Hurricane Deck

It feels like I haven't taken the dogs out hunting in forever. All of my free time (and most of my money too) has been taken up by the project that is the basement. I am attempting to turn the basement into a decent dog space - on one side there is an epoxied floor and will be this shower wall type plastic wall covering on the bottom 4' of the walls. On the other side of the basement will be my ginormous freezer (and I am hoping to add a second), a fridge for dog stuff, shelving for storage, a washer and dryer for dog blankets, a utility sink for washing dogs in and a couch and a television - and carpeted floors. The whole place will be a retreat for me and the dogs. My husband has his shop - so I need a place of my own! Last weekend was a dog show, and I am proud that Heidi Hoser the Three Toed Wonder earned her Grand Champion title. Rodear earned 2 legs toward her Grand Champion title, and she needs 3 more. Sniper took 3 out of 4 best of breed wins, which will put him b

I, in my infinate inability to keep my mouth shut, offered someone training advice on a public forum for their resource guarding Rat Terrier. I told them that when he does the growling bit, calmly walk over, pick him up by the scruff of the neck, and put him in his kennel for a few hours. In my own experience with Ratties, this works pretty well because the dog learns that if you attempt to guard something, you will be corrected and then removed from your treasure and the rest of the pack. I didn't think that this was in any way controversial. Oh, how wrong I was! I found out that I might as well have told her to punt the dog like a football across the room, because that is what "scruffing" is to the "All Positive" fanatics. Of course, their suggestions would lead to reinforcement of the behavior or out and out terror. There were two camps - the first camp said to "redirect the dog's behavior by offering it a treat to give up it's treasure

I am a great peruser (is that a word?) of Rat Terrier websites, more specifically other breeders' websites. On many websites I see the words "hunt[ing] ability" and "prey drive" used over and over, and I wonder what exactly those words mean to those breeders. I found a good definition here, that "prey drive [is the] the canine’s inherited need to engage in the type behaviors that would lead to the capture of food if they were in the wild." In my experience, a prey driven dog means "if it is small and fuzzy and moves fairly quickly the dog will try to kill whatever it is." A highly prey driven dog will attempt to kill without regard to life or limb or it's owner screaming at it to get the hell out of the road. Those kinds of dogs rarely make good family pets mostly due to their owner's inability to maintain good control over the dog. Supposedly, one can redirect a highly driven prey dog into a highly driven performance dog in one venu