Category archives: All Things Dog

Almost all dogs are better suited for the cold than humans – it’s just the way they’ve evolved. However, some breeds are better suited for the cold, rain, snow and ice than others. These breeds historically served a purpose that had to do with cold, nasty weather, climates or conditions.

Three breed groups feature several dogs that tend to fall into the winter-loving category and have some unique features that help them adapt to cold climates – namely double coats (those featuring an insulating under layer and weather-resistant outer layer) that were developed to repel the elements.

It’s something to keep in mind if you’re considering a new dog. These dogs tend to be happy and at home in colder temperatures, and if you live a hot area (like the desert southwest) they might not fare as well as in more northern climes or higher elevations where cooler weather is more prevalent.

Retrievers

Breeds such as the Labrador, Chesapeake and golden retriever were developed to fetch fishermen’s nets and hunters’ waterfowl from rough, icy seas.

As such, retrievers tend to have an outer coat that is slightly oily, which helps repel water while trapping air and body heat while submersed ...

Great trainers don't just run drills or take their dogs into a field and let them chase birds. Great trainers start each session with a goal and specific task to accomplish. They set up drills and scenarios that help teach the dog bits and pieces of a larger concept. By micro-focusing on areas that might prove problematic to the dog, they can anticipate trouble and administer well-timed corrections, praise or avoid the issue altogether.

If you're not anticipating how your dog is going to behave to a situation, you're not really training; you're just reacting. If your dog makes a mistake because you didn't anticipate the problem, you're effectively teaching him to do it wrong. To train after reaching that point requires that you correct the dog to teach him that's not what you wanted.

Sometimes negative reinforcement is the way to go and what is required, but to wholly rely on it is not only lazy, it's unfair to your dog.

With a balance of positive and negative reinforcement properly administered, you can teach your dog how to react to very complex scenarios. And, as George Hickox and Dan Irhke both pointed out at a ...

There are few sure bets in the NFL or the Super Bowl. Calls are blown, favorites lose or the national anthem can be flubbed. When it comes to the biggest bets however, Super Bowl commercials are the riskiest around. But the power of a puppy is undeniable, as was clearly illustrated during this year’s championship game.

At around $4 million per 30-second commercial spot, an advertiser’s big gamble can vault their branding into the stratosphere (at least in the short term) with a winning commercial. On the other end of the spectrum, with that much money spent just on air time (and not counting production costs), heads can (and probably do) roll when a commercial misses its mark.

While it’s anyone’s guess as to what will resound with the Super Bowl audience from year to year, and in turn be fodder for water-cooler talk on Monday and go viral online (imprinting that branding, if done correctly, for days after the game), there seems to be no denying that puppies are a safe bet to at least garner the “awww” factor and vote and to keep a media buyer’s head from being kicked across the marketing department’s floor.

This year, Budweiser ...

Since early in canine domestication, humans have been selecting individual dogs with desirable behavioral and physical traits to be founder breeding animals for the hundreds of dog breeds we have today. Early on, the traits selected for were often of great importance for their role as working animals. With time, as the world of dog fanciers took shape, dogs with particular physical traits of aesthetic value began to be the chosen bearers of future generations regardless of their ability to work. Unfortunately however, there are multiple examples of selected physical traits that are significant risk factors for disease.

One important example is a disorder seen in Rhodesian ridgeback (RR) dogs known as a dermoid sinus that has been associated with the characteristic “ridge” trait in the skin overlying the spine. In 2007, a large genetic duplication on canine chromosome 18 was identified as the underlying genetic cause of the ridge in this breed.² Unfortunately, the same genetic duplication responsible for ridge formation has also been found to predispose RRs to formation of dermoid sinuses.^1,2

Dermoid sinuses are tubular to round shaped cavitations in the skin often filled with hair and keratin that are present at birth. It ...

You can run drills all day long, day after day, and you will produce a hunting, obedience, agility or whatever other kind of dog you're interested in producing. It's not until you understand why you're running them and what effect they, and any subsequent corrections or praise, have on your dog that you start to really become a trainer. Plugging along from Point A to Point B and beyond will build a foundation for your hunting dog. It's vitally important that your dog have that foundation to build upon, and it's also one of the biggest problems amateurs have with training.

We get excited to "get to the fun stuff" and skip all the small steps that teach a dog to correctly carry out that fun stuff. When someone says their dog doesn't do something correctly or only does X, Y or Z incorrectly, you can almost always bet that the issue was caused by glossing over or altogether skipping a step in their foundation.

However, just plugging along and running drills, exercises, obedience and applying praise, corrections and the like in a more or less ordered sense isn't what it's all about ...

There’s generally two camps when it comes to training: the positive-only camp and the aversive camp. Positive-only trainers eschew any use of punishment and use rewards to motivate, reward and shape behaviors. The aversive camp, in an overly simple explanation, tends to shape behaviors by punishing, in one form or another, the wrong behaviors – which doesn’t necessarily preclude rewarding proper behaviors. This is simple carrot-and-stick training: do this correctly, get a treat; do that incorrectly get punished.

Chad Culp, a certified dog trainer in California, does a great job outlining the carrot-and-stick approach to training. However, he takes it further and discusses a study done with human children (you can read it here http://www.thrivingcanine.com/beyond_carrots_sticks). The basic premise being that continual rewarding reduces, even destroys, intrinsic motivation (which is very interesting) – the child, or dog, no longer wants to work for the pure joy of it; they hold out for a reward. This has been one knock from the aversive side of the aisle: that sooner or later that cookie isn’t enough of a reward to counter the desire to carry out the undesirable act.

The knock on aversive training is that it can destroy ...

Back in my younger days I enjoyed skiing. A day on the mountain was filled with fresh, cold air and adrenaline rushes as my buddies and I pushed each other to do better. I used the mantra (sometimes it doubled as an excuse): "if you're not falling, you're not skiing hard enough."

The same might be said of training your dog: if you're not making adjustments, corrections or changes to your dog's performance, you might not be training hard enough. You might just be practicing. Now, I say might because with dogs it's very subjective and depends upon what you've already done with the dog.

If you haven't taught the dog what you expect and then suddenly throw him into a scenario that he has to figure out by trial and error, then corrections, be them verbal, physical or via e-collar, are woefully unfair.

However, if you've gone through the teaching phase, the dog understands what you're doing and what's expected, then pushing him to do better by challenging him mentally and giving him every opportunity to make the correct decisions is training the dog.

If you're simply running ...

Like many scientists, I despise conventional wisdom. Given that I’m a veterinarian, this is especially true when it comes to medical conventional wisdom; the type of beliefs I remember many adults from my childhood relaying as fact that, I too, held as true for many years. Despite what my family told me in youth, I’ve since learned that shaving my body hair didn’t actually make it thicker, that reading in low light didn’t hurt my eyesight, and that vitamin C didn’t cure my cold. Nearly every day you can find postings on social media that appear to be based on fact, but are actually pieces of 21^st century conventional wisdom. One such Facebook posting recently struck near and dear to my veterinary heart. The posting was a link to an article discussing the ways dog ownership can improve our health. After reading the story, I decided to do some digging to see if there was science behind the claims being made. Since childhood, I had heard that pet ownership was good for our health. I heard it lowered blood pressure, prevented heart attacks, and otherwise improved our quality of life. But is it true?

Finding good evidence to support ...

The first week of December saw an arctic front blanket much of the country with subzero temperatures, snow and ice. Travelers were stranded in airports for days, household pipes were frozen and children left the house in multi-hued layers of clothing. It’s only December, and there’s a high likelihood of another arctic blast or two hitting before the end of February.

While it’s natural to protect our children from the discomfort of freezing temperatures, our dogs feel the temperature change, too. When it comes to canines, there are a few simple precautions you can take to protect them at home and in the field.

Provide proper shelter: If your dog spends his day outside (and hunting dogs should spend some time outdoors to acclimate to dropping temps), he needs shelter from the elements – snow, rain, wind, sun, heat and cold. A dog house with insulation of some sort is all that’s required. Canines have evolved to keep themselves warm, so just giving them a spot to get off the cold ground, some blankets or hay to nest in and a roof over their head is all that is required.

You can augment the basics with heat sources such as mats ...

Seeing a dog with a distended stomach, unproductive attempts at vomiting, weakness, and rapid, strained breathing is sure to strike fear into the heart of any dog breeder or owner. These classic signs of gastric dilatation and volvulus (GDV) or “bloat” as it is colloquially known, are the worst enemy of anyone who has experienced this traumatic, life-threatening condition that often affects otherwise healthy dogs. The significance of the heartbreak caused by this disease has been made obvious to me by the numerous clients that have inquired about genetic testing for this condition at Paw Print Genetics. Though many suspects have been implicated in the cause of GDV in our dogs, unfortunately no single risk factor, including a genetic mutation, can adequately explain the lion’s share of cases at this point. With an estimated 21-24% chance of large and giant breed dogs developing GDV within their lifetime (Broome and Walsh 2003), it is no surprise that people would love to find an easy, low-cost and predictable way to prevent this disease.

GDV is a condition marked by rotation of the stomach on the upper end near the esophagus. This rotation closes off the opening between the stomach and esophagus, thus ...