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I was going to go throw grass because I don't know if Turf will trigger the same instinct to poop as the smell and feel of real grass. Also I live in Florida so the rest will probably be fine as long as I throw some fertilizer and some water on it every couple days not particularly worried about that sound like I live in New York or something where it's going to freeze and die in a couple days So general consensus is turf>grass?
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Feb 12, 2018 14:14
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| # ? May 26, 2024 04:12 |
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So I read a couple of reviews. Some people like the delivered hydroponic grass over sod because it doesn't have bugs and worms. That's probably more of a concern if you were keeping it inside. Dog pee also kills grass. If you build a nice box for sod and it doesn't live, you can always buy a piece of turf to put in the box. If your dog is already using the bathroom in the spot you want her to go, I don't think it'll hard to figure out the turf if you just pick up one of the pre-made kits. Home Depot had a couple different kinds of turf last time I was there.
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Feb 12, 2018 15:23
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StrixNebulosa posted:Very similar here. Sometimes if I need Apollo to go, I'll play fetch with him or go running so he can get all of his equipment moving, which helps pushes things along. And then of course with that weight gone, he's free to fly around the yard and the house and send help how do I keep up with him When Tarkus has a big one brewing he’s grouchy right before, then once he’s unloaded outside he always does this jaunty trot around the yard with a big doofy grin on his face. 
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Feb 12, 2018 15:25
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Super Grocery Kart posted:When Tarkus has a big one brewing he’s grouchy right before, then once he’s unloaded outside he always does this jaunty trot around the yard with a big doofy grin on his face. Same. Not my dog though, I mean me.
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Feb 12, 2018 15:34
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I'd like to shout out to Apollo for being the best possible dog this morning - I'm sick with a godawful cold, and when I got up at 2AM for a random hot shower he just moved to sleep in my spot, and when I came back he laid on top of me and licked my face until I turned out the lights and we both went back to sleep. And then in the waking hours he's been really calm and chill - hanging out with me, sleeping on his bed, not pestering me for playtime or longer walks. I think he can tell something's up and he's being a good sport about it. 
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Feb 12, 2018 15:37
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hah good to know the poop mania is a common feature!
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Feb 12, 2018 15:45
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My pup is 9 weeks and is starting to become a bitey little demon. We have a playpen in the living room for her to stay in for the day though we take her out all the time to play or hang out with us. For the most part she's good and sticks to her tug toys but she eventually gets too excited and starts to nip hands. When this happens the general strategy is to shout "Ow" and stop play immediately, but should I be placing her in the playpen when that happens or should I walk away first and attempt to calm her down, then put her in the playpen? I don't want the pen to be seen as punishment but I also don't want her to have free reign of the place when she's supposed to be on time out. If I simply get up and walk away then she'd probably run off and find something inappropriate to do in the moment I'm not looking at her.
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Feb 12, 2018 18:22
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Just remove the positive interactions. That should be all the punishment required. IIRC it's something like "say Ow, turn your back, wait 15 seconds or so, then resume normal interactions".
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Feb 12, 2018 18:42
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Teeter posted:My pup is 9 weeks and is starting to become a bitey little demon. We have a playpen in the living room for her to stay in for the day though we take her out all the time to play or hang out with us. For the most part she's good and sticks to her tug toys but she eventually gets too excited and starts to nip hands. I understand your concerns about the playpen, I sort of feel the same way about it. One thing I did with my dog was as soon as she started getting bitey I would immediately go get a toy of hers, like a rope or bone, or random chew toy and try and play with her with that, and if she continued being bitey then I would just ignore her. Now when she gets excited and wants to play she just runs and finds a toy to bring to me.
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Feb 12, 2018 19:44
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I was always told not to use crates and such as a punishment. You want your dog to be 100% comfortable with going into them. So the theory is if you don’t want your dog to associate the play pen with negativity don’t use it as a punishment. Maybe others can refute this.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:10
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boop the snoot posted:I was always told not to use crates and such as a punishment. You want your dog to be 100% comfortable with going into them. So the theory is if you don’t want your dog to associate the play pen with negativity don’t use it as a punishment. nope you pretty much have the rub of it.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:13
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A timeout for every minor bad thing is impractical IMO, they make maybe ~100 little 'mistakes' per day. Just offer something they're allowed to bite on instead and/or do the walk away thing.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:15
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One of the things to realize, too, is that dogs very much live in the moment. If your punishment isn't immediate with the thing they did to deserve the punishment, they're not gonna connect the dots; likewise, if your reward doesn't come right when they do the thing you want to reinforce, they're going to have trouble figuring out what they did right. That's part of why verbal praise / clickers work -- you can give the feedback at the right time. Likewise, there's no point in scolding your dog if you come home and find that they've been counter surfing or gotten into the trash or treats or whatever, because by that point a) they have no idea what you're angry about, and b) they've already gotten the reward (whatever they stole) from misbehaving. But similarly, since they do live in the moment, punishments don't have to last a long time to be punishments, and indeed, there's zero point in stretching punishments out or remaining angry with them. Give the correction, give them a little time to forget about what was going on (that's the 15 seconds I suggested earlier), then go back to interacting with them like normal.
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Feb 13, 2018 05:44
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We've recently adopted a 2 year old Chihuahua, and while she's a very good dog most of the time, I've got two issues that I'm not sure how to solve. First, we crate her when we're not home, but she'll just cry the whole time we're gone. What can we do to get her to not freak out so much? It may also be in part that she had been bought in to the shelter in December by animal control after neighbors had reported her and her brother had been left outside, tied to a tree, with no one home for three weeks. Secondly, we have two cats, and if they start running, she'll chase them. Gonzo has chilled out and bopped her across the nose when she got too much in his personal space, but Little Miss is still terrified of her and I'm afraid it'll become a self fulfilling cycle.
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Feb 13, 2018 07:53
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Has anyone here trained a dog to fetch before? My dog is pretty smart and responds well to clicker training -- she picked up sit/stay/come/shake/etc really easily, but she's never been very interested in toys, and I was hoping she'd have fun with fetch once she understood. (The only other game she likes is gnawing on hands which I've been getting her not to do...) I've been working with her with a tennis ball, and she's finally walking after the tennis ball when I roll it, but she'll give up and come back if the ball goes too far away from me, and I've been clicking when she reaches the ball, and so I'm not sure what the next step would be to teach her to pick it up. Any suggestions?
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Feb 16, 2018 03:04
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Try a stick? Is she a small dog? My dog ignores regular sized balls and only plays fetch with small ones cause she's tiny, 9lbs. Also if you want to play alot of dogs in my.very limited experience like tug of war? By a rope toy and screw around with it
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Feb 16, 2018 04:10
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We thought our puppy wasn't interested in toys for a long time, but I think it was partly anxiety and/or her getting used to us. For example, she would always bark at our soccer ball and walk a wide way around it as if she was scared of it, and it took a few days of her watching us play with it and occasionally kicking it in her direction for her to actually approach it. Now she's a fiend and we had to buy her a doggy version of the ball because she loved it so much she nearly crushed it with her teeth. I think we started her on tug toys and went from there. We're still working on fetch (first she wouldn't run after the ball, then she would run after it but take it away to chew on it somewhere else, and now finally she's bringing it back to us but won't drop it without a command.) I never would have thought that play would be such a gradual process, but that's been our experience. Also, take your dog to a pet store and see which toys they grab as you walk down the aisle.
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Feb 16, 2018 04:40
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Yeah, she's a little one, about 12 pounds, but I've tried a lot of different things, ropes, sticks, balls, and she never seemed to care much about them. She chewed on a rope toy a couple times and then ignored it forever, and she doesn't seem to care about any toy enough that she actually wants to tug it back if I try. I've actually had her play fetch once or twice with a little bear toy that she seemed to like, but she eventually decided she didn't trust me with it because I kept throwing it, and so she'd go put it in her bed and come back out to play some more without it. It just lives in her bed now.  The ball I've been training her with is actually a mini-sized tennis ball that seems like the perfect size, but it took several sessions before she'd show any interest in it at all. I was literally giving her a click and a treat when she would even just LOOK at the ball when I threw it. I had to cut a hole in one and put a treat inside it and then very obviously show it to her before I could get her to go after it at all. It's the one frustrating spot in our relationship -- it's like, I want to play with you! You want to play with me! It'll be fun! Just figure it out somehow! She's willing to work with me, I just don't know how to coax her into actually picking the ball up, let alone bringing it back. She gets to the ball, gets her click, and then whirls around 180 degrees to look at me for her treat.
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Feb 16, 2018 05:05
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This is what I would personally do: Try to make it as easy as possible for her to pick the ball up initially. Offer the ball to her with your hand until she gets that you want her to hold the ball in her mouth. Reward her if she takes it and then repeat. Then move on to dropping it in front of her and if she picks it up reward her. Work your way up to throwing the ball. Also don't click unless she actually picks the ball up. If you click when she does anything else (like simply looking at the ball) she will associate it with that particular action. Once you have worked your way up to playing fetch though you want to praise and then reward her when she brings the ball back to you not when she picks it up. If she doesn't bring it back just turn your back on her for about 10 second to show her that's not what you wanted and that you won't be rewarding her, then try again. Sockmafia fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Feb 16, 2018 |
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Feb 16, 2018 06:22
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Rewarding for looking at the ball, then nosing the ball, then grasping the ball is the first step, but it needs to be with the ball in your hand or right on the ground in front of you. Then you work it backwards (backchain), so the final step of bringing it back is always what earns the reward. I used this to teach my little terrier mutt to fetch - she has zero interest in toys and I never do it without intermittent food reinforcement because she'd quit otherwise.
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Feb 16, 2018 12:52
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xpost:Waroduce posted:Anyone know what this is or if I should be concerned? Dog is not in any pain or discomfort as far as we can tell
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Feb 17, 2018 20:19
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Anybody have experience with a dog who's terrified of specific noises? We adopted our little Havanese/Lhasa/whatever mix about two years ago. She's very energetic and friendly, but she had obviously been abused and neglected at her previous home; she's easily scared and especially afraid of people raising their hands. She's gotten a lot more chilled out since we've had her, but we've recently noticed that she's terrified of electronic beeping noises like you might hear from a digital thermometer or an alarm clock. Just one high-pitched beep is enough to have her slinking off to her kennel and her whole body trembling. She's really inconsolable when this happens. Her favorite treats and toys don't calm her down, and it usually takes 10-15 minutes for her to stop shaking. Even then, she's still weary of the person responsible for the noise. Ever since we noticed this response, we've tried to be mindful about which devices make those noises and avoid using them around her, but sometimes an appliance or TV show makes an unexpected sound, so it's unavoidable. She's so anxious about the noise that she starts getting scared when anyone opens the medicine cabinet where the thermometer is kept. Has anybody dealt with something like this? Exposure therapy is a common suggestion online, but I'm not really comfortable with that, and it's not a super common occurrence, so it feels like overkill.
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Feb 19, 2018 22:53
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My dog hates smoke detectors and anything similar. Our last place had really sensitive detectors so they would go off anytime we cooked. He associated the noise with smoke so now he goes into our room when we start cooking. When I grill outside he runs inside. We undo our detectors while cooking so that they don't go off.
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Feb 19, 2018 23:06
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Lester Shy posted:Anybody have experience with a dog who's terrified of specific noises? We adopted our little Havanese/Lhasa/whatever mix about two years ago. She's very energetic and friendly, but she had obviously been abused and neglected at her previous home; she's easily scared and especially afraid of people raising their hands. Find a treat she loves and right before she is about to get anxious try and overload her with them. My dog was terrified of the sound of our upstairs neighbours, whenever they got home she'd freak out a bit, so as soon as I heard them get home I'd start feeding her treats. It worked well. The key is to be consistent and be on it every time. Another thing my crazy dog did was if anyone would scuff their feet on the ground she would yelp and run and try and bite their shoe. I have no idea why she did this, I got her when she was 8 months old or so, so I bet my brother $50 I could get her to stop in 3 days. He accepted because she would just go crazy about it. I took the same approach. I used clicker training with her already, so I would start to scuff my feet and immediately click the clicker before she freaked out, and gave her a treat, over and over, and I did it a few times a day over the three days and at the end the worst that she would do would be run up and sniff my foot. No yelping, no biting shoes, etc. I used the clicker for the upstairs noises as well, forgot to mention.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:40
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Besides the horrible website and music......does this look like a good breeder? http://www.luvashihtzu.com/index.html I am interested in getting a shih tzu and this breeder is close to me.
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Feb 24, 2018 01:03
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When do puppies start to calm down in terms of energy levels? Related question, how do you keep dogs occupied during work hours? I work from home with our 7 month old rescue pup and it's starting to drive me nuts. On rare days she sleeps all day and leaves me alone, but most days she needs more playtime than I can give her. I feel bad crating her for long hours...should I? I tried taking her out to play for 5 minutes every hour or so, and all it seems to do is rile her up. We walk her in the morning and take her to the park in the evenings and feed her with Kongs to keep her occupied, but she goes through them really quickly. She has open access to the backyard (not to mention tons of toys) but doesn't go out unless I'm there with her. She drags around things like shoes and bedsheets when she's bored, not super destructive - yet. Doggy daycare is not affordable unfortunately. Edit: innocent looking puppy on top of completely mangled, formerly clean and made up bed  Double edit: also discovered that she's still having occasional accidents so I'm overall feeling like a lovely dog owner. I'm sure this can all be solved with more crate time right? I just thought she'd gotten past the point where she needed to be supervised every second of the day but evidently not. Winter Rose fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 01:29
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Jacco posted:Besides the horrible website and music......does this look like a good breeder?
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Feb 24, 2018 01:33
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We are adopting a senior beagle that has no apparent history of dental care. The pound vet pulled almost all of her teeth - she has no molars now, just canines and a few front teeth. We have an appointment with our vet on Monday, but we're getting the dog on Friday. Are there any issues with feeding a dog just wet food? I realize there are some foods that are just "toppings", which aren't meant for nutrition, but a regular can of say Blue Buffalo Homestyle should be OK as a sole source of food, right? Is there a different kind of bagged food that is soft enough to be gummed? Thanks!
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Mar 1, 2018 15:15
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You can also soak your dry food in some water first.
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Mar 1, 2018 15:54
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Winter Rose posted:When do puppies start to calm down in terms of energy levels? Related question, how do you keep dogs occupied during work hours? I work from home too and I have a 1-1/2 yr old border collie-lab mix, so it’s probably similar to your situation. My solution has been exercise, exercise, exercise. I try to have two 15-20 minute intense playtimes (fetch in the yard, mostly) in the morning and another 2 in the afternoon. If we can go to the dog park for at least an hour or take a 3+ mile run then he doesn’t really need any other playtime that day. Your dog is likely too young for long runs but sprints are probably ok. I also do 10 minute trick training sessions if he’s being annoying. In addition to the kongs there are food dispenser balls that you could try. Sometimes I spread his dry food all over the floor to make mealtimes last longer. More time in the crate will only help if it’s combined with more exercise. Or you could get another dog for her to annoy 
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Mar 1, 2018 16:14
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Joburg posted:Or you could get another dog for her to annoy I did this. I got my dog a smaller dog. Unfortunately, smaller dog has been on heartworm treatments and won't be cleared to really go nuts for two more weeks.
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Mar 1, 2018 19:15
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Joburg posted:I work from home too and I have a 1-1/2 yr old border collie-lab mix, so it’s probably similar to your situation. My solution has been exercise, exercise, exercise. That sounds like a good regime. Adding 30-40 minutes of fetch every day sounds easy enough. I've been waiting for her to get old enough to go on runs with me (the internet seems to think 9 months is when they can start?) She also really mellows out when she's lying in the sun, but I have to be out there with her and it's been too cold for me to work outside for long periods.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:58
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Phenotype posted:Has anyone here trained a dog to fetch before? Things that worked really well for me: Playing tug will make the toy interesting. Throw the toy a *really* short distance (like a couple of feet) and resume the game of tug as she picks up the toy. The reward is the resumption of the game of tug. Increase the distance that you are throwing the toy.. Use treats to aid with drop it. (or second toy). I then changed to the firehose style toys, which are really tough, easy to throw and floats. At this point, she would often loose focus whilst retrieving the toy, so I had a second, identical toy to aid with recall. (most interesting toy is always the one in your hand). This also helps with 'drop it'.
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Mar 2, 2018 00:33
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RusteJuxx posted:We are adopting a senior beagle that has no apparent history of dental care. The pound vet pulled almost all of her teeth - she has no molars now, just canines and a few front teeth. We have an appointment with our vet on Monday, but we're getting the dog on Friday. Post some picks of the pup. Old lazy fat beagles are the best.
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Mar 2, 2018 06:31
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i kind of want to get samoyed. will i be spending every day washing it after walking it?
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Mar 4, 2018 23:54
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No personal experience with them, but I do distinctly remember some neighbors with one bitching about it.
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Mar 5, 2018 03:03
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It’s a herding dog. Unless you’ve got lots of space and lots of time for exercise/training/play, you’re gonna have a very bored dog and come home to destruction every day. E: Also, in answer to your question, yes you will. BAGS FLY AT NOON fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 04:00
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Hope this is the thread for this: Anyone have any experience with any dog walkers in the DC area? Not sure what my schedule is going to be this summer and beyond, but I may be away for long stretches some days and would like to get him out of the house. Are there any types of licenses or certifications I should look for when shopping around for one?
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Mar 5, 2018 04:03
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How do dog walkers work in general? Do you give them a key to your house and you just have to trust them with that?
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Mar 5, 2018 04:07
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| # ? May 26, 2024 04:12 |
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bamhand posted:How do dog walkers work in general? Do you give them a key to your house and you just have to trust them with that? Yes. Ours came on a personal recommendation from a friend.
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Mar 5, 2018 04:36
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