Dog Blog - Dog Product Reviews

We’re taking a survey of dog owners to find out more about how Americans feel about their pets.  Early results are fascinating.  Did you know that nearly half of us would give up 10% of our pay if we could take our dogs to work with us? And nearly one in five would be more upset at the death of our dog than the death of a spouse.

Haven’t taken the survey yet? It only takes 90 seconds. Go to http://app.intellicontact.com/icp/sub/survey/take.  Meanwhile, here are some early results (678 responses):

Social statements (check all that apply):

Consumer Behavior (check all that apply)

My Age Group

A Bit About Me (check all that apply)

I have two Chows.  One, whom I recently adopted, is a year old. My other Chow is three. They seem to get along great , until snacks are brought into the picture. The younger one  drops hers and goes for his almost instantly. She also likes to block him from food. This ends up in a brutal display of teeth and hair. They are both free feeders; I keep kibble out  for both of them at all times. Is this just a matter of seperating the food in different rooms, and giving them snacks seperately?

S. Brooks, Worcester MA

Dear S.

Your young female Chow is asserting her dominance over the male. One way in which dogs sort out the pecking order of any pack is by who eats first. The dominant dog always eats first. So, to be dominant in a new pack, your female is taking food from your other dog and keeping him away from the food.

I would definitely not feed them free-choice. This is not the most natural way for dogs to eat. They are predators who — in their natural state – hunt and feed, then don’t eat for a while. So two feedings a day, 12 hours apart, should help both their digestion and the food aggression problem. There are a couple of things you can do to minimize the competition for food.

First, watch how Cesar Millan, The Dog Whisperer, deals with food aggression. He asserts himself as the alpha dog by claiming the food. He puts down a dish of food, then stands over it, keeping the dogs from getting to it until they accept that they cannot get to it, at which point they usually lie down or sit calmly. Your female might be dominant over the male, but she must not be dominant over you. She must give way when you want to claim the food. This is a good thing to practice at every mealtime and snacktime.

If you have a helper, you can put both dogs on leashes at mealtimes, tell them to sit, put the food on the floor, then make them wait for your command before they eat. Keep them on leash while they eat, and leave them alone as long as everything’s going well. If the female begins to look at the male’s food, give her a firm correction on the leash and a vocal reprimand (one word or sound). Do this at the first sign that she’s thinking about going after the male. After a while, you can remove the leashes and maintain control with your voice.

If you don’t havea helper, you can also feed them in crates to minimize squabbling. But this does not teach the dogs to behave. It’s like putting the cookie jar out of reach of a child rather than teaching the child not to get into it. Your dogs may be boarded together some day, and have to eat side-by-side. So it’s always better to teach them good manners than put up physical barriers. Either way, this behavior should not be tolerated. If you do nothing, it’s the same — in your dog’s eyes — as approving of the behavior.

I had a long conversation this week with one of our best repeat customers. She was wondering what soft treats we have that she might put a pill into for her dog. The dog bit into a pill once, and ever since, has been very suspicious of any treat used to camouflage a pill.

He gets the pill out of whatever she uses to hide it, and eats the treat, leaving the pill behind. He does this with cheese, peanut butter, even commercial treats made for this purpose, such as Pill Pockets. She’s trying to use soft treats and mix them up to keep him guessing. I have her a few ideas (I’d been through the daily medication dance with an epileptic  Dachshund I once had) but she’d already tried them all.

So I told her I’d post a question on our Blog. How do you hide your dog’s pills? Does any of you have a particularly talented dog who has thwarted the usual methods for hiding pills? Do you have a better way to feed pills to these dogs? Please share with the rest of us any methods other than those I’ve mentioned which have worked for you. 

Shawn, this one’s for you.

- Lisa Woody, President, www.FunStuffForDogs.com

Here’s a story from AP that was recently published in newspapers around the country:

OMAHA, Neb. — Lucy was drowning and turning blue, so Randy Gurchin recalled his Air Force training on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It didn’t matter that Lucy is a 10-month-old English bulldog, because he and Lucy are “best buddies.”

“Once you get a pet, it’s truly part of your family,” he said. “You just tend to do whatever it takes to save their life.”

Lucy had jumped into a partly frozen lake in pursuit of ducks and geese, but the water was too cold for her. When Gurchin edged onto the ice and pulled Lucy out of the water, she was unresponsive and her face and paws were blue.

He closed her mouth, put his mouth over her nose, breathed air into her lungs and pushed on her chest, and after about a minute she began shallow breaths. He drove her to a veterinary clinic, where she was immersed in warm water, given injections and placed in an oxygen tent. By Friday, a week after her ordeal, Lucy was back to normal, said Gurchin, a pilot who retired from the Air Force two years ago.

It’s amazing what we dog parents will do for our beloved friends.  I’m sure that most of the dog people I know would not hesitate to give their dogs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a life-or-death situation.

Society in general is catching on that dogs are part of the family nowadays. They don’t just live in the back yard like they used to (although sadly, some still do). They sleep in our beds, go with us on errands and sometimes to work, they go on vacation with us and sometimes and they help us get over bad relationships.

We think it’s time that people knew just how much our dogs mean to us. So we’ve created a survey of American dog owners. Please take 90 seconds to answer some simple questions. When we’ve collected a statistically significant number of responses, we’ll amalgamate the data into a press release, and send it to every daily paper and weekly paper in the country.

The results so far have been very telling. It seems that half of us would give up 10% of our salary if we could take our dogs to work with us. 70% of us think that people who own dogs (or want to) are generally better people than those who don’t. And nine out of ten of us select a home based in large part on our dogs’ needs.

If you have a dog, please take this important survey. We think the writers and editors who see the results will be impressed at how much our dogs impact our everyday life. Just follow this link:

http://app.intellicontact.com/icp/sub/survey/start?sid=7857&cid=44833