rsieg

You have an advantage in that the first dog is already housebroken. Dogs are programmed to go where they smell dog urine, so if your first dog is going in the backyard then it has the "right smell" to attract your new greyhound to go there as well. Key point though - wherever your greyhound (or the other dog, for that matter) has gone inside the house, you need to clean and deoderize that spot, using something like this. If you do not do this, then your greyhound will smell the spot of previous urine in the house and think - "Right, that is where I am supposed to go."

I start getting nervous when the temperature drops below 20 deg. Fahrenheit, as it seems like that is when the dog's feet begin to bother them. That said, they seem to walk it out pretty quickly. Today it was around 18 deg Fahrenheit and I took Logan and Max for 0.8 miles in the morning, and 0.6 miles this evening. Would have gone farther this evening except I'm developing a cold or flu. By comparison, they may go 1.5-2.0 miles in a single session, and 3-3.5 miles for the day, in warmer weather. If it gets into the single digits they are walking out to the end of the driveway and back, or just being let into the backyard. Also have to note that, per the post above, the Canadians seem to go in much colder weather, I think Canadian hounds (and their people) are tougher :-)

Taste of the Wild, but they always get something extra in the food, try to mix it up with BilJac, Parmesan cheese, cottage cheese, bone broth, stuff like that. The extra usually includes a half can of salt-free tuna in at dinner.

I would wait, if only because having a dog at home (new or otherwise) is one more thing to worry about and that can go wrong and mess up a vacation. You get a call from the sitter that there is a problem, you either have to cut the vacation short or worry about it though the vacation. Unless there is some reason you cannot wait until after the vacation to adopt (there will still be houndies out there to be adopted in February 2018, rest assured :-) I would enjoy the vacation without worries about a dog at home, and then make your transition to being a dog owner afterward. Remember. after you adopt you will not be able to take any vacations without worrying about your dog. Good luck!

Good luck! Do you know the track name of your hound? If so you can type it in the search in the upper right of this page: http://www.greyhound-data.com/ and get her racing history and lineage info.

Sorry for your loss. FWIW, 28 days is 7 months in dog years...

Condolences on your loss. He always seemed like he was a happy hound in your posts on GT.

Welcome from another Cleveland native. West side here, currently North Ridgeville.

Out of bed around 7 am, shower et cetera Walk 30-45 min GH breakfast, 1.5 cups kibble + extra (often Parmesan cheese) leave for work ~9 am Dog sitter visit around half an hour around noon Brother gets home around 4:30 pm Home from work at 7-8 pm Walk 45 min - 1 hour+ GH dinner, 1.5 cups kibble + salt-free tuna Treat, bed around 11 pm Max - usually up around 3 am to go out again :-(

Adding something, e.g. Parmesan cheese, cottage cheese, salt-free tuna, or so on helps make it palatable. Moistening it does not hurt, may make it more palatable. I try to mix it up to keep it interesting for my guys. Two points: (1) don't spoil her, e.g. if you give her stovetop cooked ground turkey on top in the first week she may not go for anything less for a while. (2) There are a few things dogs should NOT have that people eat, such as chocolate, grapes, garlic, and a few others, if you search for something like foods not for dogs I think you can find a list. (Or maybe someone here can link to one?). Yogurt is an ok additive EXCEPT that there is a non-sugar sweetener, Xylitol I think, which is sometimes used in "healthy" yogurts which is very bad for dogs, so watch out for that one.

Where are you walking? Another trick can be to take him somewhere he will be so engrossed in sniffing that he forgets to be afraid. Also helps if the place is actually calm. Often a park can be a good choice, especially compared with an urban area with lots of noise. Keep in mind that a dog "sees" the world through his nose - give him time to sniff things, go slow. In spite of being racers, they tend to go *very* slow on walks. Max and Logan are routinely passed by the woman in our neighborhood walking three chihuahuas, or by old people who have no business being faster than greyhounds :-)

Agreed, at his age having a scruffy coat as his biggest problem (well, along with some back leg weakness) he is doing well. Be interesting to see if the coat gets better in a few weeks.

Max just turned 13. Last month or so, he has been getting an increasing amount of gray fur tufts, starting on the rear end and now also coming forward along his sides. It looks like undercoat fur to me, and he has always had a significant undercoat. It is not simply the silver graying of the hair (not a huge problem for him so far), it is tufts (i.e. small clumps) of undercoat sticking out from what I can tell. My first thought was that he is unable to groom properly due to a bad back, but honestly I don't recall him spending time grooming before. May be seasonal shedding, but don't recall anything to this extent in the past and I don't recall that producing tufts. The only thing I have done for it so far is I take him outside and use a fur comb to remove it, ends up producing gray clouds of hair (hence doing it outside). Max seems to like it, and it does help a lot for a few days, but then it comes back. It doesn't seem to bother him, but I hate seeing him look all scruffy, especially being a black dog! Anyone have this with their seniors? Wondering if a diet aid, maybe olive oil or something like that, would be helpful. Thanks in advance for any advice,

If she tires of "shaky cheese", another one to try is cottage cheese. I swap between those to keep my guys eating.

Testing from SmugMug and small size test

"He hasn't had any real big changes to his life in the last few months. He has to stay in a big gated room in the house during the day because we nanny a few toddlers for teachers." Is the nanny gig new, or something he was already used to long before his accidents began? If it is new, and if there is no medical issue, I would guess he is stressed by the toddlers being in the house and that may be triggering his accidents.

Another vote for peanut butter, if your hound like it. Fortunately for me, Max LOVES peanut butter - if I make a PB&J sandwich he is out in the kitchen drooling. Since Max is the old guy who takes three pills in the evening, that is good for me. Logan, on the other hand, is not a peanut butter fiend. I give him a glucosamine pill each evening in peanut butter and he usually eats it, but sometimes I find it spit out on the floor by his dish. It is purely preventative for him at 7 years old, so no biggie right now but when he gets older he may be more of a problem to pill.

Doesn't want to ... or ... does not realize he should hold it. Remember, dogs don't think like we do. If he goes in the kitchen, and he has been doing so for a long while now, and it has the right "odor" to be a good place to go, Merlin sees no problem. Why should he be holding it when there is a perfectly good place right in the kitchen to go? If you come by minutes or tens of minutes later and find it and yell at him, he is not necessarily connecting your yelling with his going in the kitchen. There is a great story somewhere on Greytalk (apologies, I don't recall who posted it) about a hound who kept urinating in the house. The owner would yell at him when she found the spot, and he would act suitably "guilty". Then one day she was watering her plants and accidentally spilled some water on the floor -- and the hound saw the water and immediately ran away into another room. She realized all the hound had learned is that his owner did not like water on the floor, but did not connect it with anything he did :-) Your original post was June 1, i.e. four days ago. While that seems like a long time when dealing with this, it really is not a long time for a dog to change behavior he has learned over several months. Give it a while longer, keep the spot clean with the urine deodorizer, and hopefully Merlin will figure it out. Good luck!

How long has he been doing this (i.e. how many weeks)? Also, are you deodorizing where he goes? Not just cleaning it with regular cleaner, but using a urine de-oderizer from a pet store? Dogs tend to go where other dogs go - this is why they wander around sniffing before finally stopping to do their business - they are sniffing for a "proper" spot. So, if you are not completely deoderizing where he is going on the kitchen floor, he may be sniffing it and saying to himself - yup, that is where I should be going. Along the same lines, if you can predict when he needs to go and get him outside to a standard location before he goes, the odor should build up there and he should hopefully begin to pick up that is where he should be going. (Obviously you will want to be picking up the bm, but the odor will still remain way strong enough for a dog to pick it up). Also, is it solid bm or soft/diarrhea type? If the latter, it may be that switching food may help. Like people, if he has diarrhea it may be harder (or impossible) for him to hold it.

You know how Cleveland is, east side is a foreign country for me :-) However, I got my two from Greyhound Adoption of Ohio (GAO). They are in Chagrin Falls which is near you, so they might be able to put you in touch with some east side greyhound owners. For pictures, you have to have a service that lets you generate a link to the picture, then you click the square "Image" icon in the top edit bar and paste the link to the picture. Photobucket is the service I use, takes a bit of practice but eventually will work. It has the distinct advantage of being free for the basic service. Use the "direct link" option when copying the Photobucket image link.

Hi, welcome to Greytalk. I'm from the far west side of Cleveland (North Ridgeville) so not convenient for a far east side meetup, but there are a lot of east side greyhound owners out there, hopefully you can get something going. We have had a few meetups on the west side, not regular monthly events or anything, with up to 30 greyhounds attending. Just remember you should require muzzles for *all* greyhounds in the meetup, they can get pretty wild when playing together.

I do the twice/day, 1 1/2 cups each like you do. But note that I have male dogs, about 75 lb each. I'm pretty sure they get treats from the dog sitter too :-) My guys sometimes skip the morning meal as well. I don't worry about it - they always eat the evening meal if they miss the morning one. Missing an occasional meal should not hurt anything as long as they are holding weight. Mine are, so if they don't eat reasonably promptly I pick up the dish and go to work. I do make an effort to make sure they eat the evening meal, if they initially do not I pick it up and later in the evening put something in it and put it back down, they almost always eat then.

There seems to be a bias toward adopting females, so you will sometimes see after a haul of new greyhounds off the track for adoption that in a few weeks all the females are adopted and it is mostly males remaining available. So you may have more of a choice if you are interested in males (or at least willing to consider them). All my dogs growing up, and my first (non-greyhound) dog that I adopted on my own were all females, but Logan and Max were my first greyhounds, males obviously. I don't see any difference in behavior or anything like that, but there is a subtle psychological effect we impose on the dogs, that is, we think of a male dog as a "he" or a female as a "she". It may seem silly, but if you really want a female, that is, a "her", as your canine companion, then that is what you should get.

I may do that, thanks for the suggestion. Bravecto does seem to get good reviews. My only reluctance has been the 3-month thing, just seems like it would either need to be a very heavy initial dose to work that long, or maybe it does not work that long.

Can you use the Seresto collar with Trifexis? Trifexis handles fleas and worms, but not ticks (though I have heard it actually works on ticks as well, just not for the whole month). Trifexis (or actually Comfortis, the version without worm protection) cured a flea infestation in our house instantly, so I am not going off Trifexis. But, I would like something for the ticks. Tried the Preventic collar last year but Logan got a rash from it, I suppose similar results may occur with Seresto but may be worth a try.