Recent Pics

Tara and our bunny Risi, she's so good with him. She loves following him around and sniffing him, wagging her tail real silly like a fool! All Risi has to do is lower his head and look at her and she backs off with her more intense sniffing. They are so silly. Risi is 8yrs old which is quite old for a bunny, but he doesn't look or act it.


There are some other new pics of Tara and Orion together at the beach on Orion's blog: http://orionthecrested.blogspot.com

I have wonderful dogs. She's up to a whopping 38lbs, lol. I also measured her at the withers and she's about 21-22", I don't know where I got the idea that she was 23-24". : ) She's brilliant. In one session I taught her the the halt-pivot left 90 (and pivot left 180 or anything for that matter) - halt, in one training session. She's fantastic! I taught her to back-up on cue in one training session. I taught her how to shake - which I never did before, in two tries of one session, she offers it all the time now in any environment. She retrieves a metal spoon from any where and puts it in my hand. She's fabulous. I had her picking up and retrieving the metal spoon in one session. How awesome. I really just don't have anything negative to say about her brain power. She's a smart girl.

We're supposed to be in a whole bunch of rally trials coming up, but that remains to be seen at this point due to finances, but I'm hoping to get to all we can.

We're also going to be starting competition obedience run-thrus up here in Maine, so that will be good for us too. We've met some nice people with dogs too.

And she's fabulous about being brushed now too. I can really brush her for a long time now, before it was always in 5-10min increments, now I can brush her for 30-45 mins and she's fine. She's never had a problem with me trimming her nails.

Tara's also really been enjoying the return of our streams due to all the rain and snow melt. She goes off on her own in the yard, when we are out there for any length of time, on a personal mission to go bite at the biggest little waterfalls in the stream, barking, jumping and running up and down the stream. I really should've gotten some video of her antics, but now the streams have dried up considerably, but I'm sure we'll be getting more rain.

We were also in the city for the first time the other night since she was a little puppy, and she had no issues with the transition, the people, bikes, buses, taxis in Harvard Sq. didn't through her off at all. : )

Hopefully we'll be getting to more agility classes too in the next few months. . .

Rocky's Bloat Scare

This is not a Tara story, but I wrote it on another of my blogs about an experience Tara's friend Rocky and his mom Sarah had the other night.

Bloat in Dogs
Bloat is a very serious health risk for many dogs, yet many dog owners know very little about it. According to the links below, it is the second leading killer of dogs, after cancer. It is frequently reported that deep-chested dogs, such as German Shepherds, Great Danes, and Dobermans are particularly at risk. .....
The technical name for bloat is "Gastric Dilatation-Volvulus" ("GDV"). Bloating of the stomach is often related to swallowed air (although food and fluid can also be present). It usually happens when there's an abnormal accumulation of air, fluid, and/or foam in the stomach ("gastric dilatation"). Stress can be a significant contributing factor also. Bloat can occur with or without "volvulus" (twisting). As the stomach swells, it may rotate 90° to 360°, twisting between its fixed attachments at the esophagus (food tube) and at the duodenum (the upper intestine). The twisting stomach traps air, food, and water in the stomach. The bloated stomach obstructs veins in the abdomen, leading to low blood pressure, shock, and damage to internal organs. The combined effect can quickly kill a dog.


Sarah called me on Thurs night around 9pm, asking if I was home, she wanted me look at Rocky because she thought he had bloat. So I told her to come right over. Rocky was huge! His stomach was so hard and almost protruding on the left side, insane. She said she thought that he might of gotten into the bag of dog food (Solid Gold's Wolf King : ) and maybe gotten 4-5 cups of food (which is about what he eats for dinner, he currently weighs about 85lbs). Rocky had gotten into the bag a few times before and it had never been an issue, so Sarah wasn't really worried about that alone, except for the fact that he also drank about a gallon of water on top of it. One of the symptoms of bloat is lack of normal digestive sounds. So I went and listened to Tara's gut and then Rocky's. When I first listened he had NO gut noise at all. I listened off and on and occasionally heard a few small noises, but nothing like when I was checking Tara's gut noises. So that was scary. Sarah was standing in our kitfchen on our phone trying to track down the local vet, and Rocky was just standing there. Not his typical self at all. Rocky is a goofy 10month old Dobie puppy, not a stand in the kitchen and look really miserable dog. He also had been gagging and threw up a lot of food in Sarah's truck on the way to my house. She made the decision to leave our house (around 9:45pm) and go into town (20 mins away- which is important because bloat can kill a dog in hours!) and buy him some Gas-X, one of the suggestions we found online. On her way there she kept trying to get in touch with the local vet. She went to his clinic and caught him as he was just getting ready to leave. He examined Rocky, told Sarah that it appeared to be bloat to him. He wasn't able to do x-rays or emergency surgery though, so he sent her to the closest emergency vet clinic another 45 mins away. On the way to the emergency clinic Sarah stops at her mom's work to get some money for the vet and called me to tell me all of the above. She said that Don (the local vet) had called the emer. clinic to tell them she was coming in with a dog with bloat and they said the price for bloat surgery was $1700 and it had to all be paid up front. Sarah didn't have $1700, her truck just died this week, etc. So when she got off the phone with me she said she was going to the clinic to have them at least do x-rays but if he needed surgery she couldn't afford it and would have to euthanize him. What a horrible phone conversation, I just felt so horrible for her. We (Oen and I) went to bed and it was all we talked about. How horrible it was. If we'd had $1700 for the surgery we would have given it to her. Everytime I woke up in the night I thought about Sarah and Rocky, and it was the first thought that occupied my mind the next morning. I didn't hear from Sarah until late in the day. She wasn't planning on going to work, but I figured she must've since she wasn't home. There were only 3 dogs at her house, Zeus - dobie, Ember - dobie, Bear - shihpoo, when I stopped by, so that didn't tell me whether Rocky lived or not either.

I finally found out that Rocky was alive. He didn't actually have true bloat, he was just incredibly bloated from eating 6+ lbs of food. He obviously got a lot more than Sarah thought he did. He did need to be seen though because eating that amount of food seriously stopped him up. They gave him a shot of something to make him vomit it all up, which took a few hours. Sarah said he literally collapsed into her arms of exhaustion when they finally brought him back out to her. The total bill was only about $250.

Lesson learned for Sarah, the food is now safely out of reach.

I went over to Sarah's today to see the x-ray they took of his gut -- there was an insane amount of food in there. Sarah said after he drank, after they got all the food out of him, everytime he moved you could hear his stretched out stomach sloshing. He is much better today. Insane, huh?

Tara now has 2/3 of her RN!!!

She was so perfect today, and got a 92! Just narrowly missing placement. It should have been more like a 97 though, Oen and I think. She was perfect, I almost goofed at one point on a turn, but recovered. She has a promising career, and we met some fun collies there today (as well as other dogs) too. I cant wait for our next show

Foiled again!

20" of snow means no MA and now CGC. I wonder what's going to happen next weekend to prevent us from getting to Bath, ME for our 2nd RN leg?

Some Tara-girl brags and what's to come

In list form, because I'm lazy and have hardly updated in so long!

- Tara was walking off-leash with Orion, Oen and I the other day, when I saw 8 deer come out of the woods to cross the dirt road we were on, I called Tara off them (she was just starting to hone in on them) and she came and sat at front. What a good girl! Big rewards for that for sure! I don't think she's ever even seen deer, definitely not that many. She's soooo good off leash, and always comes when I call her.

- In our last obedience class, we were complimented on our "perfect" figure 8! Woo-hoo! Competition obedience here we come! She's also catching on to "stand" too, even though I'm horrible about working on it with her.

- Our agility class has been canceled temporarily, but we got to play on the agility equipment ourselves the other night at Gemini. I was working on serpentines (with 3 jumps) with her and she caught on so fast! I'm not really worried about our agility future either (unless you count my lack of handling skills as being worrisome, lol)

Upcoming for us:
4/5 -We go for CGC (Canine Good Citizen) on Thursday! I'm pretty confident we'll pass, but you never know.

4/14 - We go for our 2nd RN (AKC Rally Novice) leg. We've missed our past 3 shows (the Dec. one cause I had pneumonia, 3/2 because Tara came into heat, and 3/17-18 in NH because of freezing rain and snow that made driving 3 hrs impossible). I'm expecting a snow storm, lol. : ) The show is in Bath, ME

5/19-20 - We go for our 3rd (hopefully) RN leg and our first (hopefully) RA (AKC Rally Advanced) leg in Scarborough, ME

5/25 - We go for our 2nd (hopefully) RA leg in Fitchburg, MA

5/26-27 - We go for our RL2 (APDT Rally Level 2) title, and 4 more RL1 legs (when you get 10 Tara's RL1 after her name will become a RL1X)

5/28 - If we're lucky, lol, we'll be going for our 3rd and final RA leg in Fitchburg.

If we accomplish all that it'll be very awesome! We'll see, Tara's really good, but you never really know what might happen. I'd like Tara to finish her RN, RA, and her RE titles for AKC, and her RL2, and RL3 titles for APDT, but we definitely have some work today for the advanced classes and a whole lot of work left for the excellent classes. I think the hardest thing for her is going to be the exercises where we have to heel through an offset fig. 8 of food dishes with food in them! She'll be off-leash and she has to ignore them! Yikes! : ) But we're working on it. Hopefully we'll get there in time, if not we'll just wait.

She's an awesome girl and I think we are starting to get a handle on her stomach upset with some new digestive enzymes added to her food. Hopefully there is still raw in her future.

We are also taking our trailer with us to VT for the first weekend in May, hopefully we'll get plenty of fun outside hiking time while we are there.

Pics are coming as soon as I can get them up, I've just been super-busy and neglecting her site.