Dog things

Friday 12th of October.

Life is pretty much quiet now the pups have gone and the children are all back at school and college.

In the end Raiza did not enjoy his time away from home. He did considerable damage to Karens brand new kennels even though he spent very little time alone in them. Fortunately, Karen was able to have them replaced free of charge from the company she bought them from, so that saved me from huge bill, I would have payed it had I been asked.

I am waiting for Lela to come into season, but also hoping she can hold on until next month as she will need to be X Rayed for hips and elbows as 2 years is the age requirement here in the US. It is 12 months in the UK. She will be 2 at the end of November.

I am very pleased with Lela, she has beautiful construction but has inherited the free flowing movement that is so typical of her mother Kasidi. She really is a dream to watch.

Having bred 5 litters in 5 years, I now have to face something this weekend that I have never faced before and that is taking back a puppy. His name is Ranger and he is a brother to Lela. He was placed with a family with young children who were used to living with large dogs, in this case, Dobermans. Ranger is a very much loved family pet, but has, in the last 12 months, bitten a child in his family and recently bitten a neighbours little boy. Fortunately, they were not serious incidents, but non the less, serious enough to remove him from the family situation.

Mark and I faced a similar situation many years ago with our dog Louis. He was a fabulous dog in many ways but on several occasions in his life he let us down by suddenly lashing out at people by biting them. We had him castrated, sought expert advice from an animal behaviorist, practised dominance training, but nothing could predict his aggressive tendencies. In the end our vet advised putting him to sleep. It was a very difficult decision for us but we had 3 children and our home was often frequented by lots of children and we felt very strongly that he could not be trusted. What made it difficult for us was, we could never pre-empt Louis behaviour, months would go by and he really was the novel dog and then suddenly without warning we would have a situation on our hands.

Rangers family are devastated at having to part with him. He is, by all accounts, very well behaved, good with other dogs and good with adults. He is also a big boy, weighing in at 115 pounds.

He will find life very different here with me, he will be joining a pack where he will be at the bottom of the pecking order. He will also have to get used to my free range chickens, my three cats and my pigs and cows. I hope to keep him here long enough to assess him and will then decide to either re-home him or keep him here with us.

Either way I will monitor his progress here on the blog.