Tag Archives: pets

The Joy of Rescued Pets

Posted on by
Dr. Patricia Fitzgerald

Wellness Editor, The Huffington Post; doctor of acupuncture and Oriental medicine; nutritionist; author

Happy Tails: Amazing Stories of Rescued Pets

Posted: 02/29/2012 8:48 am

It was love at first sight. When I went to my local animal shelter more than six years ago, I thought of it as a first step — I was planning on researching carefully all of my options, visiting several shelters and rescues, and taking my time to find my new canine companion. Ten minutes later, I was on the phone with my husband, explaining why we had to bring home a 7-year-old Beagle-German Shepherdish-looking mutt with advanced cataracts named Charlie. He was found as a stray, so I had to wait a week until he was available for adoption in case his owner came to claim him. I visited him every day, leading up to the day he was available. I was super nervous and couldn’t sleep the night before, worried that other people would want to adopt him, too. I had already become so attached!

When we went to the shelter the next morning (a half an hour before they opened, just in case), I remember worrying that everyone else at the shelter was also there to adopt Charlie. After all, he was the cutest dog ever.

Boy, was I naïve! Like so many things in life, you don’t know until you know. It didn’t really occur to me that older dogs at shelters are often the last ones to be adopted, if at all. I also didn’t know that most animals don’t make it out of shelters alive.

It turned out that nobody else had come to adopt Charlie, so he was mine (for all of $28.00, including a microchip and shots, and he was already neutered). That same morning, my husband fell in love with an 8-year-old adorable Beagle-Bassett named Simba. We left that shelter that day with two dogs, and it has been a love affair ever since!

The decision to be a pet guardian is an enormous one. There are many factors to consider when deciding what kind of pet to bring home — large or small, young or old, dog, cat, or tortoise — and especially where to find your new animal companion.

According to the ASPCA, there are between 5 and 7 million animals in shelters across the country. And of those, 3-4 million will be euthanized — that’s 60 percent of dogs and 70 percent of cats. Most of those animals are euthanized simply because there is no one to adopt them. And yet, despite this overwhelming need, 15-20 percent of new pets are purchased from breeders, while only around 10 percent are adopted from shelters.

And it’s not just mutts who suffer. On Valentine’s Day of 2012, a Pekingese was named Best in Show at Westminster — which, sadly, will likely mean pain and suffering for thousands of Pekingese in years to come. Each year, Westminster contributes to Americans’ desire for purebred puppies — often bred in inhumane puppy mills. Then, sadder still, millions of these dogs end up housed in shelters after their novelty wears off, and are eventually put to sleep. Over a quarter of dogs euthanized in shelters are purebred.

This tremendous need may be the best reason to bring a rescue pet into your home — but it’s far from the only one. There have been literally hundreds of studies showing that pet companionship is good for humans — from a physical level to a spiritual one. Recent studies have shown that pet owners have lower levels of risk factors for cardiovascular disease, spend less on health care, and have stronger immune systems. Beyond that, pet ownership contributes to physical fitness, sociability (so easy to talk to a stranger who is walking a dog), self-esteem — and pure joy and bliss.

On a wider, societal level, rescued pets have been the catalyst of some profound healing of the hearts of those often marginalized. A great example is K9 Connection, a California-based group that came up with an innovative way to tackle two problems at once — alongside the millions of dogs and cats euthanized each year, there are thousands of teenagers who take their lives each year. At K9 connection, at-risk teens train homeless shelter dogs. Dogs who were doomed for death are adopted into loving homes. The impact on the teens is profound as the healing power of the human-animal bond does its work.

The healing that takes place at prisons across the country which have programs pairing rescue dogs with inmates is extraordinary. Shelter dogs are saved from euthanasia and given training, and the prisoners benefit from the companionship, responsibility, and the satisfaction that they are helping to save the life of such a beautiful, vulnerable creature. Some prisoners report that they had never had the experience of unconditional love until they started training a rescue dog.

Some groups that facilitate these amazing programs include Project POOCH, Prison Tails, and Paws in Prison.

Nationally, rescued pets are becoming increasingly visible. Since the world’s first viral video of a kitten doing something adorable was posted on YouTube, it’s been well recognized that watching cute animal antics is perhaps second to none among our favorite activities. This year at the Super Bowl, Budweiser capitalized on that love, running a commercial with a tiny dog named Weego, trained to fetch beer. However, their interests were in more than just selling six-packs: Weego was a rescue dog, and the commercial raised more than a quarter of a million dollars for the Tony La Russa Animal Rescue Foundation. Moreover, it’s done a great job drawing attention to how great rescue pets can be; Bud Light’s Facebook page tells the story of Weego, and has gotten amazing engagement from tens of thousands of people, sharing stories about rescue pets.

from:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-patricia-fitzgerald/pet-adoption_b_1308093.html?ref=mindful-living&ir=Mindful%20Living

On Rupert Sheldrake, Scientific ‘Heretic’

Posted on by

Rupert Sheldrake: the ‘heretic’ at odds with scientific dogma

Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain.

  The Observer, rupert sheldrake in Hampstead

Rupert Sheldrake in north London. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn

that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he

appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once

was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher

at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.

All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake’s untouchable status was conferred

one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life,

he woke up to read an editorial in the journalNature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his

was a “book for burning” and that Sheldrake was to be “condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to

condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy”.

For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense

of shock. “It was,” he says, “exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous

person to know for scientists.” That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the

margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that “conventional, materialist science” cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded

approach to scientific inquiry.

His new book, The Science Delusion, is a summation of this thinking, an attempt to address what he sees as the

limitations and hubris of contemporary scientific thought. In particular, he takes aim at the “scientific dogmatism” that sets itself up as

gospel. The chapters take some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make them into questions: “Are the laws of nature

fixed?”; “Is matter unconscious?”; “Is nature purposeless?” “Are minds confined to brains?”

Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that

undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to “learn” how to grow, to

some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near

the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work – Seven

Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home – been

generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.

One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it

is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title

of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Was that, I wonder, his express intention

in writing it?

“Slightly,” he suggests. But the title was really his publisher’s idea. “It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But

Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind,

so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title.”

Sheldrake is the same age as Dawkins – 70 this year – and though their careers began in an almost identical

biochemical place, they could hardly have ended up further apart. If Sheldrake’s ideas could be boiled down to a

sentence, you might borrow one from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are

dreamt of in your philosophy…”

“What we have in common,” Sheldrake says, “is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of

nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he

has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the ‘laws of nature’ are also prone

to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they

clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe.”

Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now

thought to be “dark matter” and subject to “dark energy” forces that “nothing in our science can begin to

explain”.

Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to “the recurrent fantasy of omniscience”. The science delusion,

in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that

is left to do is to fill in the details. “In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think

is bad for science,” he says. In America, the book is called Science Set Free, which he thinks is probably a

better title. “They were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a rightwing tract

that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that.”

The evolution of Rupert Sheldrake, would, you guess, be a worthwhile scientific study in itself, but one for which

you might struggle to attract funding. Like all heretics worth their salt, he started out in good faith, a true

believer, but he has been beset by increasing doubt ever since.

“I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14,” he says, with a grin. “I bought into

that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who

refused to get confirmed. When I was a teenager, I was a bit like Dawkins is today, you know: ‘If Adam and Eve

were created by God, why do they have navels?’ That kind of thing.”

Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, tha

t human beings were in Dawkins’s term “lumbering robots” – did not accord with his own experience of it.

Sheldrake was a gifted musician and “electrical changes in the cortex didn’t seem able to fully explain Bach”.

Likewise: “To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn’t

seem to give a very full picture of the world.”

The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As

a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would

place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how

they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. “Every weekend in the

season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me

there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you

would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly

plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand.”

They were not alone. When Sheldrake won his scholarship to Cambridge several years later, he asked various

scientists how they thought this happened. The scientists talked about the sun’s position and an internal clock

and scent traces, but what “they weren’t prepared to say was that it was a total mystery”. That refusal, and

others like it, troubled Sheldrake. “There is a lot of science that you can’t directly experience,” he says, “but to

concentrate on quantum physics when we couldn’t begin to explain homing pigeons seemed to me,” he

suggests, “a great distortion.”

For a decade or so, Sheldrake kept some of these thoughts to himself, but as his career developed his doubts

about the idea that “conventional, materialist” science would one day explain everything seemed increasingly

wrong-headed. He took a job working at the University of Malaya on ferns and rubber trees and to get there

travelled for some months through India and Sri Lanka. It was 1968 and India was a very interesting place to be.

“I met people, highly intelligent people, who had a completely different world view from anything to which I had

been exposed.”

Returning to Cambridge, Sheldrake became interested in a notion of biology and heredity that shared close

affinities with Carl Jung’s ideas of a collective unconscious, a shared species memory. He was profoundly

influenced by a book called Matter and Memory by the philosopher Henri Bergson. “When I discovered

Bergson’s idea that memory is not stored in the brain but that it is a relation in time, not in space, I realised that

there might potentially be a memory principle in nature that would solve the problem I was wrestling with.”

In 1974, Sheldrake returned to south-east Asia and took a job at an agricultural institute near Hyderabad

developing new varieties and cropping systems in chickpeas. “By day, I was working on these practical things,”

he recalls, “but in the evening I was reading a lot about crystallography and the philosophy of form.” He had

become friendly with an eccentric woman called Helen Spurway, widow of JBS Haldane, the great British

biologist. She lived in a remote full of animals, with a tame jackal and wasps’ nests in the living room; Haldane’s

library was being eaten by termites; Sheldrake felt right at home.

“At around the same time,” he recalls, “I had some exposure to psychedelics, and that opened me up to the

idea that consciousness was much richer than anything my physiology lecturers had ever described. Then I

came across transcendental meditation, which seemed to give some access to that without drugs.” Alongside

that, to his surprise, Sheldrake began to realise that there was “a lot more in my makeup that was ‘Christian’

than I cared to admit. I started praying and going to church.”

Did he pray with a sense of its efficacy?

“Well,” he says, “I still say the Lord’s Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. ‘Thy

will be done’, that sense that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that we do not comprehend.” By

the time Sheldrake went to live at the ashram of the exiled Christian holy man, Father Bede Griffiths, he had

been confirmed in the Church of South India and was the organist of St George’s, Hyderabad. It was at about

that time, “living in a palm-fringed hut under a banyan tree”, that Sheldrake decided to set out his decade’s

worth of thinking about memory being a function of time, not matter, shared by all living things, that he called

“morphogenetics”.

Was he aware that the book would be incendiary?

“Well,” he says, “I wrote it to try to find a broader framework for biology. A more holistic one, proposing the

argument that the laws of nature were also evolving in time.”

For the first three months after it was published, the speculative book got a generally favourable reception. But

then the “book for burning” editorial was written in Nature, by its editor, Sir John Maddox, and Sheldrake’s new

life began, as a discredited scientist and bestselling author.

Far from refuting his ideas in the face of this broadside, Sheldrake went on the offensive. His research since

then has concentrated almost entirely on the kinds of phenomena that science dismisses out of hand “but

which people are generally fascinated by and made to feel stupid about”. He has a long-running experiment that

collects data about how dogs “know” when their owners are coming home; another is concerned with the

apparently strong deviations from chance in human ability to predict when they are being stared at from a

distance. He retains an interest in subjects as diverse as the mysteries of crystal formation, the efficacy of

Chinese medicine, the forces that trigger migrations of birds and animals over vast distances, and the nature of

consciousness.

None of these pursuits has enhanced his standing in the professional scientific community. Sheldrake is

unrepentant. He cites Darwin as an example. “If you look at his books, almost all the data there come from

amateur naturalists, practical breeders, gardeners. TH Huxley, meanwhile, ‘his bulldog’, was very much against

amateurs, largely because many of them were vicars and he was very anti-religious. He wanted to marginalise

anyone who saw science and faith as compatible and mutually reaffirming.”

Though he remains at best a contentious figure, and to some an irredeemable charlatan, Sheldrake sees some

evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science.

“I think one of the reasons why my book has – so far – been well received is that times are changing,” he

suggests. “A lot of our old certainties, not least neoliberal capitalism, have been turned on their head. The

atheist revival movement of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett is for many people just too narrow and dogmatic.

I think it is a uniquely open moment…”

His hope is that there will be a “coming out” moment in science. “It’s like gays in the 1950s,” he suggests. “I

think if people in the realm of science and medicine came out and talked about the limitations of purely

mechanistic and reductive approaches it would be much more fun…”

The imminence of Sheldrake’s three score years and ten has made questions of mortality and consciousness

seem a little more pressing to him. He almost came face to face with his morphic energies in 2008; speaking at

a consciousness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was attacked with a knife by a Japanese paranoid

schizophrenic. He suffered a huge wound in his thigh, which just missed his femoral artery. “Apparently,” he

says, “he was aiming at my heart and stumbled at the last moment. It certainly made death a bit more present.”

Given his speculative nature, I wonder what he imagined, as his life flashed before him, would happen next?

“I’ve always thought death would be like dreaming,” he says, “but without the possibility of waking up. And in

those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists

convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will.” He trusts in a more colourful future for himself. After Sheldrake

shows me out, I walk to work across the heath, imagining how his dream eternity might work out: hammering

out The Goldberg Variations on his Hyderabad organ, while the jungle grows around him, wondering all the time

how

from:    http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/05/rupert-sheldrake-interview-science-delusion

The Healing Power of Pets

Posted on by
Amy D. Shojai, CABC

Animal behavior consultant, author of 23 pet care books

3 Ways Your Pet Can Help You Heal

Posted: 9/4/11

Studies prove that pets provide physical health benefits, offer stress relief and detect or predict health challenges. Some pets now are used prior to health tests like MRIs to reduce patient fear.How can that be? Pets help keep us emotionally healthy.

They keep us connected to the world and other pet lovers, and offer a purpose to get out of bed in the morning. People who wouldn’t go to the store for themselves will make the effort to get dog food or kitty litter.

Sure, walking the dog means people exercise, but studies also show that walking a dog offers more benefits than walking alone. There’s a social and emotional benefit that has no equal.

Emotional Benefits Of Service Dogs

Service dogs have offered people assistance for many years as guides for the blind, ears for the deaf or even an extra pair of hands — fetching everything from the phone and clothing, to turning lights on and off. While we mostly think of dogs, other critters including parrots, cats, lizards and even horses do this work. But service animals also boost emotional health in surprising ways.

Researcher Karen Allen conducted a two-year study looking at individuals with a variety of challenges who had used wheelchairs for a year or longer. She compared the group who received dogs to those who didn’t. After a year, those with dogs showed dramatic improvement in areas such as self-esteem, psychological well-being and generally getting back into life. People were going out and having relationships, they made friends and a couple of people even got married.

This effect was also documented by researchers at the University of California Davis. They found people with pets were approached more often for conversation than when they were alone. Blind and wheelchair-bound kids with their dogs in public places were approached for social contact 10 times more frequently than without their dogs. Beside the day-to-day help service animals provide, they act as a social lubricant that emotionally heals.

When animals are present, Alzheimer patients are more responsive and more positive.But even healthy senior adults benefit emotionally from spending time with pets.

Pets Don’t Judge

Healing includes the mending of broken hearts, lost dreams and painfully poisonous ideas and beliefs. Pets make things safe for emotions. You can express anything to your pet — anger, sadness, joy, despair — without being judged.

Humans suffering from trauma or illness, grief or depression, often withdraw from the world to find a safe and healing place. Kids who are lonely, dealing with death or illness in the family or other trauma have better coping skills when they have access to a pet. Families going through divorce also benefit from this pet effect. People caring for a pet are less likely to suffer from depression.

Psychiatric service dogs alert people when they need to take medication, eat on time or assure them the house and environment is safe and relieve their fears. And pets won’t take no for an answer.

The Human-Animal Bond

The bond refers to feelings of love we have for pets — and they for us — and this biochemical process can actually be measured with blood tests. A study by South African professor Johannes Odendaal proved that the human-animal bond makes us feel good from the inside out. Pets feel it, too!

Our feelings, thoughts and attitudes are influenced by changes in brain chemistry. Odendaal measured blood levels and found that positive biochemicals phenylethalamine, dopamine, beta-endorphin, prolactin and oxytocin increased significantly for both the pets and people when bonding takes place.

People who interact with their own pets have even higher elevations. These chemicals stimulate feelings of elation, safety, tranquility, happiness, satisfaction and love — it’s more than simple contact, it’s the individual animal and the bond we share.

Pets insist on being noticed, yet their presence is safe. They listen without judgment, and are silent without offering unasked advice. Animals know how to just sit and be with someone for as long as necessary. And pets don’t turn away from tears and grief the way humans tend to do. Sometimes our beloved animal companions are the only bridge able to receive and return affection and show us the way home to emotional health.

Amy D. Shojai, CABC, is a certified animal behavior consultant and the award-winning author of 23 pet care books. She also writes for puppies.about.com and cats.about.com and appears on Animal Planet’s CATS-101 and DOGS-101. Check out Amy’s latest book, “Pet Care in the New Century: Cutting-Edge Medicine for Dogs & Cats” and on Red Room, where you can read her blog. 

from:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-d-shojai-cabc/emotional-benefits-of-pets_b_939715.html?ref=happiness

Dog Behaviors, Triggers, and Training

Posted on by

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

Time and Pets

Posted on by

Do Your Pets Notice the Switch From Daylight Saving Time?

By Michelle Bryner, Life’s Little Mysteries contributor
04 November 2011 5:03 PM ET

 

You might think it unlikely that this weekend’s switch from daylight saving time (DST) to standard time could throw your cat or dog’s busy schedule — eat, sleep, eat, sleep — off-kilter. But, as it turns out, some animals are so in tune with their owners’ schedules that falling back an hour can cause our furry friends some confusion.

Just like humans, animals have their own internal clocks that tell them when to eat, sleep and wake up. This biological timekeeper, also known as circadian rhythm, is set in motion by natural sunlight. However, for pets this effect is minimized by the artificial environment they live in, where light comes and goes not only with the rising and setting sun, but most often with the flip of a switch.

Humans set their pets’ routines, said Alison Holdhus-Small, a research assistant at CSIRO Livestock Industries, an Australia-based research and development organization.

“Animals that live with humans develop routines related to human activity — for example, cows become accustomed to being milked at particular times of day, or pet dogs become accustomed to going for walks or being fed at a particular time of day,” Holdhus-Small said. “When humans apply daylight saving time to their own lives, if they carry out their routine according to the clock, the animals can become confused.” [Everything You Need to Know: Why Do We Observe Daylight Saving Time?]

Holdhus-Small gives some examples of how animals might respond to a time change: If a farm owner arrives an hour later (when the clocks are turned back) to milk the cows, the animals will be waiting, bellowing anxiously because their internal routine tells them that they’re late. Conversely, if the farmer arrives an hour earlier (when the clocks are turned ahead) the cows will not be inclined to come in to milk until closer to the “proper” time.

“When humans change the clocks for daylight saving, to suit our preferred working environment, from an animal’s point of view, we are suddenly behaving oddly,” Holdhus-Small told Life’s Little Mysteries. “To the animals, it is inexplicable that suddenly dinner is an hour later or earlier than expected.”

This behavior shift could cause animals psychological and physiological stress, Holdhus-Small said. A cow’s udder, for example, will continue to produce milk regardless of how we set our clocks and pressure will build up until the cow is milked. Household pets might get grumpy when they show up to an empty food dish at their perceived dinner time.

So when you set your clock back an hour this weekend, remember that your pets need a little paw-holding during the time change. Holdhus-Small suggests gradually changing the animal’s activities by a few minutes a day rather than the whole hour at once.

from:    http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/daylight-saving-time-pets-notice-difference-2155/