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Rehoming a dog due to loss of income, loss of a home, or another extreme circumstance is understandable. In other scenarios it's less clear if rehoming is the best option.

My Ella is a chow hound. Not only does she eat everything I offer her, including lemon slices, but she thinks the purpose of walks is to see how much food she can find. It's amazing what she comes up with. In the first year and a half that I had her, we spent one night at the emergency vet after she ingested paintballs, and she also had to see a specialist to remove a peanut fragment that she tried to cough up but which got caught above her soft palette in the back of her nose instead. I mention this so that maybe you'll understand why I panicked when the cap from a container holding a fly paper strip disappeared after I dropped it. I didn't think much of it at the time, just finished putting the strip up, and then looked around to pick up the cap, which I had heard fall, but it was nowhere to be found. I wouldn't have been overly concerned, except that the top had a thumbtack pushed through it for hanging the strip.

There’s every chance that you, like me, get regularly smacked in the face by a Facebook “memory" of your beloved heart dog who passed some time ago. It’s just as likely to make you smile as bring tears to your eyes.

My husband and I were talking about childhood dogs for some reason, and he said, "We got a dog when I was little and it died of distemper, and my parents said, 'That's it, no more dogs.'"When he said that, I suddenly remembered that my family, too, had lost a young dog to distemper when I was a child. I have a solid memory of my mother wiping up vomit, and the adolescent pup lying limply nearby, and my mother telling me, "I don't think she's going to make it." I was probably about four or five years old, but I knew that this phrase meant the dog was probably going to die.

WDJ Training Editor Pat Miller wrote an article for the June issue of WDJ about unconventional or unintentional cues - things that people taught their dogs that are far from the ordinary sit, down, stay-sort of behaviors. In the article, she and other trainers describe how they taught their dogs things such as locating a pile of poop that needs to be picked up, standing in a certain place and a certain pose that's convenient for grooming, and coming when it's time to take a daily medication. My favorite was, "You're not going!" - which is what Pat taught her Kelpie, Kai, to indicate he shouldn't get excited about going for a car ride, because he's not invited on that impending trip. Pat asked readers to send in descriptions of the unconventional cues and behaviors they had taught their dogs. I'm going to post some over the next couple of weeks; we're getting a lot, thanks! You guys are an unconventional bunch, apparently! And Pat will be selecting one – perhaps by random, because there are so many great ones to choose from! – to win a prize.

An article that discusses the health effects of spay/neuter surgery appears In the February issue of WDJ. It's a topic that's overdue for discussion in WDJ, but one that can get people upset, for different reasons. From the perspective of those of us involved with shelters or rescue, any discussion of delaying or foregoing sterilization for all but the best individual dogs from impeccable bloodlines is practically verboten. Some of these people verbally attack anyone who questions the wisdom of pediatric spay/neuter, and insult anyone with an intact male dog who is not a conformational and behavioral paragon of his breed standard.

Why do “stray” dogs always seem to appear when you have the least amount of time to deal with them? In your experience, what proportion...

I’ll bet that in the past 10 years, every Super Bowl broadcast has been spiked with television ads with dogs in them. Why dogs are such reliable pitchmen for beer, cars, and snack foods, I’ll never know.

I was dismayed to open the link to what sounded like an interesting new dog training product – the Pavlov Dog Monitor from the Apple App Store. The application is intended for pets at home barking and suffering with separation anxiety problems as a result of their owners being gone for long workdays.

I am a fan of dog-park rules, and I, too, have taken pictures of the posted rules at every dog park I have ever visited, in an effort to see how different communities have responded to the people and dogs there.

Please stop helping people sell dogs on your sites. Oh, I know, you say you don’t allow these sales – that these activities are prohibited by your terms of service – but you do absolutely nothing of value to stop them.

Warning: The following is an ardent product endorsement. Each January, we publish a feature in WDJ called “Gear of the Year,” where we tell subscribers...