Lifestyle

Read any good puppy contracts lately? Probably not. Health and placement guarantees, spay and neuter requirements, limited registration and other legal details are important, but they can (yawn) put you right to sleep. Well, that used to be true, but today some breeders are writing contracts that leave people rubbing their eyes in disbelief because they contradict everything mainstream veterinary medicine recommends. These contracts require puppy buyers to feed an all-raw diet, avoid routine vaccinations, and use holistic therapies instead of conventional veterinary care.

We have four dogs and two cats. Pet hair is omnipresent in our lives, especially since housecleaning never seems to get very high on our list of priorities. However, we know enough other dog owners to know that we are not alone. With the possible exceptions of the short list of “non-shedding” breeds, anyone who allows dogs in the house (which is where, in our opinion, dogs belong!) has to deal with dog hair. We vacuum. We sweep. We brush. We cringe in embarrassment when we glance at our clothes in public and see the plethora of hairs that our clothes brushes missed.

So you want to adopt an older dog. Rescue a homeless hound. Save a life. Fantastic! Gone are the days when everyone wants to start out with a baby puppy – and that’s a good thing. In the last decade, as pet owners have become more responsible about spaying and neutering, shelters across the country have noticed a marked decrease in the numbers of puppies they receive. Instead, they now find that the preponderance of homeless dogs in their kennels are adolescents – six months to two years old – who haven’t received the training and direction they needed to become good canine citizens.

A long-time dog lover, Marci Boothe volunteers at the Santa Cruz (California) SPCA walking adoption dogs. She had assumed that her landlady wouldn’t approve of her keeping a dog in her small rental unit, so she got her “dog fix” by giving love and attention to shelter dogs. But then came Stella, a year-and-a-half-old Border Collie mix. The winsome young dog arrived at the SPCA in July of 1998.

As we were going to press with this issue, we received a report of a dog’s death due to ingestion of a small part...

Recently, I got a chance to work with a drug-sniffing dog who had been purchased about four months prior by my local police department....

the other to a small metal clip that fastens neatly to your belt loop or other handy ring. The clicker is still kept leashed and under control

We are quite late in publishing a few corrections and small announcements, so we’re taking this space to catch up. The corrections are most...

By volunteering at an animal shelter, you can directly increase the number of dogs that win" the contest of their lives. Shelters are almost always under-funded

Tucker, our six-year-old Cattle-Dog mix, loves to swim. Every morning when we walk the quarter-mile down our driveway with our four-pack of dogs to pick up the Chattanooga Times-Free Press, Tucker casts longing glances at the pond in our next-door-neighbor’s front yard. As long as we occasionally remind him to stay with us, he’s fine. But if we let our attention lapse for too long, especially if it’s a particularly warm day, a loud “Splash!” announces in no uncertain terms that Tucker has once again gone for an unauthorized swim. You would never know that Tucker used to hate the water, and that we had to make an effort to convince him to give recreational swimming a try.

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

We don’t generally “name names” when criticizing training techniques we don’t approve of; after all, it’s the methods, not the trainers who use them, that we want people to consider. But in this case, who the people are is important to the story. Many, many people are under the impression that there can’t possibly be a more peaceable trainer than a monk. And if monks wrote a book about dog training, wouldn’t you imagine it would advocate only nonviolent training techniques? But the Monks of New Skete do advocate the use of some physically forceful training methods, anathema to WDJ’s philosophies on training.