Environmental Hazards

When I was growing up, I knew a family that kept a dog just for finding and killing skunks. My friends lived on a big cattle ranch, and all their dogs had jobs. They had a couple of Australian Kelpies for working cattle, a number of tall, rangy hounds for hunting wild pigs, and then there was poor Frank, the skunk dog. I don't remember where my friends had obtained Frank, or even what breed of dog he was, but I recall that there had been numerous cases of rabies in the county where I lived as a child, and that skunks were the main carriers.

We all love seeing our dogs run and frolic on turf – but we seldom consider the chemicals that may be dangerous to their health.

Car rides. Some dogs love them. Some dogs hate them. Helping car anxiety in dogs, and getting a calm passenger is a step-by-step process.

In previous issues Whole Dog Journal reviewed products designed to make picking up dog poop easier. We also compared some commercial poop bags

Non-dog folks turn pale at the thought. But responsible dog owners, knowing how important it is to clean up after our dogs, think nothing of reaching down and picking up a fresh, fragrant pile of Fido's feces with our hands. Oh, not our bare hands, of course, but often with nothing more than a couple of millimeters of flimsy plastic between epidermis and excrement. No big deal. Until, that is, one of those handy plastic bags breaks. Intrepid as committed poop-pickers may be, even we will blanche at the thought of . . . well, you can imagine.

Because we feel deeply that dog training should be pleasurable and effective, and because we have personally witnessed innumerable successful demonstrations of completely pain- and fear-free training, we have taken the position that training tools and methods that inflict pain are inferior (a strong word, we know) to those that do not.