Fatal(?) Attraction

When you decide that it's time to add a dog to your household, how do you go about deciding what you want and where you'll look?
There are three basic ways to proceed
1. decide on a breed, do your research, and contact breeders or rescue groups
2. decide on a breed, go to a pet shop or look in the local classifieds
3. don't make any decision about what sort of dog, and go to the local shelter or rescue group.
Most of the time, I fall into the third group. I did buy my Keeshond after becoming utterly besotted with the breed, and I may have one again sometime. . . or perhaps a Portuguese Water Dog or Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. But most often, when I need a dog, I simply start making the rounds of the shelters, starting with the local and moving out from there. I do have some things in mind. Last time, it was "no black dogs," as I had just lost the second of two large black dogs and wanted a change. Now I seem to have developed a preference for male dogs, though that may not hold up if the right female were to come along. There is also more of a size requirement than there used to be, as I am getting older and having some effects from my battle with cancer, and can't really handle the big guys any more. Activity level also figures in, though I have plenty of ways to give a dog lots of exercise without having to totally exhaust myself. Intelligence is important to me -- I like a dog who thinks for him or herself, even has a bit of a naughty side or a wicked sense of humor.
My last search went through three shelters and even then, I didn't think I'd found my match. My friend had to point out the little inanimate brown dog to me. He hadn't moved the whole time we were in the puppy room. He obviously hadn't had much good happen in his life, but there was still something in his eyes that said there was a good dog in there, if only someone would give him a chance. So I said yes, and then cried buckets when they said he couldn't be released until they neutered him the next morning. But he survived the night, and though it took some months for him to develop trust and a good secure bond, after that he blossomed. He is perhaps at least as smart as my Keeshond was, maybe more. I was new to dogs when I had her, didn't know about clicker training, and didn't really do much training at all. So I don't know how she would have coped with learning the concepts of "bigger/smaller," "higher/lower," though she did know "left/right."
I have contacted purebred rescue groups from time to time, with the idea of having them keep an eye out for a Keeshond mix or a Collie mix for me, but we never followed through with it. Still, I think it's a good way to go if you have a particular breed in mind. The dogs in rescue are nearly always fostered in people's homes, so they're getting regular training and socialization from dog people who care. They're rarely puppies, but a slightly older dog who's already had the kinks worked out can fit really smoothly into a household.
Of course reponsible breeders are the real watchdogs of their respective breeds. The best among them are dedicating themselves to identifying and eradicating genetic diseases, breeding for good temperament, and socializing their puppies fully. I have my problems with some things in the purebred world -- I don't like cropping ears, and I don't like some of the extremes to which various breeds have been pushed -- but I have total respect for reponsible breeders.
The same doesn't hold for backyard breeders and pet shops that sell dogs. Most of the ads for puppies in my local paper can't even manage to spell the breed correctly, so what does that say for their level of knowledge? Pug/peke crosses are advertised as "papered," 8-week-old puppies "have had all their shots," and on and on. And all this goes on while we have a serious overload in our local shelter.
The local pet shop selling puppies claims that they don't do business with puppy mills, yet a suspicious number of their puppies originate in Pennsylvania and Missouri and Arkansas, the hot beds of puppy millers. The only dog I ever acquired from a pet shop was misidentified as to breeds, too young to be there (6 weeks), dying of every parasite known to dogdom (despite a health guarantee), and turned out to be psychotic. I made the pet shop pay for her veterinary treatments to pull her through, then helped the police shut the place down.
I called this blog Fatal Attraction because too often people fall in love with the look of a dog and have no idea what the dog is like to live with. People think they want a Border Collie because they're smart - you don't, not unless you plan to invest many hours in training and entertaining that dog. Or they love the look of a Siberian Husky, but insist they will not fence or leash their dog. Bye bye, Husky. It goes on and on.
Whether you decide on a purebred or a shelter mix, please give some thought to what it's going to be like to live with that dog for the next 10 or 15 years. You'll both be better off.

Leading by Example

I don't know why I should expect more of elected representatives when it comes to dogs than I do of the general public. Perhaps it's because these people can actually impact dog owners by passing good or bad legislation. Lately, they seem to be infatuated with breed bans and mandatory spay/neuter laws, neither one a particularly good idea. And I'm sure there are some dog-loving right-thinking (as in correct, not right-wing) representatives out there. But it's the other kind that I've been hearing about.
Back when the Republicans were still vying for the chance to run for president, a bit of news came out about Mitt Romney. It barely made a ripple in the general media, but it sure made some BIG waves among the dog writers. It seems that the Romney family includes an Irish setter. And every year, when the family set off for their summer holiday, the dog would be loaded in a crate and then strapped to the roof of the family car for the ride to wherever their destination. That's right, the dog rode on the roof, outside the car. The Romneys seemed to feel that this was normal, acceptable behavior.
But that's old news, and I wouldn't have mentioned it. . . except that another story about an elected representative and a dog surfaced recently. It first arrived via the Internet, so the facts had to be checked before anyone got too excited. But when the story was confirmed, it turned out to be even worse than initially reported.
State Senator Kent Williams of South Carolina adopted a female German Shepherd from his local shelter. That sounds like a good thing. Until you get to the part where you learn that the dog was kept in a fenced portion of the yard, with an automatic feeder and automatic waterer. Sounds like a lot of human care went into this dog, right? Well, the senator became annoyed that the dog repeatedly jumped the fence and ran away (perhaps looking for a little human companionship?). After several such episodes he turned her back into the shelter, saying that he was worried the dog would be hit by a car. And that's when it turned out that the Shepherd was pregnant - she gave birth only a few weeks later.
There is a state law in South Carolina requiring that all shelter animals be spayed or neutered. When asked why he hadn't had the Shepherd spayed, Williams replied that he had hoped to breed her! Apparently, he didn't see anything wrong with this reply. You get a dog from the shelter and you compound the problem by breeding more dogs from her. Yikes!
This is just one reason that we dog writers sometimes despair, when we chat with each other, of ever having any effect on the problems of dog ownership. When we write for dog magazines, we are "preaching to the choir," as only the more informed dog owners actually read dog magazines. When we write for the mainstream magazines (not something any of us are allowed to do very often), we may get our message out there better, but this doesn't happen nearly often enough. And yet, we keep trying. And maybe here in the blogosphere, if enough of us speak up, we can gain a little more traction in getting our message out.
I've read two studies recently that confirm the old-time "common wisdom" that six months old is just about the perfect time to have a dog spayed or neutered. While some of the toy breeds may actually go into heat before then, most dogs won't, and you can get all the benefits of the surgery without much worry over impacting bone closure or temperament. Yet the most recent bit of spay/neuter legislation mandates altering by the age of four months. Elected representatives, if you are out there and you read this, feel free to contact me before you write a piece of legislation that's going to impact dog owners. I can point you to the science behind the issue and help you craft a bill that might actually do some good.

Oprah's Show on Puppy Mills

It's been an interesting week in the media, dogwise. Word started flying around late last week that Oprah was going to do a show on puppy mills. Some of the dog writers were merely interested, some were trepidatious. Most of us probably watched.
But before the show aired, almost as soon as word got out, in fact, several of us received a long email from a man who appeared to be speaking for the American Sporting Dogs Alliance. I have not confirmed that with the organization, but he included their name prominently in his email. He was livid over this show (which had not yet aired), and demanding that everyone boycott Oprah's sponsors, because she was certainly going to get it wrong!
Well, after I wrote my last blog about freedom of speech and freedom of the press, you can imagine how well this went over with me. I put the show on my calendar so I wouldn't forget to watch, and reserved judgment.
I have just finished watching the show, and I have to say kudos, Oprah. I thought it was a very fair-minded and, for a lot of people, probably eye-opening account.
First a man involved in rescue and Oprah's reporter Lisa Ling went to several puppy mills. That was combined with some footage from the HSUS. It showed dogs crammed in little wire cages, or larger dogs in small fenced areas in the mud. The rescuer was taking dogs the puppy millers no longer wanted. He often had to carry the dogs to his car because they had never walked on ground before.
They talked about pet shops getting most of their dogs from puppy mills, and the rescuer noted that no responsible breeder would sell their pups to a pet shop.
The show followed some of the dogs that had been rescued, showing them cutting off the chain collars, shaving them down because they were so matted.
Then the focus switched to animal shelters, the municipal kind, and how many dogs are euthanized. They showed a shelter manager going through and choosing which dogs would die that day.
Then they talked about spay and neuter. Oprah's vet was there, and gave some of the benefits of spaying and neutering. The show did NOT encourage, or even mention, legislation regarding spay/neuter, they simply encouraged owners to have their pets spayed and neutered. They talked about free or low-cost clinics, and said that money was not an excuse.
Other that what was probably an inflated percentage of how many dogs in shelter are purebreds, I found nothing in the program to quibble about.
What would be absolutely fantastic would be a follow-up show. On the off-chance that someone from Oprah's staff stumbles over this blog, a look at how successfull education combined with low-cost clinics has been at reducing the number of dogs in shelters would be a great next step. We don't need legislation. The legislation won't have any effect on most of the guilty parties, makes hard feelings with the responsible breeds, and accomplishes little.
Good job, Oprah. And Mr. nobody from American Sporting Dogs Alliance, I hope you might open your eyes and realize that you were WAY out of line.