Thanks to a veterinarian friend of mine for giving me this article to use. She wrote it but didn’t want a link or credit. Thanks, friend, you know who you are! This is not the most cheerful reading but I offer it in hopes that it will help somebody’s dog, maybe yours. — Rosana

The holidays can provide some dangers to dogs. Here are several, and what to do about them.

Snow Globes and Antifreeze
There have been rumors for many years that snow globes contain antifreeze, and if they break and a dog licks up the liquid, they can be poisoned. Read the rest of this entry

It was almost dark when I stepped out into our fenced back yard to call our Rottweiler Lola for dinner. LarryDog was already chowing down in the kitchen. Usually if Lola is outside at that time, she is right near the back door, but not that day. I called. No Lola. I walked around the yard and discovered that our back gate was open. No telling how long she had been gone. Calling didn’t bring her. Lost dog.

Okay, take a deep breath, then another. She hasn’t been loose since we moved here. In fact, she has never been loose in the nearly four years we have had her, other than when doing a little off-leash work in the neighborhood.

My husband took our car and began cruising our neighborhood. I grabbed a flashlight and a warm jacket and went back outside to resume calling. “Lola! DOGGIES! Lola! DOGGIES!” Read the rest of this entry

We moved from Mexico back to the U.S. back in April, and I blogged about the long road trip with dogs and cats in June. Since then, this blog has been filled with guest posts that I had lined up before we left Mexico, and we’ve been unpacking boxes, tiling floors, and getting settled.

Now, it’s back to blogging myself. I’ve missed it, glad to be back! Have a lot of ideas for the fall. Books I’ve been reading on dog training, some deeper understanding of clicker training, and much more.

We moved back to to the same town in Colorado where we had lived for 10 years before moving to Mexico for about 5 years. Luckily, when we arrived with our dogs and cats, we had already bought a house from a friend. It’s got about half an acre of land — high desert with a lot of yucca, a well-defended plant with sharp spikes that are painful to human ankles and dog paws and legs.

Still, it’s a yard! Read the rest of this entry

I’ve wriiten before about coprophagia. Here are a couple of my blog posts: Does Your Dog Eat Poop? was followed by Dogs Eating Poop: More on this Fascinating Topic.

But can I leave well enough alone? Not when I found a guest article by one of my favorite dog writers… and I like his point that the biggest problem with this habit is how disgusting we human find it.

Yuck! My Dog Eats His Own Poo!

By Aidan Bindoff

Coprophagia – that’s what vets and animal behaviorists call it when dogs eat their own faeces. To us, it’s possibly the most disgusting thing a dog can do. Is Coprophagia harmful? What can we do to stop it? Will it make our dogs sick? Does it mean that something is missing from their diet?

Unfortunately we don’t really know what causes Coprophagia. There could be many reasons. Some dog owners report that their dog is more likely to eat their own stool after a change in diet – usually to a processed food with preservatives. Owners of dogs who eat their own stool can find that dietary changes may end the habit, particularly changes to a higher quality or more biologically appropriate diet. Read the rest of this entry