Patience boy, patience…

Here’s a nice selection of funny dog pics to make you smile..

This is something special, I’ve never seen a dog dance like this before have you?

Just shows what you can do with dog training…

Let me know if you enjoy it.

Speak to you soon,

Stuart.

Hi there,

This is the final article in the series on dog aggression. In the previous article we outlined aggression toward family members and discussed ‘Resource Guarding’ in detail. Today we are going to cover the other major type of aggression toward family members, that is:

Aggression Due to a Perceived Threat

Very often this type of aggression manifests itself during handling, this could be whilst bathing your dog, ‘loving’ it or similar.

Dog don’t like to be handled for several reasons:

• They may never have been accustomed to physical contact from a young age and get edgy when someone tries to hug them.
• They may consider themselves higher up ‘the ladder’ than they actually are so won’t tolerate lot’s of cuddles, hugs and kisses. This type of behaviour undermines their feeling of superiority so they tend to snap at the ‘hugger’ to show that they are the boss.
• They may feel scared or threatened by an event, for instance bathing a dog often scares the living daylights out of it so it snaps out of self defense. - A lot of owners, when confronted with a wild-eyed, half-washed, upset dog, feel that in order to complete the wash they have to forcibly restrain him. This only adds to the dog’s sense of panic, and reinforces his impression of a wash as something to be avoided at all costs.
• They may have had a bad or painful experience they don’t want to repeat, nail clipping is a common cause of this. When you clip a dog’s nails, it’s very easy to “quick” him – that is, cut the blood vessel that runs inside the nail. This is extremely painful to a dog, and is a sure-fire way to cause a long-lasting aversion to those clippers.

“Retraining” Your Dog to Enjoy Being Handled and Groomed

People often ask whether it’s possible to ‘retrain’ their dogs so they enjoy being groomed.

In a word, the answer is: YES! It’s a lot easier if you start from a young age though – handle your puppy a lot, get him used to being touched and rubbed all over. Young dogs generally enjoy being handled – it’s only older ones who haven’t had a lot of physical contact throughout their lives that sometimes find physical affection difficult to accept.

Practice picking up his paws and touching them with the clipper; practice taking him into the bath (or outside, under the faucet – whatever works for you, but warm water is much more pleasant for a dog than a freezing spray of ice-cold water! Just ask yourself how you’d feel if put under a shower of ice-cold water - you wouldn’t like it would you?), and augment the process throughout with lots of praise and the occasional small treat.

For an older dog that may already have had several unpleasant handling/grooming experiences, things are a little more difficult. You need to undo the damage already caused by those bad experiences, which you can do by taking things very slowly – with an emphasis on keeping your dog calm.

The instant he starts to show signs of stress, stop immediately and let him relax. Try to make the whole thing into a game: give him lots of praise, pats, and treats.

Take things slowly. Don’t push it too far: if you get nervous, stop.

Dogs show aggression for a reason: they’re warning you to back off, or else! If your dog just can’t seem to accept being groomed, no matter how much practice you put in, it’s best to hand the job over to the professionals.

Your vet will clip his nails for you (make sure you tell him first that he gets aggressive when the clippers come out, so your vet can take the necessary precautions!). As far as washing and brushing goes, the dog-grooming business is a flourishing industry: for a small fee, you can get your dog washed, clipped, brushed, and whatever else you require by experienced professionals (again, make sure you tell them about your dog’s reaction to the experience first!)

For more information on handling aggressive and dominant behaviors, as well as a great deal of detailed information on a host of other common dog behavior problems, check out SitStayFetch.

It’s a complete owner’s guide to owning, rearing, and training your dog, and it deals with all aspects of dog ownership.

To get the inside word on preventing and dealing with problem behaviors like aggression and dominance in your dog, SitStayFetch is well worth a look.

You can visit the SitStayFetch site by clicking on the link below:

Hope you found this series of articles useful, in the next article we’ll talk about Alpha dogs. This is a term that is being bandied about more and more but many people use it without understanding it’s true meaning or the ramifications if those meanings aren’t understood.

Speak to you soon

Stuart.

PS

If you have any questions or there’s anything you’d like some advice on post a comment and I’ll be glad to answer you.

Strange the things we humans think of to entertain us… but sometimes you’ve just got to laugh! Sorry about the commentary being in Korean though, not able to translate it but the visuals do the trick.

Enjoy it and look out for the final part of your article on dog aggression, will be online soon.

Stuart.

In the previous article I mentioned that there were two main types of aggression in dogs. We dealt with one type in that article - namely dog aggression toward strangers - and today we’ll talk about a common problem with quite a lot of dogs, that is:

Aggression towards family members

A dog is aggressive towards members of his own human family for two main reasons:

1. Because he’s trying to defend something he thinks of as his from a perceived threat (you) - Also known as resource guarding, and though it may sound innocuous, there’s actually a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Your dog isn’t simply trying to keep his kibble to himself.
2. He’s not comfortable with the treatment/handling he’s getting from you or other members of the family.

1 Resource Guarding

As mentioned above, resource guarding is pretty common amongst dogs, most owners have encountered it albeit in a watered down form, and probably ignored it if it didn’t go any further.

The term refers to overly-possessive behavior by your dog. For instance he may snarl at you if you approach him when he’s eating, or give you “the eye” (a flinty-eyed, direct stare) if you reach your hand out to take a toy away from him.

It’s in a dogs nature to be possessive from time to time and sometimes they’re even possessive over things that have no conceivable value: inedible trash, balled up pieces of paper or tissue, old socks. More frequently though, resource-guarding becomes an issue over items with a very real and understandable value; for instance food and toys.

This type of behaviour all boils down to the issue of dominance.

Let’s take a moment to explore this concept… Dogs are pack animals, this means that they’re used to a very structured environment.

In a dog-pack, each individual animal is ranked in a ‘dominance hierarchy’ of position and power in relation to every other animal. Each animal is aware of the rank of every other animal, which means he knows specifically how to act toward each pack member in any given situation (whether to back down, whether to push the issue, whether to muscle in or not on somebody else’s turf, etc etc).

Now, to your dog, the family environment is no different to the dog-pack environment. Your dog has ranked each member of the family, and has his own perception of where he ranks in that environment as well.

This is where it gets interesting because if your dog perceives himself as higher up in the social rank than other members of the family he’s going to get cheeky. What’s more, if he’s really got an overinflated sense of his own importance, he’ll start to act aggressively toward them.

The reason for this is that dominance and aggression are the exclusive rights of a superior-ranked animal. No underdog would ever show aggression or act dominantly to a higher-ranked animal (the consequences would be dire, and he knows it!) This is where disobediance and even biting of ‘lower ranked’ family members comes from.

Simply put, your dog thinks he’s higher-up the social ladder than those family members and thinks they’ve no right telling him what to do or demanding the privileges of rank. In his mind he is quite within his rights to act aggressively toward them.

Resource guarding is a classic example of dominant behavior: only a higher-ranked dog (a “dominant” dog) would act aggressively in defence of resources.

To stop this skewed thinking on your dogs behalf you have to demonstrate to him that he is, in fact, the lower ranked dog and that all the other family members are higher up the ladder than him. Once this is clear to him he’ll never even dream of trying to prevent you from taking his food or toys – because a lower-ranked dog (him) will always go along with what the higher-ranked dogs (you and your family) say.

The best way to curb dominant, aggressive behavior is consistent, frequent obedience work. This will show your authority to your dog and it needn’t be a lot either. Only two fifteen-minute sessions a day will make it perfectly clear to your dog that you’re the boss, and that it pays to do what you say. However, make sure that these two obedience sessions are productive i.e. give your dog an intense training and not just play.

You can reinforce this fact by rewarding him (with treats and lavish praise) for obeying a command, and isolating him (putting him in “time-out”, either outside the house or in a room by himself) for misbehaviour.

If you feel a lack of confidence doing this training by yourself, it would be wise to consider investing in a good training manual or enlisting the assistance of a qualified dog-trainer.

You should also brush up on your understanding of canine psychology and communication, so that you understand what your dog’s trying to say to you. This will help you to stop any dominant behaviors before they get entrenched and help you to communicate your own authority more effectively.

Don’t forget to train regularly: keep the sessions short, no more than fifteen minutes each, and train at least twice a day.

In the final part of this article I will talk about the other reason for aggression in your dog. This is because he’s not comfortable with the treatment he’s getting from you or your family.

I’ll be posting ‘Dog Aggression - Part 3′ soon but if you’d like some more information about training your dog before then you’d do well to take a look at what I consider to be one of the best training resources available at the moment. You can get more information by clicking the picture below.

Speak to you soon,

Stuart.

PS
Be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions.

Dogs are aggressive creatures by instinct. In the wild aggression is necessary as it helps dogs to hunt, defend themselves from other creatures, and to defend resources such as food, mates and a place to sleep.

Over the centuries though, selective breeding has minimized and refined this trait somewhat but, even still, dogs of all sizes are still physically capable of inflicting serious harm.

However, that doesn’t mean that we, as dog lovers and owners, are totally helpless when it comes to handling our dogs. There is a lot we can do to prevent aggression from rearing its ugly head in the first place and, even if prevention hasn’t been possible (for whatever reason), there are still steps that we can take to recognize and deal with it efficiently.

Most Common Aggression Types

Whilst there are several different types of canine aggression, the two most common ones are:

Aggression towards strangers

Aggression towards family members

These two different types of aggression stem from very different causes, and require different types of treatment, let’s take a look at each in turn:

Aggression Towards Strangers

The symptoms are: a jumpy and nervous dog who is constantly on the alert - either he can’t sit still and is constantly fidgeting or leaping at the smallest sound and pacing around barking and whining; or he’s very still indeed, sitting rock-steady in one place, staring hard at the object of his suspicions. Be that a visitor, the mailman, or someone approaching him on the street.

Why does it happen?

…There’s one major reason why a dog doesn’t like strange people: he’s never had the chance to get used to them and be sociable with them.

Socializing Your Dog

The process of accustoming your dog to the world and all the strange people (and animals) that it contains is called socialization. This is an incredibly important aspect of your dog’s upbringing: in fact, it’s pretty hard to overemphasize just how important it is. Socializing your dog means exposing him from a young age (generally speaking, as soon as he’s had his vaccinations) to a wide variety of new experiences, new people, and new animals.

When you socialize your dog, it helps him learn through experience that new sights and sounds are fun, not scary.

However, you can’t just expose your dog to a crowd of unfamiliar people and tell him “Settle down, Roxy, it’s OK” – he has to learn that it’s OK for himself. And it’s best to do this from puppyhood for the lesson to sink in.

The more types of people and animals he meets (babies, toddlers, teenagers, old people, men, women, people wearing uniforms, people wearing motorcycle helmets, people carrying umbrellas, etc) in a fun and relaxed context, the more at ease and happy (and safe around strangers) he’ll be in general.

Socializing your dog is pretty easy to do – it’s more of a general pastime than a specific training regimen.

First of all, you should take him to puppy preschool. This is a generic term for a series of easy group-training classes for puppies (often performed at the vets, which has the additional benefit of teaching your dog positive associations with the vet!).

In a puppy preschool class, about ten or so puppy owners get together with a qualified trainer and start teaching their puppies the basic obedience commands: sit, stay, and so on.

Even though the obedience work is very helpful and is a great way to start your puppy on the road to being a trustworthy adult dog, really the best parts of puppy preschool are the play sessions. Usually these are held several times throughout the class where the puppies are encouraged to run around off-leash and play amongst themselves.

This is an ideal environment for them to learn good social skills because there’s a whole bunch of unfamiliar dogs and unfamiliar people present plus the environment is safe and controlled. They learn how to interact with strange dogs and that new faces are nothing to be afraid of under the watchful eye of a certified trainer who ensures that nothing will get out of hand.

Socialization doesn’t just stop with puppy preschool, though. It’s an ongoing effort throughout the life of your puppy or dog: he needs to continually be taken to a whole bunch of new places and environments.

But don’t overwhelm him though, take things slowly and allow him to build up confidence at his own speed.

If you would like more information about dog aggression and how to train an aggressive dog take a look here.

Speak to you soon,

Stuart

When the music gets to you and you just gotta groove… Enjoy it!

It’s getting warm here now, the temp is in the high twenties (Centigrade) with nearly 100% humidity and soon it’ll be climbing to the mid to high thirties

This means that whenever we take Kylie for a walk we must be careful of heat exhaustion - as you know Huskies were bred for cooler climes. However, she was born and bred here in South China so has acclimatized, her coat is nowhere near as thick as more northern Huskies and we do take plenty of water when we go out.

But the warming weather got me to thinking…

How do you tell if your dog is starting to overheat?

After a little research I came across an article on The Dog Blog which spelt out nicely the signs of heat exhaustion. To quote:

Watch for signs of heatstroke, such as heavy panting; excessive salivating; staggered walking; muscle tremors; seizures; glazed eyes; noticeably darker tongue and gums; vomiting; or bloody diarrhea.

Now maybe you dog isn’t showing these advanced symptoms but you still think she’s too hot so what is the best way to cool her down?

I hear many people say put some ice in her water, in fact Susan wanted to give ice to Kylie when she got hot. But this is probably one of the biggest mistakes you can make and could even prove fatal.

Going back to the previous article I noticed that the writer had an Afghan hound who he gave iced water to to help cool it down.

However the dog started going into bloat and needed emergency treatment to save it’s life. Whilst at the vet the owner was discussing the cause with the vet and had this to say about this experience (Baran is the Afghan in question):

The ice water I gave Baran caused a violent Muscle spasm in his stomach which caused the bloating.

Even though I figured his temp was down enough to feed and give him this ice water his internal temp was still high. Dr. Vogf stated that giving dogs ice to chew or ice water is a big NO, NO; there should be NO reason for them to ever have ice/ice water.

Normal water (roomTemp.), or cooling with cold towels on the inter thigh. This is the best way to help cool a dog.

So do take Dr Vogf’s words to heart and refrain from giving your dog iced water - it could save his life.

Speak to you soon,

Stuart.

Hi there,

A couple of years ago a policeman in South Africa visited my parents in law’s house to take a statement about a burglary they’d reported on a property they owned.

On arrival at their house the policeman parked his car on the grass outside the lounge window, rang the bell and then moved towards the window to see if there was anyone at home.

Now, as anybody who has ever visited my parents in law’s house can tell you, the one thing you NEVER do when you visit is ring the bell…

You see they had a Bull Terrier dog who was the most gentle, loving animal in the world… Until she hears that bell!

Well, on this particular day there she was, sprawled flat on her back, legs pointing to the heavens, eyes exploring the inside of her eyelids as she happily slept upon my sister in law’s bed and dreamt about chasing rabbits or whatever dogs dream about

That was until some @#*$&@! fool decided to disturb her slumber…

Sure enough the sound of the bell was like a hair trigger on a starters pistol and she was off like a hundred yard sprinter with a nest of angry hornets stuffed down the back of his trousers, only madder and meaner!

Now picture this…

The lounge is over thirty metres long and it is another twenty metres or so from the bedroom to the lounge so she had plenty of time to get up to speed…

Pieter, my father in law, was watching TV at the time and thought “OH NO!” as he heard the bell ring and quickly went outside to warn the stranger.

He’d just got outside and was saying hello to the policeman when the lounge window exploded into a thousand tiny pieces as 25Kg of furious, power packed muscle came to greet the person who’d dared to intrude upon her siesta!

To make matters worse the window is at head height above the ground and this white ball of fury straight from hell, was suddenly hurtling at great speed right towards the face of the policeman - only a metre or so away.

Well I can tell you, there isn’t an Olympic sprinter or high jumper who is faster than that policeman was on that day…

His car was about 10 metres away and he covered that ground and was on the roof of his car before the first piece of glass had hit the ground!

Pieter just stood there in speechless amazement as he took in the scene - the glass exploding and the tiny, glinting pieces scattering in the sun, the hurtling white missile and the ‘Olympic Gold Medalist’ making a herculean leap for the safety of his car roof!

Fortunately no one was hurt and Pieter soon had things under control, he helped the policeman to get shakily off of the roof and the dog, now that she’d made her point, was as happy and friendly as ever and trundled merrily off to resume her slumbers.

Before he could get the policeman to write down a statement though, Pieter did have to ply him with copious amounts of whiskey to stem the violent shaking of his hands!

And the window? Well shortly after the policeman had left Pieter called the glazing company and had it replaced with armoured glass… Just in case!

I hope you enjoyed this true story, please leave me a comment and let me know.

All the best,

Stuart.