doginprogress - Tumblr blog

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Last year we had a significant problem with turtles showing up in the backyard. I was able to rescue and relocate each one.

This year is off to a bad start for turtle season

Turtles: 0

Dogs: 1

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FREE TO BAD HOME

FOUR DOGS OF VARYING AGE AND BREED

ONE OF WHICH BROUGHT A BABY SNAKE CARCASS INTO MY HOME SO BUYER BEWARE

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Ponzi had her third challenge course lesson yesterday and we got into some obstacles that she found really, truly challenging!

I ended up having to physically place her back feet on the tire for her to realize that it was a possibility. She was stretched to her very tippy toes and refused to before I showed her 😅

We also finally got her to dip her toes in the acid bath (water feature) and she had tons of fun leaping through the window.

The barrels made me personally really nervous, as Ponzi likes to race over everything and they were quite slippery. So we worked on slowing down.

This is the first time she really showed us she was worn out physically and mentally by the end of our 30 minutes.

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Squidgy would like to offer you a pillow in these trying times

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No thoughts, only Tansy

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hi! are you open to DMs from dog people in a similar area as you who are interested in getting into sighthounds? I don’t wanna overstep so thought i would ask

I don’t mind at all!

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Choosing their crates for a midday nap over the nice comfy couches

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who gave her the right to be this pretty?

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Birthday sammich for the birthday girl

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Happy happy birthday to Ponzi, who turns two today!

Ponzi, Punchie, Punchie Pie, Bunchie Baby, Miss Squidge, Squidgey is truly turning into the best dog. Not a day goes by that I don’t laugh at some antic or another and she is the sweetest girl in the world.

In the past year she’s earned 13 points and all her majors towards her AKC Field Championship despite very limited running. She’s also earned her first GRC points in LGRA. We’ve tackled a challenge course together and continued to work on our show ring skills.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish in the next year and then each one after that for as long as possible 🩷

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“I am requesting ur undivided attention pls and thank you”

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Ponzi (in white) had a ton of fun and kicked ass at racing this weekend. She ended 3rd (of 9!) both days and earned some points towards her racing titles!

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the face of a dog who was awoken from the deepest slumber by an old lure coursing video

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gotta say, the "id dog breeds" gimmick is fun and all but the thing about referencing biological categories is that they're so much messier than the car model IDs that are being riffed off. especially with anything with a poodle coat, given.... the thirty years of doodles meaning that there are a hell of a lot of crosses out there.

I would not personally presume to confidently announce the breed of any poodle/doodly thing without having hands on it, because a) crosses with all manner of options are so common, b) so much of the common heuristic for recognizing poodle vs doodle is a matter of haircut, and c) it's so hard to assess anything about the structure of a dog with a loose, rough coat that obscures the dog's shape. Frankly, after getting Benton's Embark back, I also don't make confident pronouncements about any mix.

Yeah, that dog is approximately half American Bully. Guess that from looking at him, folks. (I routinely flabbergast dog professionals by encouraging them to guess his breed makeup.) I still regularly read the r/DoggyDNA subreddit, and it's just astonishing how many ways there are to build a mutt and how hard it is to accurately predict anything about a mixed breed dog's ancestry without additional information--especially when a lot of colors pop out in mixes in some rather unexpected ways. (For example: Golden and Labrador retriever mixes have a pronounced tendency to pop out as brindles, bewildering everyone concerned. There are a lot of dominant black pit bulls. And about 75% of anything with a wire coat is poodle, not any kind of terrier.) There are so many ways to get a black and tan or sable dog. If you want to claim expertise, you have to know what the limits of your knowledge are and when you need additional information to make a call.

Identifying purebred dogs which come out of a controlled gene pool is obviously much easier, although you need to be aware how various populations within breeds have been selected and what those populations typically look like. Even then, you need to be careful: it's so easy to assume that conformation shots show you what a given dog breed looks like, but that's usually not the case: both pet and working populations have often diverged substantially from the conformation ideal, not least because conformation standards are a fucking social construct. We have to distinguish between socially constructed and natural categories when we try to learn how to run these kinds of identifications.

more broadly, dogs are living things and therefore they don't come with model numbers or unique serial numbers. "Breed" is a social construct that shapes their populations because, basically, our human culture says it should. You can identify a car very accurately because cars are human-made inanimate objects, and each category of car is essentially identical within the category at construction. That's how mass-produced items work. They lend themselves so nicely to this kind of ordered assignment and identification.

Animals do not work like that. You can strive for uniformity all you want, but mutation is going to pop up and fuck with your carefully uniform lines when you aren't looking. For example, just look at the C57BL/6J and C57BL/6N mouse substrains, which have been bred in total isolation from any other mouse population in brother-sister matings aiming for total uniformity since the 1930s... and were noticed having developed divergent characteristics by the 1950s. Turns out that substrain matters.

And you can't tell without running some very specific tests, let alone from any marker so plain as a static picture.

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No peas for this princess 👑

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Shnuggle time (ft jealous Spork)

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The question came up in an Ibizan group today who the first Ibizan you met in person was. For me it was this guy in November 2016. I brought home Azula, who happens to be a great niece of his, less than two years later.

“Dylan”

MBIF Can/Am DC Gryphon’s Mr. Tambourine Man, MC, FCH, LCM2, JOR, SOR

@sunnybutte Dylan is Moby and Cisco’s great uncle! Owned by the same woman who owns Moby, Dylan raced LGRA but was not entered in NOTRA cause he’s developed a bad habit of jumping the fence. He was very vocal about his displeasure in not being able to chase the lure though.

A hematoma in his ear caused it to bend forward at the tip after it was drained.