The little bastards do it on purpose, just to scare us Our Gwen after £650 worth of needlework at the Vets
Waiting anxiously for his favourite hooman (my son) at the station……shortly to be followed by literally turning somersaults in delight, along with a cacophony of huffing and yelping and, sometimes, peeing. All of which is absolutely delightful in the confined space of a Mini!
Dogmatic head collars work well for us and our German Shepherd and Great Dane seem happy to wear them.
One of the chaps I see over the fields every morning was missing a dog (we call them the white caps because hes tall, has white hair and two pointers with matching docked white tails) and I made the rookie mistake of asking him why. Apparently his youngest one (no more than a year) ran out in the road yesterday and they lost him. Literally broke down in front of me. What on earth do you say to someone in that state? Nearly broke me yet alone him. Poor bastard I cant even begin to imagine the guilt either.
Jesus, that’s awful. Iggy runs in the road every now and again, which absolutely terrifies me. I can’t imagine what that guy is going through. Were the dogs siblings? Iggy is my first dog as an adult and before I got him, I thought my relationship with him would something like the those I’d had with the black lab we sort of timeshared with our neighbours when I was a kid, or the various cats I’d had over the years (ie: they were part of my life, I was fond of them and was sad but not heartbroken when they died), but nothing prepared me for the intensity of the bond we’ve formed. It’s like having a child, a best mate, a comedy machine and a counsellor, all rolled into one, but with an additional “specialness” as you’re connecting emotionally across a huge gulf as a result of belonging to different species. Tbh, if I’d known this in advance then I probably wouldn’t have got him because dogs live such short lives, even if they don’t meet with an accident along the way, that we start the clock on a ticking time bomb of grief the moment we bring them into our lives.
I don't know whether it is better or worse if they were tbh. Just last night I was at cricket practice along with Iggy (as he basically goes wherever I go unless there's a specific prohibition on dogs), and one of my teammates left the gate to the ground open. Iggy kept going over to that part of the field, but I just kept calling him back over rather than walking the 200m to go and close the gate, so there but for the grace of God go I. There's another dog in the village, a huge bear of a thing, a Newfoundland/Poodle cross, more or less the same age as Iggy that ran out of the same gate in 2021 and was hit by a car. Luckily as he's such a big lump, he "only" suffered a broken pelvis, and luckily, the car wasn't going very quickly despite it being on a section of road on the way out of the village, where although the speed limit is still 20mph, rat-running wankers treat it as if they've already reached the NSL sign a quarter of a mile further down, so it could have easily been fatal if the dog was smaller or the car was travelling faster. Lesson learned.
Really feel for the guy, havent lost any of my dogs yet but when one of my Dad's passed a few years ago did upset me, and I only saw it every few weeks And 100% spot on. Got more dogs than we know what to do with and they range from 9months to 9 years and the thought of losing any now is horrid. The 2 labs and beagle sit in here with me all day every day while I am working or are out in the garden together all the time, they do almost everything together and the though of that little family being broken up now scares me a bit
What are they? Mrs Cringe has just bought a medieval looking collar thing for our boisterous male. He pulls like buggery when going out for a walk but not too bad coming back. Cos he’s knackered coming back…. She’s determined to instill discipline in the daft bugger. He’s lovely- just full on…
Iggy is like that too but I’ve resigned myself to losing that particular battle of wills. Spaniels have a very strong tracking drive, so he’s either wanting to scout ahead in front of me or hang back to check out an interesting smell that’s caught his attention. Being an intact male probably doesn’t help either and I’ve been told by a few people that bitches make better gun dogs because the males can be a bit of a nightmare to train. He came from a shooting family and was bred to work (hence the legally docked tail, to reduce the likelihood of injuries when scrambling through thickets) and that’s probably why all 5 of the female puppies had been taken and there were 4 males remaining. Iggy was also the most confident of his litter mates, which has developed into a kind of hard-headedness (albeit a very sweet natured stubbornness) as he’s got older. For a while I tried a training technique one of my dog loving friends recommended, which was to just stop and wait every time he pulled - the aim being that eventually the penny would drop and he’d realise he’ll only get to where he wants to go if he goes at my pace. Wrong. After three weeks of it sometimes taking three quarters of an hour per day to walk the quarter mile to the country park or cricket field in 5 yard increments (and then back again), I realised he probably was never going to change and so I just put up with it now. On the other hand, he has got me pretty well trained, so if, for example, he wants some goat’s milk, he’ll noisily kick his drinking bowl around the kitchen until I oblige
https://www.dogmatic.org.uk/ They go on the dogs nose and round their neck, if they try to pull it turns their head towards you. We’ve found they work well. Our cat likes to hide and then take a swipe at the Great Dane as he passes, to get him to chase him. Very entertaining, but it means when we’re out the Dane is constantly looking for cats to chase.
A good few years ago we had a Springer, he was quite hard work so the wife insisted on getting a specialist round to help. First thing he said to us was it’s the owners need training not the dogs.
It’s a good job he doesn’t live around here as a lot of the cats round this way are semi-feral farm cats and as hard as nails, so he’d be in for a nasty surprise. Tbh, I’d back most cats against most dogs in a scrap. My Suzie, the tiny one-eyed, runt of the litter, hand-reared midget moggie who almost died from cat flu when she was a kitten, regularly used to take on the local dogs, and a guy even complained to my dad once when she’d attacked his German Shepherd or Rottweiler (he had one of each, but I can’t recall which one she beat up).
