Dog Help Blog

Does your lovely pet dog bark a lot? Is he not obeying to your command? Nothing to bother. He needs training that is all. There are so many dog training procedures. Let us discuss some best tips here. These dog training tips can be implemented to achieve the goal. If the dog needs to be taught to behave properly in public places such as streets and parks, then it must undergo dog leash training. The most of the dog trainers are aware of this training, we can take their help.

Dog Training Tips

1. Positive reinforcement – it matters a lot.  It is a lot easier to train a dog in positive manner instead of training the dog by strict or punishment based way. Let the dog be rewarded for its obedience.

2. The trainer must have hell a lot of patience. The learning ability differs from dog to dog. The trainer must understand the dog’s learning pace and work in accordance with it.  In case the dog is slow leaner, it must be given sufficient time to learn the command. One should never rush the training. If you rush things to slow learner, then the things will go awry.

3. The training procedure varies with the breed too. Select the training procedure suited for the breed in hand. Let the training method used be proven, time tested and familiar with you.

4. Please be informed that the behavioral problems are acquired not inherited. Hence best time for training is puppy stage. Common bad habits such as chewing, barking, jumping etc can be controlled with ease, if training started at puppy stage.

5. Fun-filled training is the best. The dogs just love that. Let the training session be lively and not boring. Let the training be conducted not more than 30 minutes. If more time is taken, then the dog will be tired and bored. Let the training be regular, with a day break after 5 -6 days of training.

6. It is better to use training equipments such as remote trainer, training collar system etc. But you have to make sure that the equipment is effective without any risk attached to it.  The equipment used must be in accordance with the size and age of the dogs.

Cleaning the dog poop, yes, it is a major hassle. Many don’t know how to dispose them off. Most of the pet owners face this major challenge every other day. The dog poop will become your heath threatening factor if not disposed correctly.

Un-cleared dog poop will attract harmful worms, parasites, insects etc and cause trouble to the households by spreading the infection. Hence improper dog poop disposal is dangerous to the dog as well as the owner and his family, mind that always.

Easy disposal methods are plenty. Let us discuss it here. The methods discussed here are cost effective at the same time environment friendly too.

1. Doggy loo- you can prepare a doggy loo at the backyard of your house. Dump the dog poop in that.  Preparing a doggy loo is very simple. It costs you bare minimum. All you need is a plastic bucket. Remove the base of the bucket or make holes big enough to facilitate the passage of the dog poop. Let this be buried in the soil of the backyard. Let the dog poop is dumped in to the bucket as and when required. You may have to pour water mixed with chemical cleaner for easy flushing of the poop in the bucket.

2. Dog waste bags [bio-degradable]-this is very useful for those who want to take their dog outdoors. These biodegradable dog waste bags are not like the ordinary plastic bags. These bags will disintegrate easily when exposed to moisture or heat. Hence the dog poop and other wastes are converted in to water, bio mass, minerals and carbon-di- oxide. These biodegradable dog waste bags are easy to get as they are available in most of the pet shops and super markets.

3. Worm compost bins- do you want to convert the dog poop in to a useful product? Then you need to build compost bins. Worm compost bins are available in the market. Just buy then and use. The bins have worms that feed on the dog poop and convert them in to fertile compost which can be used for the plants in the garden as fertilizer.

Maintaining a sick dog at home is just not easy. Taking the pet dog for veterinarian’s consultation may be easy, but making the dog to consume the recommended medication is tough. Some dogs take the medication with ease while many others are not. But the pet owners have no choice but to adhere to the vet’s advice without any deviation or imagination. The vet can only help you by prescribing the right medication. The onus of administering rests with the pet owner.

Pills-administration

Request the vet to prescribe the medication that can be given with the food. In some cases that may not be possible. Here are few suggestions in case pills were recommended.  Let the pill be held between the index finger and thump. Tilt the dog’s head back little. The upper jaw of the pet should be held firmly with the other hand.

Open the lower jaw of the dog slowly using middle finger. Let the middle finger rest on the small incisor teeth of the pet. The pill needs to be deposited on the toque as deep as possible. Now, let the mouth be closed immediately and never allow the dog to open the mouth for some time. Let the throat of the dog be stoked gently. Alternatively you can blow the nostril. Both will make the dog to swallow the pill.

Syrup or Liquids

Let the dropper or the syringe be filled with medicine at first. Let the dropper or syringe be inserted between the teeth and cheek of the dog. Hold the dog’s head back slightly by closing the mouth. Then slowly release the medication in to the mouth. Let the mouth be closed for some time so that the medicine is swallowed, not wasted. You can help the dog to swallow the medicine by stoking the throat or by blowing the nostril of the dog.

Let it be pill or syrup, you need to be very calm and should never get agitated while administering the medicine. The dog will quickly understand your nervousness which will further complicate the medicine administration.  It is better to reward or praise the dog once the medicine was administered successfully.

For many, dogs are the best companions and in some family the dogs are even considered as family members. But there are some, who are prone for dog allergies. Dog allergy is nothing but the human body’s immune response to the danders. Danders are the tiny particles produced from dried hair. For such people, there are certain breeds are highly suitable. Let discuss about those breeds here.

Bedligton terrier- this breed looks like a lamb.  This breed offers excellent company to thee pet owner.  The hair coat of the breed is blue in general. As this breed shed very few danders, the possibility of the allergic reaction for the pet owner is very minimal.

Chinese crested - this breed is becoming popular of late. The presence of hair is very less at the same time; the breed is not completely bald. Puff of hair can be noticed on the head portion of the dog.  The skin is spotted. Though the look of the dog is weird, many still love to have them as pet.

Irish water spaniel- though this breed belongs to spaniel, the look of the same is not so attractive. This breed is excellent water dog. This breed is the taller when compared with other spaniel breeds. The coat of the Irish water spaniel is very unique and the same is the breed’s most distinguishing character.

Kerry blue terrier- the hair coat of this breed is very dense but soft like a silk. The hair can be seen either wavy or curly, but never look harsh. This breed certainly requires proper grooming.

Maltese- this breed is native of Malta islands of the Mediterranean region. These dogs are very small. These animals are quite resilient in spite of their fragile look. The hair is long and white which needs regular grooming. This breed sheds very little hair and liberates very minimal danders.

Poodle- all the poodles, standard, toy and miniature are great pets for human beings. These animals long for the human companionship. These animals don’t require regular grooming and produce very less danders thus making it highly suitable for dog allergy prone people.

Portuguese water dog- these animals are excellent water dogs. At the same time, they are good at land too. This breed was developed to help the Portugal fisherman. These dogs are very active and are very faithful to the owner. These animals too produce very less dander.

Schnauzer- these animals are seen in three different sizes [standard, miniature and giant]. The most common hair coat color is salt and pepper. Black color hair coat is also seen.  Frequent clipping and grooming is must to maintain the hair coat in good condition. These dogs produce less dander, hence suitable for dog allergy prone persons.

Wheaten terrier soft coated- the size is medium. These animals love human friendship and enjoy its life.  The hair coat color is wheaten [any shade]. The coat is very soft and wavy.

Mexican hairless- these dogs are seen in two varieties and three different sizes. The color of the hair coat is bronze or grey or black.

It’s essential for Dog parents like you to know certain basic factors that determine your relationship with your Dog and can go a long way in training him effectively.

Before you begin training your Dog, it is absolutely essential that you build a loving bond with him. This is important as it helps you to understand his needs and instincts and also allows your Dog to have complete trust in you.

Know more about Dog care from this free mini course

Let us see how…….

How To Bond With Your Dog

Building a bond with your Dog is the first and the most crucial step involved in training him successfully. As soon as you bring your Dog home, you must first try to develop a caring and loving relationship with him in order to win his trust and confidence.

When Dogs are secure in the knowledge that they belong to the family, they are more likely to respond better to their owners’ training commands. Just like with any relationship, there must be mutual trust and respect between you and your Dog.

Trust takes time to develop and respect comes from defining boundaries and treating any breach of those boundaries with firmness and fairness.

Without enforceable limitations, respect can’t be developed. And when there is no respect, building a bond with your Dog is almost impossible.

4 Golden Rules To Building A Relationship With Your Dog :

Love Your Dog and He Will Love You back

Once you’re succesful in building a bond with your Dog, you can rest assured that training him and teaching him new and clever tricks will be a cakewalk.

Learn how to bond with your Dog with this free mini course.

How Your Dog Learns…

Your Dog’s learning period can be divided into five phases:

The Teaching Phase – This is the phase where you must physically demonstrate to your Dog exactly what you want him to do.

The Practicing Phase – Practice makes Perfect. Once a lesson is learnt, practice with your Dog what you have just taught him.

The Generalizing Phase – Here you must continue practicing with your Dog in different locations and in an environment with a few distractions. You can take your Dog out for a walk, or to a nearby park and command him to practice whatever you’ve taught him.

Practicing the learned lessons in multiple locations and in the presence of small distractions will help him learn and retain lessons better .

The Testing Phase – Once you’re sure that your Dog has achieved almost 90% success….he responds correctly almost every time you give a command, you must start testing his accuracy in newer locations with a lot of distractions.

Example: Take him to the local shopping mall and ask him to obey your command. He may not come up with the correct response the very first time you do this, but you must not lose hope.

The idea is to test your Dog to see how he responds in an environment which is new to him. Set-up a situation where you are in control of the environment and your Dog.

There are only 2 possibilities:

Keep on testing until he succeeds. Follow the rule of the 3 Ps – patience, persistence, praise.

Internalizing Phase – Finally, comes the extremely rewarding phase where your Dog does everything he is taught to do even without your commands.

Remember:

Learn how to train your Dog better with this free mini course.

Copyright (c) 2009 TrainPetDog.com

The dog are loved by many, there is no second opinion. You know that the same dog can’t be with you all through the lifetime. The only way of living with the beloved pet dog for ever is by breeding. But one has to think a lot before breeding. Is it the best for the dog?  Are we taking right decision? The reason is dog breeding is not l a simple procedure as one generally assumes.

One has to safeguard the health of the dog, its offspring and have the time and other thing to handle the situation that arises due to breeding activity. Problems ate too many while attempting breeding, one has to no wary of it.  He or she must have sufficient time. One must have sufficient money to take case of the breeding expenses such as breeding, vet consultation, vaccination, deforming etc.  There comes the responsibility of finding good home for the puppies.

Dog Breeding -The Wrong Reasons

Many people breed the dogs for wrong reasons, which is why nearly 17 million dogs are sent to animal shelter every year. Only ten percent of those dogs have takers and the remaining needs to destroy. This situation can be avoided by breeding the dog for right reason.

Don’t breed the dogs because you like the puppies as they are very cute. Remember, they grow very fast. Don’t breed the dog, to make your kid to experience the whelping [act of giving birth to puppy]. Because the process is very fast and your kid may miss it. Don’t think you can make big money by selling the puppies. That is not all that easy. The breed you have must be a popular one; otherwise you will not have takers for all. Don’t breed, just for the sake of cross breeding. Dogs are not certainly experiment animal, but pets.

Dog Breeding – Right Reasons

To be a responsible breeder one has to consider many facts. Please remember just like human being the dogs too have emotional and physical needs. The dog needs to be bred only for right cause. If you want to breed you dog for promoting that breed in your locality then it is fine. But please consult the experience and reliable breeder. Because so many cross breeds are available, getting pure breed is tricky. Always mate with breed with top qualities.

Before actual breeding, you must have the home ready for the mother and puppies.
One must also have advance booking for the puppies, because looking for takers in urgency, having the puppy at home, may result in selecting wrong taker. Better to start marketing before the arrival of the puppies.

You have to have one to one discussion with the potential buyer to find out whether he is suitable. You must know whether he or she is a really animal lover? Does he posses sufficient experience? Does he have sufficient money to take care of the dog? Never try to finish the deal for the sake of money.

If the potential buyer is not having suitable home for the puppy or suitable lifestyle for petting a dog or not having experienced care taker at home in his absence , you should be in a position to turn down his request in there  best interest of the puppy.

The lovely spring has set its foot now. You can notice the plants growing, flowers blooming, insect buzzing etc.  You can also notice that your lovely pet dog scratching its body and prefer to stay in the corner. This is nothing but seasonal allergy. You may know that few get allergic reactions human beings experience due to danders of the pet dog. The dogs too suffer from allergy. Seasonal allergies are more seen in dogs than in cats.

In most cases the allergy is due to genetic factor. The dogs that are in age group between 1 and 3 years are more prone. The allergens make entry in to the body of the dog either through inhalation or ingestion. In dogs the allergic reactions are mostly itching rather than sneezing, running nose, watery eyes etc.   This can be evident by the dog’s act such as frequent rubbing of the face, licking of the feet, and scratching the body.

Types of Seasonal Allergies

There are two types of allergies very common in dogs. Lets us discuss it out here.
Allergy due to fleas- this is more common in dogs. You know that the flea menace is ever lasting problem in pet. The allergic reaction is due to the saliva of the flea. The dog’s immune system reacts quickly for this foreign body. The antibodies are rushed to the affected area, the skin, which is why you notice all those scratching.

Allergic inhaled dermatitis- this type of allergy is due to allergens such as house dust mite, house dust, pollen, ragweed, feathers, grasses, shrubs, trees, dander etc. These allergens gain entry either through the respiratory tract [inhalation] or through the feet or through digestive system [ingestion]. This allergy is bit difficult to prevent as the above mentioned allergens are seen in abundance in dog’s surrounding.

Diagnosis

Diagnosis of the allergy may be easy but finding out the root cause of the allergic reaction is difficult as you know by now that the allergens are more than few. The veterinarian needs to be consulted at the earliest.  The vet will conduct blood test and intradermal test to find out the possible cause. In case of intradermal test, the allergens will be injected under the skin of the dog and will be observed for the reaction. Formation of wheal or hive like swelling will indicate that the test is positive.

Treatment

To start with the vet will subject the dog to symptomatic treatment. Once the cause of the problem is identified, appropriate treatment can be designed. By far the most effective and popular treatment is immunotherapy or hypo sensitization. Here the specific allergens are injected to the dog in lower concentration at periodic interval. The pet becomes less sensitive to it over a period of time, thus preventing the allergic reactions. The disadvantage of this technique is that it is costly and time consuming. The duration of the treatment may be a year or more in some cases. The other alternative is to give steroid injections to minimize the allergic manifestations. The side effects of the steroids are cause of worry, hence used in limited quantity and duration.

Have you ever looked at your pet dog’s nose? If not, please do so now. At first sight you may wonder, what is so great about it, it looks similar in all the dogs. No, you are wrong. The dogs have nose prints that are unique for each dog and never match with any other dog, just like our finger prints.

Please be informed that the nose print has been approved as proof of identity by the Canadian kennel club as early as 1938. A company in United States of America has come out with a product that can identify the dog by its nose print. The name of the company is “ID systems integrators”. They seemed to have developed a technique called “Dog nose ID”. Using this technique the company confirms that it ca n provide painless, noninvasive and tamper proof record, permanent in nature, for each and every dog.

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The identification of the dog is must for the safety of the dog. There are many identification procedures in use such as collar tag, tattoo, nose print etc. But by far, the best one is micro chipping the dog. For many pet owners micros chipping may sound alien. Lets us discuss about the microchip, its database, its scanner and the companies that are marketing these microchips here.

The Micro Chip

Micro chip is nothing but very small computer chip. The size of the same will not be more that of a grain. The chip stores the identification number of the dog, which can be red using scanner. The micro chip has 10- characters and two hundred and seventy million codes. These microchips are easily inserted in to the back side of the neck of the pet, as they are loaded in a syringe. Within ten seconds the chip can be inserted and the pain can only be compared with injection prick. The skin forms a casing as the reaction to this foreign body, which secures the movement of the microchip. The microchip is made up of bio-compatible substance to prevent the rejection from the body of the pet.

The scanner for the microchip

These scanners are must to decode the identification number of the microchip. The microchip transmits the information through radio waves. Electromagnetic energy is used by the scanners to make the chip to emit radio waves. The frequency of the radio wave is different for different microchips. Hence the same scanner can’t read all the microchips. This was yester year problem as in the year 1996 universal reader [scanner] was introduced and the same was provided to all the veterinarian, animal shelter and other animal welfare organizations. This helped immensely for the reunion of many stray pet and their legitimate owner.

Data base of microchip

There are incidences that the stray dog captured was having the microchip but due to some reason the identification number couldn’t be decoded.  In such incidences the microchip company needs to be contacted for help. Each company that markets the microchip will have the sale detail. Through that, one can find out the purchaser. In case the microchip was bought by veterinarian or animal shelter or any other organization, nothing to worry as it is mandatory for them to have the record of the animal to which the microchip was inserted. Using that information the stray dog can be handed over to his master.

Microchip companies

There are two companies that are actively marketing the microchips in United States of America. They are AVID and HOME AGAIN.  AVID – this company claims to have sold few million microchips so far. At present 142000 pets those have gone missing were made to find their home using this company’s microchip at the rate of one dog per 32 minutes.  Home again – this company seem to have sold 0.5 million microchips till date. Nearly 34000 pet dogs were reunited with their owner using their microchip details.

The dogs are lovely animal to have as pet. They shower hell a lot of affection towards the owner and his family.  The loss of the pet dog is unbearable pain. Many pet owners will vouch for this. So it is the duty of the pet owner to protect the dog from possible loss. There are many methods to locate the dog, if lost. Let’s discuss about them one by one here.

Collar tags

The tag must have complete information about the dog such as the name, address and the contact number of the pet owner. The name of the vet should also be mentioned in that, if there is space. The tag should be attached firmly to the collar of the dog, so that it doesn’t get detached that easily. If the pet owner doesn’t like the ID tag, he can go for collar plates of sufficient size to have all the above mentioned information of the dog.

Top tag pet ID

This tag has 64MBb flash drives that are safely located in the waterproof cases. The whole set up will have attachment provision for connecting it to the collar of the dog.  The flash drive will have the fed information about the dog which can be accessed with ease. The program is done in such a manner; one can easily retrieve the information. Hence the pet will be taken to safety and the owner will be informed at once.
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Pet protector system

This is something similar to the medic alert system in humans. This provides 24 hour service and functions nationwide. The company will have the complete information about the dog registered. All one has to do is to make a call to the toll free number of the company, that is provided in the color. The company’s representative will attend and do all the needful to take the dog to its owner.

Tattoos

This identification method is in practice for quite long time. Here the dog will be tattooed with a number on any part of the body, preferably the upper leg. If any one finds the lost dog with the tattoo, he needs to contact the national dog registry and inform the number noticed in the form of tattoo, which in turn inform the owner of the pet. The pet owner can also tattoo his contact number, but he should never change the number. The other disadvantage is that if the tattoo is not done perfectly, it becomes illegible after some time. Besides the procedure is painful affair for the pet.

Micro chip

This is one of the recent introductions. Here the procedure is very simple. The micro chip grain size] is inserted to the back side of the dog’s neck. All the information about the dog is fed to the chip. All one has to do is to just pass the scanner over the neck to find out the registration number. Using that number all the information required about the dog, can be found out from the database. Here one minor disadvantage is a quick swipe of the scanner over the neck can miss to locate the registration number. Hence the scanner needs to be moved carefully and slowly over the neck.

Micro chip and Cancer

There are some reports that these micro chips cause cancer in some dogs.  But the manufactures of the microchips aver that they are absolutely safe. Many experts opine that one can’t rule out the possibility of cancerous growth triggered by microchips but the incidences are very rare.