Care

Two months ago, I read a news story about a dog owner in Minnesota who had shared her home and her life with her 10-year-old Great Pyrenees for eight years. On December 30, 2008, the dog attacked his owner as she was trying to trim his nails, sending her to the hospital for multiple bite wounds to her arms. The news report on the incident stated, “[The dog owner] was able to reach another room and closed the door, keeping the dog out.” The owner in this sad story was treated and released from the hospital the same day. The dog is now dead – euthanized at the veterinary hospital for safety reasons, at the owner’s request.Nail-trimming should not be a matter of life and death. Nor should any other routine grooming procedure. If a dog objects strongly to any sort of physical contact or restraint that may occur in the process of ordinary care, a smart, responsible owner needs to take immediate steps to overcome his objections in a positive, nonaversive manner. Fortunately, this process (described in detail below) is not difficult (or dangerous!) to do – but it does take a serious commitment of time.

I have been meaning to write this e-mail for some time. Whole Dog Journal has done such a tremendous job of providing high-quality, informative articles this year. In particular, I was most impressed with the article about dental care and the vaccine article featuring Dr. Ron Schultz. Your writers did such a top-notch job of researching complex topics and providing fair and accurate information and opinions. As a veterinarian myself, I sometimes read such articles with an overly critical eye, but I could find nothing at fault with either of these. In fact, I was so ecstatic with the dental care article that I had my entire staff read it, so they could see from a dog-owner’s perspective why high quality dental care is so important.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past year, you know that Malia and Sasha Obama will soon be getting their very first dog. Every year, children all over the world experience the joy of holding a dog or puppy in their arms for the very first time. We trust that the Obamas will select wisely, and make the right training choices for the newest member of the First Family. If a new dog is in your future, we hope that you'll do the same.For many kids, getting a family dog is one of the happiest experiences imaginable. However, disturbing dog bite statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that all is not well in the kid-dog kingdom. According to the CDC, each year, 800,000 Americans seek medical attention for dog bites. Half of these are children. Your best insurance against your family being part of these statistics is a puppy-raising program that incorporates proper management and supervision and tons of carefully orchestrated, positive social experiences for your new dog. (For more about how to carry out an ideal socialization program, see The Social Scene

Each of us has, at some point, wandered into a room and realized that we've forgotten why we've gone there. When that happens, chances are we are momentarily perturbed with ourselves, but typically we chalk it up to too much on the brain, remember why we're there, then move on. Should our dogs wander in the same fashion, it could well be a sign of cognitive dysfunction syndrome (CDS), a condition quite similar to Alzheimer's in humans. CDS happens when the aging process affects brain pathology, resulting in behavioral changes, including cognitive decline (memory and learning).

For some reason the blinking red light on my phone that signals “message waiting” always seems ominous to me. Last Thursday, my wariness was reinforced: my friend Cindy had left a frantic message. Her dog was lost. “Hattie’s missing!” I could hear the panic in her voice. “I was walking her at Antietam Battlefield last night, the leash came off her collar, and she took off after a deer!” Bad news. In many parts of the country, dogs who chase wildlife or livestock can be shot. There was more bad news as Cindy’s message continued. “I have to leave town today for a work-related retreat. I have people looking for her, but if there’s anything you can do?” I called Cindy back immediately. She had already placed a “lost dog” ad in the paper for her 18-month-old, wheaten-colored, Irish Wolfhound-mix. She had put up posters in the area where Hattie was lost, as well as on the five-mile route between the park and her house in Sharpsburg. She had notified the only shelter in the county that handles stray dogs. She left one of her sweatshirts in the spot where Hattie went missing. And she had people who knew Hattie well - staff from the doggie daycare facility she visited regularly - looking for her. There wasn’t much more I could do. I gave her contact information for a person in Maryland who has a dog trained to find missing pets, and suggested setting a humane dog trap. And praying.

and matching leash all get softer with time and laundering. I like the extra large D-ring for snapping the leash onto.

It's going to be really difficult to stay caught up with everything we've been going through with our new dog, Otto. Every day brings...

and have finally reached the point where I must express myself.

No doubt readers of WDJ love their dogs; I love mine. But just because we have and love dogs does not make their lives more important than the lives of other creatures. In your article about tripe

Somewhere at this very moment, perhaps at a shelter near you, a frightened dog huddles in the back of her kennel, trembling, terrified by a chaotic overload of sensory stimuli: sights, smells, and sounds that are far beyond her ability to cope. Somewhere, today, a warmhearted, caring person is going to feel sorry for this dog - or one similar - believing that love will be enough to rehabilitate the frightened canine. Sometimes, it is. More often, though, the compassionate adopter finds herself with a much larger project than she bargained for. While shelters can a prime source for frightened and shy dogs, they are certainly not the only source. Pet stores, puppy mills, rescue groups, and irresponsible breeders (even some who breed top quality show dogs) can all be guilty of foisting off temperamentally unsound (due to genetics/nature) or under-socialized (due to environment/nurture) puppies and adult dogs on unprepared adopters.

One bright spring Sunday, my husband and I took a motorcycle trip through Virginia, stopping in the dog-friendly town of Leesburg for lunch. As we ate I watched a steady stream of leashed dogs walk by our restaurant window. Before long I noticed a strange consistency: every single dog was wearing a prong collar. The sun dimmed a little for me, because I cannot imagine a training situation for which I would be willing to use a prong collar - and I certainly wouldn't use one as an everyday dog-walking tool. But the collars appeared to be commonly accepted and used in that community. A roomful of dog trainers will never agree on the best equipment for walking, training, or exercising a dog. If you restrict membership in the room to positive" trainers you'll find more agreement

Environmentally concerned scientists believe that both polyethylene (recycling codes HDPE #2 or LDPE #4) and polypropylene (PP #5) are among the least toxic plastics available at this time. (Both are plastics, not rubber.) They offer toughness, durability, and flexibility, and don’t need additives the way vinyl does to attain these qualities. My Bouviers, who are great chewers with powerful jaws, love to play with their Jolly Ball and I feel it’s one of their best and safest plastic toys. Thank you for the excellent article “Why Vinyl Stinks,” which alerts consumers to the hazards of vinyl toys and products for dogs. As a professor of interior design, I am very aware of the problems associated with PVC and many of the products that are made from this plastic. PVC is a prevalent material in our world and it is used for a multitude of things that we use every day, many of these things we may have direct contact with. As the author points out, most PVC is fairly stable and may or may not present a hazard to the user. Primary hazards for end-users are the softening agents that are added to it or if it is burned.

Only rarely does a totally new genre of dog toy appear on the market, and it almost never happens that a new genre of toys is introduced with more than just one or two representative products. This rare event was recently engineered by Sweden’s Nina Ottosson, with the introduction of her Zoo Active Games, a line of 10 novel interactive dog toys (and a few cat toys!). As a huge fan of interactive toys for dogs, I was eager to get my paws on as many of the toys as I could, and see if they were as fun for dogs as they looked! The Zoo Active toys are available in the United States from only a select few distributors, including Paw Lickers Bakery and Boutique, owned and operated by Marianne Gage and her son David in Greenfield Center, New York. Fortunately for me, when Whole Dog Journal editor Nancy Kerns contacted David to inquire whether we could test the toys, he generously offered to send me seven of the products to try out. I’ve been introducing the toys to my own dogs for a few months, so I knew they had great “fun potential,” and looked forward to an opportunity to try them out on a bunch of other dogs, too.