pitbullEmily

anyone have any suggestions for supplements or topical treatment for the seasonal very dry skin/shedding of my 2 pit bulls? I have always given fish oil capsules, but apparently they could use something else? thanks

[quote name='Seijun']Is it common for mixed breed dogs with no pit in them to be accused of being pits or part pit? ~Seij[/quote] In the Denver Post, you can count on it. You can count on them to make a big deal about aNY incident with any dog that might be a pit bull. When the pit bulls killed the lady last year, the Post screamed the story across the TOP HALF of the front page. Traditionally, that's the place newspapers put the most important story of the day. The Denver Post does NOT headline any of the 50 or so murders that occur in the city each year that way. (unless it's something sensational like JonBenet). They hate pit bulls.

PETA are despicable scum and the Holocaust comparisons are beyond tasteless. But I believe in free speech. PETA has the right to express their views (In fact, in this case, the expression of their speech is more likely to drive away potential supporters than attract them) and should have been allowed to hold their demonstration. In the US, the ACLU defended the right of Nazi's to march in Skokie IL, a location the Nazi's chose precisely because of a large population of Holocaust survivors.

teach her to call the police, since you seem to be reluctant to do it yourself! sorry that sounds bad... but seriously, this guy sounds dangerous and if nothing else, you need to be on record with them if his behavior escalates. You might also look into any self defense courses available to you (these deal not just with martial arts stuff you won't want to do, but with confidence and other protective issues). Check with your campus women's center, or ask the police.

[quote name='Edgar']First off I'm not trolling, second of all this is the first time an Aggressive dog has attacked me/Blitz.... I knew he was trouble right away and tried standing between him and Blitz yelling commands. The Pitbull was standing stiff, neck tense, posturing for a fight. The owner managed to call him away. I should have known better and left. ... He says sorry again, I continue throwing my ball like nothing happend. Blitz retrieves like nothing happend. Fortunately Blitz's confidence seems okay and nobody was hurt. It could have turned out very differently though. Irresponsible owners really really p*** me off. One of my best friends has an aggressive dog the difference is that it is never off leash around other strange dogs..[/quote] scary experience! It sounds like you handled it very well, except *I* would have left the park after the incident, just to make sure both me and my dog were calm and the pit bull and his clueless owner were completel gone. Dog parks can be trouble, and most especially almost all pit bulls don't belong in them.

[quote name='Net_Kitten']I personally have never tried the prong collar, but recently purchased a shock collar for my dobie. In doors shes easily trained..very food motivated. But watch out if she gets a few inches between the door and you, youll be off to the races. At first she was just running around the neighborhood and we could eventually catch her. Now she ventures off and crosses major roads :( The last time she crossed 3 times, ignoring all of my commands. I.../i][/quote] I'm not sure you were being fair to your dog. It doesn't sound like you ever taught her a "stay" or "come" command. Yet you expected her to obey in very challenging situations. That's not the best way, in my opinion, to build a relationship with your dog. Sure, you can now get her to obey, having "shocked" her. For some dogs, this kind of correction is not a problem. For others, it would be a real abuse of trust. So I don't think ecollars are the first place to start with 99% of dogs. I don't think prong collars are abusive, used properly... certainly no more abusive than head halter type set ups which many dogs absolutely hate. Clicker training (operant conditioning) is a fabulous way to train and build a relationship with your dog, for those who have the patience and commitment to stick to it. But I've never been convinced that it works for aversive situations ("no, you may NOT do that"). And most sensible clicker trainers don't believe in "purely positve/no correction" training

I was just looking at a Denver dog magazine. There's an ad for a "Dog friendly" apartment complex. The list of banned breeds is almost the same. Except you can have an airedale. But not a Weimeraner. WTF?????????????

[quote name='gentle_peace']I have a 4 yr old lab/border collie. ok she sits, stays, rolls over, lies down... what else? i need to keep training her as she is becoming less obedient these days. i need some relatively easy training exercises. any tips ???? :D[/quote] any kind of obedience/agility/herding/flyball etc class would be good to get involved with. Both those breeds need lots of hard exercise or they will go crazy... and make you crazy too! If you don't like the traditional tricks, take a look at a new book "BEYOND FETCH" by C. Coile

[quote name='ESSlover']Wow :o ! Three weeks for the whole she-bang! My goodness! We dog-sat for our friends last week, but it was odd, cause we kept calling her Mocha.....[/quote] My mom loves my dog Lulu (whom I've had for about 5 years now), but she still sometimes calls her "Sunny", the name of Lab owned by our next-door neighbors when I grew up. Sunny was a wonderful dog, but she died about 35 years ago... :o

why do we need pictures when we have so much of the real thing? Now, maybe if the picture had "smell o vision"... :silly:

[quote name='mouseatthebusstop']I want my meat killed in a humane way I will pick it up from the supermarket I do not agree with hunts- our MP has been trying to ban them in our area There are other ways of entertainment[/quote] You might want to examine your assumptions. Many slaughterhouse techniques are far from humane. A clean kill done in a fair chase hunt, with the animal used for food, leather, etc is at least as humane a death and is at least as moral. If you're not a vegetarian, you really can't argue against doing the killing yourself as opposed to buying meat neatly packaged in a way that distances you from the animal whose death sustains you. I personally don't hunt, but I know many people who do. Many of them are staunch environmentalists and care more about the animals they kill than many people who oppose hunting. Sadly, there are also the cretinous macho morons whose only interest is in mowing down God's creatures for blood lust and/or a trophy on the wall.

[quote name='science_doc']I... Anyway my point is that preditors like wolves don't really seem to enjoy that kind of close proximity to people. If you think you want them in all up close and personal I think you better get the cats, dogs, and children in off the streets first. How often do we hear stories of mountain lions killing people and pets in California? ...[/quote] mountain lions are extremely effective predators of deer. I actually think California has fewer problems with pest deer than folks in the midwest and east. While mountain lions have become a small problem in California as humans have increasingly invaded their habitat, they really are NOT a huge problem for people (less than dogs, to be honest) despite the few highly sensational cases of lion attacks.. As for pets, coyotes are probably a bigger cause of vanishing pets anyway.... they don't hesitate to come in close contact with people, while lions generally don't. Wolves are the other effective predator of deer and they are much much more elusive than either coyotes or lions. There are only a very very very few verified wolf attacks on humans in North America. The biggest threat to us and our animals is probably raccoons, since they carry rabies and are very bold/adaptable.

well, in the long term, absent extreme influences, wildlife populations do self-regulate. They ebb/flow in accordance with habitat and food availability as well as climatic conditions. This does not mean, of course, that populations are static. In the real world, humans constitute an extreme influence! Deer populations cannot "self regulate". For one thing, there are no natural predators in most places (certainly not enough to impact their populations). For another, white tail deer have adapted extremely well to human settlement and have reached pest levels in many places (like Canada geese). There's nothing "natural" about the population abundance of this species in rural/suburban areas. If there were no humans (or only native subsistence hunters) there wouldn't be any problems. There would actually probably be fewer deer. The consequence of not controlling deer population is... more fatal car accidents, more tick-borne diseases, etc. HOW to control deer is controversial, since they are living in heavily populated areas where hunting may not be safe. But this is yet another example of the biological illiteracy of PETA... as if we needed another one.

I don't know about those recall proofing skunks... I know that recall-proofing porcupines are ineffective... my girl is SURE she can figure out how to get at one despite a quilling... :evil:

[quote name='Sarahstaff']The laws dealing with rabies are pretty archaic, hence the mandatory quarantine even in cases like this where the reason for the bite is fairly obvious. ....[/quote] and the dog was (surely) vaccinated, making the possibility of rabies about 0% I assume

I'm so sorry for all of you. I hope your son won't be too scarred by this. We all need to heed the lesson here. When you have dogs that have demonstrated this level of hatred for each other, they must be separated at all times. No letting your guard down! It's possible to maintain this level of dog-household management, but it's certainly beyond what most people can deal with. again, my sympathies.

My Lulu has always known how to catch food... in fact we have several blue ribbons from biscuit tossing contests. :D :D Ozzy, OTOH, is of the "let it bonk me on the head" school of catch. There's actually a section in Coile's new book "Beyond Fetch" about how to teach your dog how to catch!

Steve Dale is great... he has his own show; I think out of Chicago? It will be awesome for you to be on it. I see he has an Animal Planet show... [url]http://animal.discovery.com/fansites/radio/more/more.html[/url]

[url]http://www.apbtconformation.com/merle.htm[/url] ok, I don't understand it at all.. just the conclusion: merle is not an APBT color

[quote name='__crazy_canine__']There was a link to this on the site from the google ads. [url=http://members.aol.com/Merlepitbulls]Platinum Kennels[/url] All of their males are merle and the females are mostly blues. All of them have blue noses except for a few. Another fad or what? :roll: Does anyone know how merle can be bred into a pit bull, like what colors can be bred to get it and does it occur naturally? I dont think it does but I have no idea. They are beautiful though, arent they?!?!?[/quote] my understanding is that it's genetically impossible for a purebred APBT or AST to be merle. Just another designer mutt to take advantage of a fad. The shocking thing is that someone posted on another board that a merle won a class at an ADBA show. Yes, the same morons who love to claim they're upholding the grand original breed.. and registering upwards of 200,000 dogs a year.

AP had a feature on them during the broadcast of the Harrisburg Dog Show the other night (they just got added to AKC?) all I can say is YIKES!!! those are drooly dog. The breeder said they were bred to look that way to scare people off. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[quote name='abker17'][quote]Sue Sternburg may not be perfect but, I have yet to see any better alternatives. :( [/quote] I don't think anyone here disagrees with temperment testing, surely it is something we NEED to do. BUT Sue's temperment testing, is pushing it. A lot. So many dogs that don't need to be put down are because many of her tests end up irritating the dog to the point where it has to lash out. And then she deems it "aggresive" and "unadoptable" after poking it with a rubber hand 20 times! What does she really expect? This lady is sick and needs to be stopped. [/quote][/quote] temperament testing used to weed out very damaged dogs and to identify solvable training issues ... yes! temperament testing used as an excuse to kill dogs... no! Too many shelters use tt as just another justification for their existence as euthanasia warehouses. Shelters should kill far fewer dogs, and especially not kill dogs that have minor behavior or health issues, or are too big, or too black, or the wrong breed or ... Shelters SHOULD do extensive outreach and funding for s/n to reduce the number of unwanted dogs, education of owners, basic training of dogs. They should stop whining about how they don't have enough time or money and do something positive. The number of pet animals killed in this country is a disgrace and something we should all be ashamed and embarrased about.

[quote name='Mutts4Me'][quote name='Seijun']You disagree with [b]all[/b] species preservation programs just because tigers cannot ever be fully reestablished due to habitat loss? I am not trying to be rude or anything, and I may have misunderstood your words, but it seems a bit 'selfish' to dis all species preservation programs because not all are able to be successful... It sounds to me that it is not the preservers who should be hated, but instead it is development and a failure to protect wildlife habitat that should be hated.[/quote] No, I'm sorry. I'm all for specied preservation programs where new land is developed for the animal to repopulate, such as the Mexican Wolf......ZOO "species preservation" programs are an excuse to breed animals because they bring in money, and the babies certainyl attract even more customers. ... ....[/quote] I agree with you to a very large degree, but I think you're overgeneralizing. The golden lion tamarin program looks like it might be working: the animals raised in captivity in zoos are being released back into the wild. There are some other captive breeding programs that you might consider zoo programs as well (California condor, blackfooted ferret) that look like they're working. The case with the great panda is highly questionable.. the pressure to take pandas out of China to use them as fundraisers is enormous. Whether or not there will be any degree of breeding success, and whether there will be wild pandas in the future is up in the air. Certainly, as you say, the issue of whether there is any habitat left for the animals to be re-released into is critical. If there are no tigers/pandas/condors/etc in the WILD, the world is a much lesser place. Sadly, the future for all the large predators and all species that have unique habitat requirements is exceedingly grim.

[quote name='Taurus and Jada'][quote name='sashagirl']I was born and raised in Florida... I have never seen snow in real life! :o[/quote] you poor , poor soul !! lol here you go! [...My dogs love the snow... I've got tons more pictures at home , but I'm at work right now. I'll post some more when I get home at 5... .[/quote] my little boy grew up in Texas and he's not so sure... [img]http://pic8.picturetrail.com/VOL258/1423320/3425724/42043970.jpg[/img] [img]http://pic8.picturetrail.com/VOL258/1423320/3425724/42044098.jpg[/img]

[quote name='Mutt_Lady']That makes five of us! K tears dolls to shreads without showing any sign of mercy. That heartless killer. :lol:[/quote] this dog will KILL children! [img]http://pic8.picturetrail.com/VOL258/1423320/2712445/36198925.jpg[/img]