Tag Archives: Dogs

Dog Behaviors, Triggers, and Training

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Are You Making This Mistake When Your Pet Misbehaves?

 

Story at-a-glance

  • If your dog has a problem behavior, the first thing to do is identify what’s triggering it.
  • The next step is to figure out how to avoid the trigger so the problem doesn’t escalate (and so no one, including your pet, gets hurt).
  • Once your dog isn’t being triggered and he’s not responding from a place of fear, anxiety or aggression, he’ll be more receptive to behavior modification therapy.
  • Positive reinforcement behavior modification is the only effective way to alter your dog’s negative response to triggers. Punishment has no place in changing a dog’s behavior.
  • Setting realistic expectations for things your pet may and may never be comfortable doing will help you accept and adapt to your canine companion’s limitations.

 

By Dr. Becker

Most dog owners are at some point faced with a problem behavior in their otherwise adorable four-legged buddy.

When a troubling behavior arises in your pet, the first thing you should do is make an appointment with your vet to rule out an underlying physical cause for the behavior.

Pain can create or exacerbate undesirable behavior in animals.

So can a metabolic disorder, which is any disruption of the conversion of food to energy at the cellular level.

Examples of metabolic disorders include diabetes, Addison’s disease, Cushing’s syndrome, and hypo- or hyperthyroidism.

If a health problem is identified, it should of course be treated.

Only then will you know whether you’re dealing with a true behavior problem or behavior resulting from a physical cause.

Once medical problems are either ruled out or resolved, undesirable behaviors can be addressed.

Identifying the Problem Behavior and Its Triggers

The next step is to identify the problem behavior, how often it occurs, how severe it is, and what triggers it.

Let’s say your large dog gets very excited when guests come to visit and jumps up on them as his way of saying hello.

  • Problem behavior: jumping up on people.
  • Frequency: every time someone unfamiliar comes to the door.
  • Severity: dog cannot be restrained; guests are pawed, scratched, licked, in danger of being tripped or knocked down.
  • Trigger: visitors to your home.

Next Step: Avoiding the Triggers

Initially what you must do in a situation like the one above — since you can’t remove the trigger — is remove your dog from the triggering situation. This means you’ll need to put your dog in another room or the backyard before you open the door to guests.

This strategy as a first step helps your guests stay safe and stops the problem behavior from escalating.

The ultimate goal is to help your dog extinguish problem behaviors. But behavior modification training must be done when your pet is calm, because dogs don’t learn well in a highly aroused state. Initial behavior modification efforts should take place outside the presence of the triggering event.

In the meantime, your focus should be on avoiding the triggers that provoke your dog’s problem behavior so you can move forward safely and sanely with positive reinforcement behavior modification techniques.

Trigger Avoidance with Aggressive Dogs

If your pet is aggressive toward other dogs, places where lots of dogs gather should be avoided.

When you walk a dog-aggressive dog, try to steer clear of areas where there are other dogs, and pick times of day when few dogs are being walked. Find places to walk where you’re not apt to encounter other dogs. And make sure your own energy is calm and relaxed on walks, because your dog will pick up on your mood.

When you do come upon another dog, create space between your dog and the other one, and keep your dog in control. Head collars can help, and avoid retractable leashes. Use a set-length leash for improved control.

If your dog is aggressive toward you or other family members, the first order of business is to take common-sense steps to prevent injury to the humans involved.

Identifying which situations seem to trigger your pet’s aggressiveness is important. If your dog is aggressive at meal time, she should be fed in a quiet spot, and needless to say, she should not be disturbed while eating.

If she’s aggressive when awakened, don’t allow her to snooze on furniture, and if you need to wake her, call her from a distance.

If her aggression appears during a particular game you play with her, avoid the game.

If your dog is aggressive toward visitors, your first priority is to keep guests safe. Secure your dog in another area before allowing visitors into your home or yard. If you have a lot of visitors or your dog is hard to catch, leave a leash either by the door or on your pet to improve your control over the situation.

Trigger Avoidance with a Territorial Dog

If your dog snarls, growls or barks excessively looking out a window or door, or from behind your backyard fence, you’ll need to block either his visual or physical access.

Close the blinds, close the door, or restrict your pet’s access to the room or the fenced area where he becomes territorial.

If you have more than one dog and they fight, it’s often a territorial behavior problem. Separate the dogs at meal time and maintain control over toys and any other triggers you’ve identified.

You might also choose to use leashes or head collars at home to have better control when a fight starts.

Managing a Destructive Dog

First, remove all temptations (also known as avoiding triggers). If your dog gets into the garbage, place it behind a cabinet door with a lock or in another hard-to-reach spot.

If your dog counter surfs, make sure no food is left out. If she chews up shoes, items of clothing or other belongings, make sure she doesn’t have access to those things.

Provide your pet with plenty of exercise, attention, and toys that are mentally stimulating.

Crate train your dog and tuck her in there when there’s no one available to supervise her behavior.

If she’s eliminating indoors, review and implement house-training techniques.

Managing Your Own Response to Problem Behaviors

When your dog is actively engaged in a problem behavior, your response must be calm and controlled.

Try to remove your pet from the situation if it’s safe to do so, or remove the trigger. Failing that, calmly try to redirect your dog’s attention with a command he normally responds to, or attempt to distract him with a food treat, a favorite toy, a walk or a ride in the car.

Remember, you’re only using these diversionary tactics to avert potential disaster. Doing so at every turn will only reinforce the behavior you ultimately hope to extinguish.

All you want to do in the heat of the moment is not make the situation worse. When your dog is highly aroused, upset and reacting with undesirable behavior, it is not the time to attempt to train him.

Punishment Creates More Problems and Solves Nothing

If you find the evidence of a problem behavior after the fact, for example, a puddle on the carpet or a shoe chewed beyond recognition, the only productive thing to do is clean up the mess and vow to avoid the trigger in the future. Ask yourself how your dog was left unsupervised long enough to relieve herself on the floor or destroy footwear, and decide what steps you’ll take to avoid the problem next time.

Most importantly, you never want to respond to your dog’s undesirable behavior with aggression or punishment. Punishing your dog after the fact for a behavior you didn’t see happen can quickly turn her into a sneaky piddler or destroyer of belongings.

Being aggressive and punishing with a dog in a highly aroused, reactive state is a recipe for disaster. This type of response can cause the dog’s behavior to escalate, resulting in injury to one or both of you.

Punishing your dog can increase his anxiety, fear and aggressiveness, while making no change in his behavior. It can also sometimes stop only what you see on the outside, without improving your pet’s underlying emotional state. Often the result is a problem behavior that appears randomly, giving you no opportunity for trigger avoidance.

With all that said, you also don’t want to respond in a comforting way to a problem behavior. Your dog can easily mistake comforting words and touch for praise, which increases the likelihood he’ll continue to perform the undesired behavior.

The Goal of Trigger Avoidance and Control

The goal in managing your pet’s problem behavior is to keep it from escalating while you work with your dog toward a more permanent solution.

One of the main goals of positive reinforcement behavior therapy is to change the dog’s underlying emotional state. Once your pet is no longer aggressively aroused and full of fear, she is open to learning different responses.

If you feel changing your dog’s behavior is something you need help with, I recommend a consultation with a certified animal behavior specialist.

There are also some excellent online resources for dog parents who are looking for canine behavior and training tips. A few of my favorites include:

Setting Realistic Expectations

to read more, go to:   http://healthypets.mercola.com/sites/healthypets/archive/2012/01/05/how-to-get-the-wellmannered-dog-your-family-deserves.aspx?e_cid=20120115_SNL_TPA_1

Communicating with Canines

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Clever Canines: Dogs Can ‘Read’ Our Communication Cues

Joseph Castro, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 05 January 2012 Time: 12:01 PM ET
dog, pet, puppy

Dogs can understand our intent to communicate with them and are about as receptive to human communication as pre-verbal infants, a new study shows.

Researchers used eye-tracking technology to study how dogs observed a person looking at pots after giving the dogs communicative cues, such as eye contact and directed speech. They found that the dogs’ tendency to follow the person’s gaze was on par with that of 6-month-old infants.

The study suggests that dogs have evolved to be especially attuned to human communicative signals, and early humans may have selected them for domestication particularly for this reason, the researchers said.

Other scientists are excited that the eye-tracking method has been successfully adapted for dogs. “This opens many new opportunities in studying dog cognition,” said Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who was not involved in the research.

Communicative Intent

“The research was motivated by the infant scientific literature,” said study first author Erno Teglas, an infant psychologist at the Central European University in Hungary. The researchers essentially conducted the same experiment with dogs that other scientists did with infants in 2008.

For their study, Teglas and his colleagues tracked the eye movementsof 16 untrained adult dogs during two different trials. The dogs watched a series of movies in which a woman turned her attention toward one of two identical containers — one on her left and one on her right — after addressing the dogs in an “ostensive” or “non-ostensive” manner.

Ostensive signals, Teglas explained, convey the intention of communication. “You’re saying to the dog: ‘You are addressed and not someone else, and now I am going to tell you something that’s relevant or important to you,’” he told LiveScience.

To convey her intent to communicate in the first trial, the woman in the video made eye contactwith the dogs and then said, “Hi dog!” in a high-pitch, motherly tone (or “doggerly tone,” as Teglas describes it). In the second, non-ostensive, trial, the woman didn’t look at the dogs at all and said, “Hi dog,” in a low-pitch tone, as if she were speaking to another adult.

The researchers found that the dogs spent a similar amount of time looking toward the woman and scanning her face in both trials. However, the dogs spent more time looking at the same container as the woman in the ostensive trials compared with the non-ostensive trials.

The results indicate that, like infants, dogs are sensitive to cues that signal a person’s intent to communicate useful information, Teglas said, though it’s unclear if certain breeds are better at reading communicative signals than others.

A special adaptation

Kaminski says that the study fits in with other research (including her own) showing that dogs are aware of the “intentional dimension of communication,” a skill that may be a special adaptation unique to dogs.

“There is no other species which is so responsive to communicative cues coming from humans,” Kaminski wrote in an email to LiveScience. “Not even apes, as humans’ closest living relatives, have the same sensitivity to human communication.”

Teglas notes that previous research has shown that wolves, dogs’ closest living relatives, are not as adept as dogs at following human gestures to find food or other rewards (in fact, puppies will do better than adult wolves, unless the wolves were specially trained).

One question still remaining, Teglas said, is which communicative cue — eye contact or directed speech — is more important. “One should think that one of the cues might be more relevant,” he said. “There might even be different kinds of animals that respond to different kinds of cues.”

The research was published today (Jan. 5) in the journal Current Biology.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/17763-dogs-communication-intent.html

Pooches with PTSD

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PTSD Diagnosed Among Military Dogs

Ptsd Dogs

First Posted: 12/ 2/11 02:31 PM ET Updated: 12/ 2/11 07:57 PM ET

Now that military dogs are taking on a larger role in combat, they’re also taking on more of the risks that come with going to war, including developing post-traumatic stress disorder.

The New York Times reports that more than 5 percent of the approximately 650 deployed military dogs are developing some form of canine PTSD. While the diagnosis is still being debated, some veterinarians are prescribing agressive treatment plans, which can include Xanax or other anti-anxiety drugs.

“It really is difficult, because once the dog experiences these traumatic explosions, it’s the same as the troops,” Army Lt. Col. Richard A. Vargus, chief of the law enforcement branch at CENTCOM told the Military Times in September. “Some dogs move right through it and it doesn’t affect them. Some dogs, it takes some retraining, and some dogs just refuse to work.”

Like humans, military dogs exhibit a range of changes in temperaments when they develop PTSD. Some become aggressive, others retreat. But because dogs can’t express what the problem is, soldiers can be put at risk if their partner simply stops doing his job without warning.

“If the dog is trained to find improvised explosives and it looks like it’s working, but isn’t, it’s not just the dog that’s at risk,” Dr. Walter F. Burghardt Jr., chief of behavioral medicine at the Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base. told the Times. “This is a human health issue as well.”

And searching for such devices has become a key responsibility for military dogs. Even after spending six years and nearly $19 billion on experimenting with innovative ways to detect bombs, the Pentagon admitted in 2010 that its most sophisticated technology was no match for a dog’s nose, Wired.com reported.

The number of active duty dogs has increased to 2,700, from 1,800 in 2001, according to theTimes.

“Electronic equipment is great in the laboratory, but out on the battlefield, you can’t beat the dogs,” Bill Childress,
manager of the Marine Corps working dog program told the Los Angeles Times.

One such dog, Gina — who searched for explosives in Iraq — appeared to have left the playful part of her personality behind when she came home. Gina developed into a fearful German shepherd who avoided people and hid under furniture, according to theAssociated Press.

“She showed all the symptoms and she had all the signs,” Master Sgt. Eric Haynes, the kennel master at Peterson Air Force Base, told the news outlet. “She was terrified of everybody and it was obviously a condition that led her down that road.”

She gradually improved thanks to a healthy dose of walks with friendly people and a gradual reintroduction to military noises.

Just as physicians have yet to find a surefire way to treat PTSD among humans, so too are veterinarians weighing a wide range of options when it comes to helping their canine patients, according to The New York Times. Some focus on exercise and gentle obedience training, others go the more aggressive route and prescribe medications and counterconditioning.

But offering dogs the same innovative treatments that their human counterparts get, doesn’t guarantee a full recovery, Nicholas Dodman, head of the animal behavior program at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine told the Associated Press.

“It’s a fact that fears once learned are never unlearned,” he said.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/ptsd-on-the-rise-for-mili_n_1125925.html?ref=impact

Bowser Beer for Dogs

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OK, so maybe your pooch likes to hang out on the couch and watch the game, now there is something for the thirsty guy:

 Bowser Beer For Dogs Earns World Record

First Posted: 11/8/11 06:49 PM ET Updated: 11/8/11 06:49 PM ET

If ever there was an achievement that deserved a toast, a beer for dogs would certainly be it.

And the makers of Bowser Beer, a brand brewed specifically for pooches, have double the cause to enjoy a little hair of the dog: Their achievement has been officially as honored as the first beer for dogs by World Records Academy, an online database of offbeat achievements.

Bowser Beer, which unlike human beer has no hops, no carbonation and no alcohol, has been around since 2007, but the honor still gives spokeswoman Jenny Brown a reason to hoist a glass in celebration — even as she’s trying to comprehend the complete magnitude of having official recognition for making the first beer specifically for dogs.

“I’m surprised it didn’t show up in my Google alerts,” she told HuffPost Weird News when informed of the honor.

The concept of a beer brewed for dogs sounds potentially dangerous since hops, alcohol and carbonation are all bad for canine tummies, but Brown insists her pooch pilsners and labrador lagers are safe for dogs and their owners.

“Hops are toxic, so our beer is flavored with a sweet malt barley,” she said. “It’s human grade, which is good because some people drink it by accident.”

The beer is currently made near Phoenix, but the whole brouhaha first began four years ago when Brown was living in Washington, D.C., and created some pretzel treats for some dogs for a holiday party.

After so many customers scooped them up, she decided to offer them at a Pet Expo. Then it hit her, “What goes better with pretzels than beer?”

The obvious answer was “nothing,” so Brown and family brewed up a beef-and-malt-barley-flavored non-alcoholic beverage that she gave to her dogs to sample.

After four prototypes, there was a clear winner and that became the basis of Bowser Beer. Since that auspicious beginning, Brown and her brewing brood have added a chicken flavor called “Cock-A-Doodle Brew.”

Bowser Beer is currently available in more than 40 states and Brown has a team of taste-testing terriers — among other breeds — to ensure quality control.

“Some dogs like it straight from the bottle, others like it over food and others like it frozen,” she said.

Although Brown makes sure to inform potential customers that her hound hooch won’t get schnauzers soused, she admits some people are disappointed by that.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, I’d like to get my dog drunk,’ and I say, ‘But who’s going to walk you home?'” she said. “There was one guy who told me, ‘My dog prefers double malt scotch to single,’ and I thought, ‘How sad that he knows the difference.'”

for the video, go to from whence the article came(th):   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/08/cheers-bowser-beer-first-beer-for-dogs_n_1071762.html?ref=weird-news

New Directions in Animal Rescue

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Soren Petersen

Design Research Ph.D.; Author, Profit from Design

Creativity in Animal Rescue

Posted: 10/18/11 12:09 PM ET
2011-10-03-MarysiaWojcikanimalbehaviorist.JPG
Co-written with Marysia Wojcik, Animal trainer and behaviorist

Animal abandonment is on the rise and many blame the current recession that has resulted in people losing their homes and dumping their animals at shelters or even worse leaving them tied to a tree in a deserted back yard. Few of these people are heartless, most simply felt desperate and out of options. In 2008, at least 20,000 dogs and cats were euthanized in Los Angeles shelters alone, at a huge cost to the taxpayers.

Animal rescue groups shoulder the brunt of this work and these dedicated, passionate folk invest all of their time sitting crunched over their computers every night attempting to find adequate boarding facilities, foster parents, donors and more volunteers. For many, their rescue work ends only hours before they go to their daytime jobs. At times, these well-meaning individuals go down with the ship; some become mentally ill and turn into animal hoarders themselves. What are the human, animal and financial costs of all this madness?

Using social-media, our design research team reached out to animal lovers for creative ideas in dealing with the growing issue of animals being abandoned to shelters. We challenged the creative community, to come up with innovative new ideas to address this issue and spark the creative juices. During one month, we moderated the discussion and logged in more than 50 suggestions.

These ideas were evaluated together with Marysia Wojcik, an animal trainer and behaviorist in South Pasadena, California with over a decade of experience in animal rescue and public animal policies. Here are the top five ideas that were gleaned from the creative community:

1) Change people’s beliefs, values and behavior towards animals through music or perhaps a documentary highlighting the animal’s contribution to society.

2) Create billboards on animal issues that appeal to inner city youth and promote shelter adoptions and the control of animal fighting and breeding.

3) Introduce empathetic courses on animal ethics for local grade schools.

4) Support local state and federal politicians who are humane animal advocates and who oppose “breed profiling” laws.

5) Create a shelter environment that is pleasant and welcoming for both people and animals in order to encourage adoptions as well as volunteers.

Please help us to generate more creative ideas for changing the way animals are treated in our society and over the next two weeks, we will vote on these ideas and look for ways of implementing them.

Instead of Dr Demento’s, lament that “Dead puppies aren’t any fun,” let the theme for this endeavor be “live puppies take responsibility, but are also loads of fun.”

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soren-petersen/animal-rescue_b_992954.html

On the Domestication of Dogs

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Ancient Dog Skull Shows Early Pet Domestication

33,000-year-old fossil suggests dogs arose in multiple places, study says.

The skull of a domesticated canine.

The skull of the fossil dog found in Siberia.

Photograph courtesy Yaroslav Kuzmin, PLoS ONE

Christine Dell’Amore   National Geographic News  Published August 19, 2011

It took 33,000 years, but one Russian dog is finally having its day.

The fossilized remains of a canine found in the 1970s in southern Siberia’s Altay Mountains (see map) is the earliest well-preserved pet dog, new research shows.

Dogs—the oldest domesticated animals—are common in the fossil record up to 14,000 years ago. But specimens from before about 26,500 years ago are very rare. This is likely due to the onset of the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets are at their farthest extent during an ice age.

With such a sparse historical record, scientists have been mostly in the dark as to how and when wolves evolved into dogs, a process that could have happened in about 50 to a hundred years.

“That’s why our find is very important—we have a very lucky case,” said study co-author Yaroslav Kuzmin, a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.

In the case of the Russian specimen, the animal was just on the cusp of becoming a fully domesticated dog when its breed died out.

(See dog-evolution pictures.)

Dogs Arose at Multiple Sites?

Kuzmin and colleagues recently used radiocarbon dating to examine the skull and jaw of the Russian dog in three independent laboratories. Each lab confirmed the fossil’s age at around 33,000 years old.

Burnt twigs also found at the site, known as Razboinichya Cave, suggest that hunter-gatherers used the space for something, and it’s likely the dog was their pet before its death from unknown causes, Kuzmin said.

Cold temperatures and nonacidic soil in the cave likely kept the dog’s remains from completely decaying, he added.

The team compared the Russian dog fossils with the bones of wild wolves, modern wolves, domesticated dogs, and early doglike canids that lived before 26,500 years ago.

The results showed that the dog—which probably looked like a modern-daySamoyed—most closely resembled fully domesticated dogs from Greenland in size and shape. That’s not to say the two dog types are related, though, since the new study didn’t run DNA analysis.

Because it wasn’t fully domesticated, the Russian dog retained some traits from its ancestors—namely wolf-like teeth. But the animal bore no other resemblance to ancient or modern wolves or to dog breeds from elsewhere in Russia, Kuzmin and colleagues found.

The discovery suggests that this dog began its association with humans independently from other breeds, which would mean that dog domestication didn’t have a single place of origin—contrary to some DNA evidence, the study said.

Curious Wolves Went to the Dogs

In general, dogs likely became domesticated when curious wolves began to hang around Stone Age people, who left butchered food remnants littering their camps, according to study co-author Susan Crockford, an anthropologist and zooarchaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada.

This phenomenon occurred in Europe, the Middle East, and China, according to the study, published July 28 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Animals that were more comfortable around humans underwent changes in their growth rates—probably regulated by hormones—that eventually changed their reproductive patterns, sizes, and shapes, turning them into dogs, Crockford said by email.

For example, dogs became smaller, developed wider skulls, and gave birth to bigger litters than wolves, she said.

“The somewhat curious and less fearful ‘first founders’ became even more so as they interbred amongst themselves,” Crockford said.

 

to read more, go to:    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110819-dogs-wolves-russia-domestication-animals-science-evolution/

Dogs Doin’ The “SHAKE”

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Sit. Shake a Paw. Now Just Shake.

By KERRI MACDONALD

Before she begins a photo shoot, the fine-art photographer Carli Davidson spends time getting to know her models.

“I have my dialogue,” said Ms. Davidson, 30. “I want to talk to them before I get a portrait so I get a sense of the person.”

Ms. Davidson spends very little time working with models of the “person” variety these days. The subjects of her ongoing project “Shake” are not perfect. They’re not entirely graceful. They tend to drool.

Since photographer and subject can’t necessarily converse with one another, Ms. Davidson plays with each one before its 15 minutes of fame. The shake, when it comes, is usually provoked by a squirt of water.

It doesn’t always work. Models can, after all, be divas. “It’s not something that you have a lot of control over,” Ms. Davidson acknowledged with a laugh.

Ms. Davidson grew up in New York. Two of her early jobs — working on a nature preserve and later as a photo assistant — have converged in her career. She majored in sociology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and interned at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, where she was hired to work with the zoo’s birds of prey.

But when she was injured in a car accident a couple of years ago, Ms. Davidson began making photos for the zoo, instead.

“Shake” is in its early stages. The series is an offshoot of a book project onpets with disabilities. While working on that, Ms. Davidson tested some new high-speed mono lights on a round-faced Bordeaux. “I uploaded the photos and I was cracking up,” she said.

DESCRIPTIONCarli Davidson

It would be remiss not to mention the project’s ugly duckling, a 3-week-old kitten that had yet to perfect the “shake” motion. But at this point, the work is fairly dog-centric. Ms. Davidson has 10 canine subjects lined up over the next month and a half. Among them: a corded poodle — pleasantly dreadlocked — and a bug-eyed pug, “just one of the most hideously adorable dogs,” she said.

from:    http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/sit-shake-a-paw-now-just-shake/?hp

Man’s Best Friend

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Dog of Fallen Navy SEAL, Officer Jon Tumilson, Refuses To Leave Casket (VIDEO)

The dog of fallen Navy SEAL Officer Jon Tumilsonrefused to leave his owner’s casket at the officer’s funeral earlier this week, Animal Planet reported.

Tumilson’s cousin Lisa Pembleton captured the loyal pup, Hawkeye, resting alongside Tumilson’s casket at the Rockford, Iowa ceremony.

KPBS reported that the former San Diego residentwas killed in the Aug. 6th Chinook helicopter crash with 29 other American service members.

Pembleton contacted KPBS’s Home Post publication with this statement:

“Hawkeye is/was his loyal “son”. To say that he was an amazing man doesn’t do him justice. The loss of Jon to his family, military family and friends is immeasurable. I hadn’t planned on taking any pictures other than with family. However, from my seat at the funeral, I felt compelled to take one photo to share with family members that couldn’t make it or couldn’t see what I could from the aisle. This is that photo.”

to see the picture and the video, go to:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/24/dog-of-fallen-navy-seal-refuses-to-leave-casket_n_935707.html

Doggie – Siren Duet

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Dog Howls With Sirens (VIDEO)

First Posted: 8/14/11 03:29 PM ET Updated: 8/14/11 03:29 PM ET

Eskie HowlingThis miniature American Eskimo, aka Eskie, can do an awesome impression of a fire engine.

Like, spot-on.

Of course, while it’s cute to watch on video, we’re willing to bet he wouldn’t be the best roommate.

WATCH:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/14/dog-howls-with-sirens_n_926536.html

Calculating Dog Years

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August 3, 2011, 5:32 PM

Calculating the Real Age of Your Dog

By TARA PARKER-POPE
Is your dog a senior or a teen?Steve Goldstein for The New York Times and Fred Greaves, via ReutersIs your dog a senior or a teenager?

Most people think that one dog year equals seven human years. But according to WebMD, your dog’s real age is not that simple:

Dogs mature more quickly than children in the first couple of years. So the first year of a dog’s life is equal to about 15 human years, rather than seven.

Size and breed also influence the rate at which a dog ages. Although smaller dogs tend to live longer than larger dogs, they may mature more quickly in the first few years of life. A large dog may mature more slowly at first but already be considered elderly at age 5. Small and toy breeds don’t become “seniors” until around age 10. Medium-size breeds are somewhere in the middle in terms of maturation and life span.

To find out how old your dog really is, check out WebMD’s dog age calculation chart, which estimates your dog’s equivalent human age based on how old it is and whether it is a small, medium or large breed.

fr/   http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/calculating-the-real-age-of-your-dog/