Blog

I have relatives visiting from out of state, and after a two-day drive to get here, they want to stretch their legs on a...

If Otto is on one end of a seven-foot sofa, and I (or anyone) sits on the other far end, he will give that person a sort of dirty look and leave the sofa. If I am sitting on a couch and pat the cushion next to me, and encourage Otto to come on up, he will come and stand close, and wag his tail and blink his eyes … Nance

It’s a sad fact (but a fact nevertheless) that sometimes people adopt a dog or buy a puppy that turns out to quite unsuited for life with those people.

When was the last time you needed to take a dog to the veterinarian after regular business hours – you know, in an emergency?...

I’m going to have to ask for forgiveness ahead of time: This post may well offend some of my friends, neighbors, and readers. I’m sorry – and conflicted. I’ve been asked a number of times for my opinion about breeding dogs. Do I know a good male Jack Russell to mate with their female; would I suggest buying a puppy from that breeder who advertises puppies on the billboard by the highway; how long should they wait until they breed their German Shepherd Dog?

This is going to sound a little bananas. I think you guys can take it, however.

The most fun thing I've been doing lately with my dogs is playing hide and go seek. I'm a behavior geek anyway - I love watching dogs (and other animals) work and play and interact - but I can't tell you how entertaining it is for me to watch my adolescent dog learning how the game works, and try to anticipate my hiding strategies.

The house that I use as an office has three bedrooms upstairs. Sometimes, my husband and I rent them to students who attend a local trade school. In the past couple of years, though, we've had various relatives staying in the house on and off. At the moment, no one is living here, so I have both three rooms to hide in upstairs and no one to watch me at this ridiculous game! (Lest this sound rich - my second house! - let me assure you that the area where I live is so economically depressed, that the mortgage on this house costs us less than rent on office spaces in town.)

When I first saw the adolescent canine who was to become my darling dog Otto, in my local shelter in June 2008, his cage card warned Kills chicken" – an endearing typo that evidently meant he had either killed a chicken

All the world’s viruses seem to be having their way with us at the moment. I don’t think I know anybody who isn’t sick...

A short blog post today, to remind myself (and perhaps others) of something so simple I forget it all the time: When a dog is having trouble learning something, pose the question" differently!Case in point: I'm fostering a puppy

I read an article the other day about a pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, shutting down due to hundreds of workers becoming infected...

I’ve been fostering dogs and puppies for my local shelter for 15 years. Wow! Time flies – until I thought about it, I didn’t...

Keeping my book collection to only three tall shelves has taken ongoing effort. At least once a year, I’ve had to give the shelves a critical pruning, throwing away titles that contained either incomplete or poor information and donating to my local library books that were of good quality, but not something that I planned to refer to again and again.