suspecting that she might have to go out in it. And then of course she's just so new and she might be overwhelmed in general.
-
More perch.
You want me to climb up on a moving, rotating chair? Ummm... ok, I guess....
This is as far as we've gotten with the back stall. And I'm not sure how to proceed from here. She's so long and tall that I cannot lure her enough to get her back feet moving... she just stretches her giraffe neck. Not really sure how I'll get those back feet. I'm hoping just working on her putting all four feet on smaller and smaller objects will help and we can transfer it to the back stall.
This was pretty good. Of course right after I shut off the camera, her next attempt she walked up to the darn thing and put all four feet right on it just as easy as you please. I guess she'll have this object mastered soon and then I'm moving to something a little bit smaller, and then we'll try a little bit smaller. -
We have the balance disc. I got it when she was a pup though so it's the small one. I probably need a large one now too, though it'll be fun getting her to get all 4 feet on the small disc. I also have the 4 paw pods. I really want the peanut but... it's massive and I don't have that kind of space. When I move into a bigger house I'll get one.
I love Denise Fenzi! I love reading her blog. But I still find obedience boring. lol. By comparison to agility or disc... I just am the kind of person who needs to be moving. I don't really care for working on super precision behaviours and I find obedience is too much of that for me. I did enjoy rally well enough... but as soon as Kili started agility... well, rally fell to the wayside. lol. Once we're competing in agility and it's quite "push button" for us maybe I'll go back to rally for a bit. But then again... I really want to get Kili into disc dog so... maybe not so much with the rally.
I do love watching obedience trials though. It's absolutely incredible. I just don't have the patience for it right now.
-
^^^ This. (Darn quote function doesn't work on this computer.)
When I adopted Summit I was still in vet school. I found 2 ticks on him and took them to my parasitology prof to be identified. They were brown dog ticks. And he warned me that they can set up shop in the house. He said down in the parts of the States where this tick is a problem (we don't have them in Canada... Summit picked them up at the adoption kennel from another dog) you can pull cages out from the wall in a clinic and the wall behind the cages will be just solid ticks. Talk about gross. Needless to say I was concerned... but fortunately the ticks I pulled off of him were nymphs (not adults) and I treated him with Advantix ASAP and we never did end up with an infestation.
But yes, they can be tough to get rid of. I'd recommend getting your house professionally exterminated/fumigated! I am assuming your houndie is now on prevention/treatment.
-
Interesting! That's not the "perch work" I have in my mind, but that's interesting nonetheless. My idea of perchwork is this:
I also wrote about it in my blog to help my students:
http://www.progressdog.com/1/post/2013/12/teaching-heel-the-pivot.html
I'm so curious now. How do you plan to use that behavior?
Anyhow, for us, it's pretty obvious what we're working on
We're still working on the ever elusive picture perfect Heel. We're "good enough", but I want to be great/greyt!She's already done that kind of perch work. http://apexagilitygreyhounds.blogspot.ca/2013/05/9-months-using-pivots.html (on my iPad, can't hyperlink, sorry!), though I tend to find obedience boring so I didn't really go much further with it. If I revisit rally later it'll be handy.
This is purely for fun. It's great for confidence, balance, and core strength. It also makes for entertaining photos when I can ask my dog to jump up on random stuff. Actually, I think someone out there has a photo blog of just his dog balancing on interesting things.
Possible next steps include stalls on me. A greyhound is kind of big and awkward for foot stalls but I might be able to manage a back stall. If I don't collapse under her weight.
-
Kili is working on "perch". She's on exercise restriction because of her hock but I need to entertain her so she doesn't drive me bonkers. This is kind of fun and something she sort of likes anyway. I get all sorts of photo ops with her by asking her to jump up on stuff.
But now we're going a little extreme.
It's good for her balance and core strength. First we worked with a small end table. That was pretty easy. Then we tried our overturned garbage can which was a fair bit harder. The surface area is about the same, but the rectangle was definitely easier for such a long dog. Also the garbage can kept wanting to tip so I had to hold it. -
-
Not sure why my quote function doesn't work.... Erg.
The lack of bite inhibition is also what really bugs me. Lets put it this way. If I can choose to work with/own/handle either a friendly dog with poor bite inhibition or a dog who has snapped/bitten but has good bite inhibition... honestly, I choose the second dog. The problem with the first dog is that he might be very friendly, but if I accidentally trip over him or shut his tail in a door he is going to bite me multiple times and do damage. The second dog may actually be more likely to bite me, but is less likely to do damage. Lack of bite inhibition is always a really big concern to me.
The other thing that bothers me a little is that the OP says "without warning". As Giselle already pointed out there were probably some subtle warning signs in the body language. However, generally speaking there is a range of escalation in warnings. First the dog uses body language and calming signals to indicate "hey, I'm not comfortable with this situation, please stop". If that message goes unheeded the dog has 2 choices: escape or warn. If the dog cannot leave or does not want to leave he will warn. Usually the first warning is a growl. If that goes unheeded often a snap without the intention of making contact. THEN a bite with contact (but usually no damage... bite inhibition at work!) and finally the dog is forced to deliver a true bite.
This dog, for whatever reason, seems to lack bite inhibition, but also seems to not give great warnings. I'm sure there are body cues of "go away, please" but he never gets to "seriously, I really want you to stop that!" and just goes right for "HEY! I MEAN BUSINESS!". In my experience (which isn't vast by any means) a dog doesn't usually circumvent the warning system unless he has learned that the warning system doesn't work. Which is why it's recommended to not scold or punish a dog for growling as it can result in the dog eliminating the growl and going right to the bite. I don't know about the growling, but it may be that because his previous snap/bite with no damage warnings went unheeded that he went right to delivering a true bite. It's still concerning behaviour though, IMO.
-
Perhaps. Some dogs tend to be pickier. Personally I avoid giving in to that if I can. Maybe I'm just a mean mom. ha ha. But seriously, I pick foods for very specific reasons. Also, it is always possible for a dog to be diagnosed with a condition that requires a prescription food that the dog MUST eat to stay healthy, so I make it a point that the dogs eat what I give them to wean down the pickiness I get from them. Basically the way it works in my household is... if you don't eat it promptly you don't eat at all. Summit often wouldn't eat breakfast when we first got him but that resolved once he settled in (and with the "don't eat, don't eat at all" philosophy in place). Kili also went through a funny phase around the age of 10-12 months where she was often leaving food or not eating at all. She learned pretty quickly though that if she didn't want to eat she was going to wait another 12 hours for the chance to eat. Every so often when food goes down now and something else exciting is happening (visitors, we hear our downstairs neighbour coming in, etc) I see her have a moment where she thinks about checking out the excitement and then you can almost see the lightbulb of "oh wait, I'd better eat this first".
Anyway, that's just me. Lots of people just rotate foods. But as I said, I try to impress on the dogs that they eat what I give them. There is nothing more frustrating at work than telling a client their dog has urinary stones and has to eat a special diet to reduce the amount of crystals being formed... and then the dog is picky and doesn't want to eat it, the owners stops feeding the food, dog gets stones again....
-
There isn't really such a thing as "strong vs weak" antibiotics. There's really just different antibiotics that work against different bacteria. So a particular antibiotic might be very strong against bacteria A, intermediate against B, and C is totally resistant. If you have bacteria C you won't see the results you want, but not because the antibiotic is "weak" but because it doesn't have good activity against that particular bacteria. That's why cultures can be important depending on the results we want/need and the importance of avoiding resistance and treatment failure.
-
I like my dogs leeeean. 3 ribs showing and hips easily felt/slightly visible (depending on the hound and its body type).
Summit has 3-4 ribs showing, the rest visible if he stretches otherwise just easily felt when petting. Hip bones don't show on him but are right there when you put your hands on him. Summit's condition has not changed in the 3 years I have had him, however he is a couple kg heavier on the scale. I don't really listen to the scale. It's a number. The look and feel is going to say a lot more than the number.
Kili is a little bit leaner, but she's still a bit of a baby and hasn't totally filled out. I've probably got 5 ribs easily visible on her. Hip bones slightly visible. Little leaner than even I tend to like but she's healthy and happy and just a young'n.
-
Love the big floppy ears.
Good luck handsome boy!
-
Ideally he shouldn't be subjected to a bad experience. Taking him to get them cut is not a positive experience for him. We do our best at our clinic, sometimes with one person devoted to head petting, cooing, and offering treats. But at the end of the day... we don't have time to spend half an hour on a nail trim. So yes, we will muzzle and (gently but firmly) restrain any dog that doth protest too much. We don't hurt them, but it's not positive overall to the dog. He will view it as a negative experience with his toes and it will set back your training. The more positive experiences he has and the fewer negative, the easier it will be for him. If you can work him up to allowing you to cut even one nail you won't have to worry about overgrown nails, because you'll just do them one at a time and when you finish the last one it will be time to start over!
-
When Kili decided to be a ridiculous teenager and act like she hadn't been getting her nails cut ever since she was 8 weeks old, I started handling her feet every night before bed. I would brush her teeth and give her her special treat. I would have a few extra of her treat and I would then touch each foot and rub her toes, giving her treats the whole time. When I stopped touching her feet I stopped giving treats. At no point during this evening ritual did I bring out clippers or drummels. I was just touching feet and giving cookies. Every night. She got over her silly teenage issue pretty quickly.
With an older dog you might need to work up more slowly. Ideally during this time you never do more than the dog is happy to allow... so no nail trimming until the dog will allow it. And I never plan to do all the nails at one sitting if the dog is not completely comfortable. I'll do a single nail per day at first if necessary.
-
Hurray! This is great news.
Hopefully this means great things for Mr. Henry! -
Got mine from the GEM online store.
Beware that they can still injure and kill with a muzzle on so strict management is still necessary.
-
Or just change the handle to a turn knob. Pretty hard to turn a round ball without opposable thumbs (still potentially possible in which case add a lock or latch if he figures it out).
-
Erg, quote function doesn't work at work (ha, I made a punny).
You cannot diagnose a brain tumour based on clinical signs. A dog with a brain tumour does not show any one set of clinical signs. They may have seizures, aggressive behaviour, behaviour changes, disorientation, OCD type behaviours, blindness, and on and on and on. It depends on the location of the tumour, how quickly the tumour grows, the type of tumour, and so on. We can sometimes suggest that a tumour might be possible... sometimes in an older dog who has started having seizures that do not respond well to anticonvulsant medications, having serious behaviour changes, etc. But I would never tell a client that their dog absolutely has a tumour without an MRI or a postmortem. I simply am not able to diagnose that based on clinical signs.
This is such a sad situation all around. It makes me want to cry and hug my hounds close.
-
I would be interested to know where in Canada you are and what adoption group she came from. There aren't that many groups in Canada. I'm not familiar with groups outside of my province of Ontario, but I'm not sure what group would place a dog like this with a first time dog owner... label a dog as aggressive repeatedly... but also take the time and effort to have a trainer come out to see you (competency of the trainer not withstanding). Most of the groups I know either place dogs very specifically and carefully, or if they don't I can't see them being inclined to send a trainer. You certainly don't have to call out the group in public (it's too bad you can't PM yet) but it would be helpful to know what province you're in if you're willing to disclose that much?
-
Yes, that's what I kind of felt too. That's why I'm annoyed. I don't expect to "get my money's worth" in terms of claiming more than I pay in premiums. I have the insurance for peace of mind. But to me them dropping the co-pay because they lost the bet this time around is like me saying "well, my dog hasn't had any claims in 3 years now so I'm only going to pay half of my premiums this year". It bugs me.
Also, bothers me that they drop the co-pay by 30% at one shot, but it will take me 18 months with no claims to get it back to 80% since it only increases in 10% increments every 6 months... at the shortest.
What Are You Working On?
in Training and Behavior discussion
Posted
Well, as you can see from the video, Summit does still sometimes decide to come investigate. For the most part though he has been taught to stay in his place and he will be rewarded for staying there. I often throw a treat at him while working with Kili as a reward for staying in his spot.