the lord is my Shepherd(s), I shall not want

And yet another dog that is not mine, my friend’s English Bull Terrier, Sulla. He and Mulder enjoying an evening at the field :)

Here is an interesting foray into my life as a person who simply cannot say “no” to an animal in distress. 

This is Lulu, some sort of poodle cross (if I had to guess, I would say Golden, though I shall refrain from the portmanteau names as I strongly disagree with the breeding of these dogs in the first place). 

Her owner, a friend of my mother’s, was admitted into a mental facility for nearly 2 weeks and neglected to arrange any sort of care for this dog. When I found out I was horrified, and went to see the dog for myself. She’d been sustaining herself on toilet water and a bag of food that had been torn open and left out (perhaps a better dog than mine, to not eat the whole bag in one sitting… then again, it was Beneful, I don’t much blame her for not wanting to eat such garbage). 

The dog had mats so thick I couldn’t even touch her skin, one ear was so bad that it had somehow matted to the back of her head. 

So, I picked up a pair of scissors, a good shampoo and a comb and got to work. 3 hours later you have what you see in this picture… I feel I’d made some progress. She still needs to be seen by a professional groomer, but for now the worst of the mats are gone, and she seems to be feeling pretty good! Arrangements were made the next day to have the dog picked up, and she is now staying with a relative of the owner. 

A happy end for a sad little dog. 

Raw smelt are one of Ridley’s favorite treats. 

They no longer get to have toys at the park due to Mulder constantly losing them in the creek, so they improvised and decided to play with their leashes instead :)

Just a couple of nice Ridley shots in the yard today- the flowers are finally starting to bloom!

Its been a long time since last I posted any pictures. Here’s some of me working Mulder on the 15th. Photos taken by his trainer.

liversnap:

voxamberlynn:

yukibean:

The shelter manager’s letter: 

“I am posting this (and it is long) because I think our society needs a huge wake-up call.

As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all - a view from the inside, if you will.
Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don’t even know - that puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it’s not a cute little puppy anymore.

How would you feel if you knew that there’s about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at - purebred or not! About 50% of all of the dogs that are “owner surrenders” or “strays” that come into my shelter are purebred dogs.

No shortage of excuses
The most common excuses I hear are: 

We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat). 
Really? Where are you moving to that doesn’t allow pets?

The dog got bigger than we thought it would.
How big did you think a German Shepherd would get?

We don’t have time for her.
Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs!

She’s tearing up our yard.
How about bringing her inside, making her a part of your family?

They always tell me: 
We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her. We know she’ll get adopted - she’s a good dog. Odds are your pet won’t get adopted, and how stressful do you think being in a shelter is? 

Well, let me tell you. Dead pet walking!

Your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off, sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy. 
If it sniffles, it dies.

Your pet will be confined to a small run / kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it.
If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers that day to take him / her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose.
If your dog is big, black or any of the “bully” breeds (pit bull, rottweiler, mastiff, etc) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door. Those dogs just don’t get adopted.
If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed.

If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed, it may get a stay of execution, though not for long. Most pets get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment.
If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles, chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.

The grim reaper
Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”.
First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk - happy, wagging their tails. That is, until they get to “The Room”.

Every one of them freaks out and puts on the breaks when we get to the door. It must smell like death, or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there. It’s strange, but it happens with every one of them. Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs (depending on their size and how freaked out they are). A euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process. They find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk it’s leg. I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood, and been deafened by the yelps and screams.

They all don’t just “go to sleep” - sometimes they spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves.
When it all ends, your pet’s corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back, with all of the other animals that were killed, waiting to be picked up like garbage.

What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know, and it probably won’t even cross your mind. It was just an animal, and you can always buy another one, right?

Liberty, freedom and justice for all
I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head. I do everyday on the way home from work. I hate my job, I hate that it exists and I hate that it will always be there unless people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.

Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.
My point to all of this is DON’T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!

Hate me if you want to - the truth hurts and reality is what it is.
I just hope I maybe changed one person’s mind about breeding their dog, taking their loving pet to a shelter, or buying a dog. I hope that someone will walk into my shelter and say “I saw this thing on craigslist and it made me want to adopt”.
That would make it all worth it.”

 

STOP BUYING FROM BREEDERS YOU SELFISH ASSES!

This is why I am glad I didn’t buy my pup. Thankfully Daniel enlightened me.

PLEASE RE-POST THIS.

What I find somewhat sad, and somewhat disturbing here, is that this goes through the trouble of describing exactly how miserable it is for your pet if they should be dumped at a shelter… but then ends on the completely irrelevant note of  BREEDERS ARE BAD GRRR BREEDERS KILL SHELTER DOGS!!!

Which is outrageous, and inflammatory, and honestly part of the problem.

I see this all the time, and what never ceases to amaze me is how much people in rescue miss the point. YES, bad breeders and puppy mills contribute a lot of the homeless pets that make up the shelter population, largely due to a non-existent screen process for their buyers…

But the really real issue here isn’t breeders as a whole. Its the “disposable dog” mentality. This post even MENTIONS it, describes it in detail, and yet still misses the point. The simple fact is, less dogs would die in shelters, NOT if breeders stop breeding, but if people stopped dumping their dogs. 

THAT is the flaw in the system. “My dog got too big, my dog is too high energy,  my dog sheds too much”. None of these are good excuses for getting rid of a dog, yet every single day these are reasons dogs are dumped.

What needs to happen, is a massive shift in pet owner education. People need to be more aware of the responsibilities of owning a pet, how it is a privilege, not a right, and resources need to be made available to them if they SHOULD end up having problems so that dogs already in homes have the best possible chance of STAYING there, versus being surrendered. 

That’s how we’re going to improve this mess. Not pointing the finger at others.

I’ve got dogs from both rescue and extremely responsible breeders (of which it actually states in my contracts on the dogs that if I should try and surrender one to a shelter, they can actually take legal action against me). I am very involved in the “dog world” from many angles, from rescue to various degrees of competition, and work closely and am friends with many breeders. Amazingly, none of their dogs have ever ended up in a shelter. Why? Because they have a RIGOROUS screening processes, that heavily scrutinize the buyer and make sure they are actually a good fit for their dogs. All of them heavily encourage lifelong contact with their buyers after the sale of the dog, and many offer extended help and training should a problem crop up. ALL of them keep a clause in their (legally binding) contracts that expressly state if the dog can no longer be kept by the buyer, the dog must return to the breeder.

They are doing what NEEDS to be practiced by ALL involved in the placement of dogs, including the shelter systems. Extended education, post-adoption support and better evaluations to ensure the right dogs are being matched with the right people are what needs to be focused on here, NOT wasting time, resources, and energy attacking others. 

(Source: sparkleyunitard)

Picture of Ridley waiting for his track to age. He had a slight demodex outbreak on his face over the holidays, but its being treated and mostly gone now. 

As an aside, I do think it fair to point out that I do use corrections in my training. For Mulder, anyway.

I was honed in specifically to the “reactivity” portion of my reply, and that is a somewhat particular subject with me, as fear-based reactivity is something I spent a good bit of time working on with Ridley. But it should also be mentioned, that I generally don’t use anything harsher than a stern “knock it off” with Ridley either, as he is very handler sensitive and will crumble at anything more than that.

With Mulder, I do use the prong for proofing, though less so now than I had previously (working through Ridley’s issue as force-free as possible taught me a lot of interesting tricks along the way). Now, we mostly just use it during protection work.

Which is an interesting story in and of itself, as for a long time I wasn’t even using it for that. Then one day while working on some OB with my PP trainer, he just up and decided he wanted to take a dirty bite during a heel routine. Not cool. This is a trainer who we’ve worked with for a long while, so none of this was new to him. Best I can figure, he just got fed up with heeling (which I admit is boring), and decided he was just going to take a bite… and that was a big NO. So now, we keep the prong on a tab in the event of unprovoked larceny.

batmanimal:

I got some good questions on my last post:

From serveitindrag:

Third, it allows for a correction if the dog disobeys. You are not correcting him for looking at the man, you are correcting him for not doing what you asked.

This sounds like it’s way too complex for dogs to…

Some interesting things I’d like to note here.

First, I’ve absolutely never seen a dog who truly knew a command 100%. So a correction for non-compliance due to ignoring of a 100% known cue is sort of a misnomer… dogs, as they say, are terrible generalizers. Knowing a command up, down, inside out and backwards on the field doesn’t mean jack doodle on a busy urban street if your dog has not been properly exposed and trained to that environment. You say your dog knows sit on a busy sidewalk… but does he know sit when a random cyclist zooms by? When a car backfires? When a lose dog charges him? Have those scenarios actually been trained for? The answer to that questions is usually “no”, therefore, its not fair to say the command is “100%” anything. There can be proofing involved, but in order to proof, the dog has to actually have a grasp of the situation you are asking him to preform in, and the simple truth is the vast majority of the time, all these people say “my dog knows this command”, DON’T actually have an animal that understand as well as they THINK they do, or as well as they think they should (important distinction, as so, so many people think dogs are magical and should just somehow know to do things despite never being taught them properly). 

Its being stated that its better to correct a response than to remove the dog (already reacting) from the situation… personally, the correct answer here is “neither”.  Neither correction or removal is the TRAINING response to such a situation… its the management response. Your dog reacts, you correct. Its easy to say you’ve delivered a cue and corrected the dog for non-compliance, but few people ever actually get that sequence correct, usually due to the high degree of emotions involved on both ends (with dogs and with handler). What seems very tight and functional in practice is, more often than not, very sloppy, and rarely truly fixes the issue in the way that one would hope an appropriate correction would. Very few people are, after all, Michael Ellis… ;) Likely what results is a dog who has stopped his behavior in THAT instance, maybe the handler has been able to regain control of the dog long enough to redirect him, but the behavior rarely completely diminishes at this point. Thus, it was managed in that moment, not trained away.

Same with removal. Removal isn’t training, its managing the situation. Though personally, I would rather remove the dog, as very rarely do I consider myself in a completely focused, training-savvy mode when my dog has just had a meltdown. Quite the opposite, actually, and in instances such as reactivity, EMOTIONS are what throws gasoline on the fire. Reaching a leveling point is what is desired, and walking away is, personally, the least emotional option. Correcting the dog in this instance actually has the potential to backfire (depending on the dog) as corrections in and of themselves can be very emotional. In protection, to get the dog RIGHT up on the helper and to make that bite sink like the Titanic, you get him as pissed as possible at that helper. This is often achieved by quick, successive collar or prong pops, which is agitating to the dog and thus increases his emotional response when finally getting to his target.

I can only speak to what I myself consider the appropriate response to all this, and for me that is digging past the surface of the reaction and figuring out what I need to change in the dog’s mind to eliminate the issue. I don’t care if I’m asking for a cue and the dog ignores it due to being over stimulated by something… to me, that is not grounds for correction in most instances. What it is grounds for, is figuring out WHY the dog was over stimulated, and fixing that problem first. Here, there are no band-aids in training, we do not fix surface issues, we fix the actual problem. Without changing the emotions behind what the dog is feeling, and thus what is creating the problem, I cannot consider an issue “fixed”. Perhaps cleverly trained around, something someone ultra clever like Ellis could surely accomplish, but that is not my end goal. A well trained dog means nothing to me if he is not comfortable with the things I am asking him to do.