New Years Eve nap

Buster snuggled up to Sassy on the couch and Sidney checking them out to see what's going on

Buster and Bubby love in

Such cute little dogs

Here are some pictures of the dogs having fun - The 2nd two actually include Sassy being included in a hump fest with Sidney! She has come such a long way since she came here in July - her personality has bloomed into a feisty little bossy white dog that is such a lovely little girl who doesn't take any shit from anyone - including me!

This is Sidney  going into a shake - he is such a pretty boy!

This is the first of the aforementioned Sassy humps - she's the one on the right - and Bubby's in the front.

Here she is in full on hump position - she has also made Bubby her bitch too

Another shot of Sidney - totally giving Bubby the gears - when they wrestle it can get very noisy - Sidney can sound like someone's dying when he wrestles

Sidney doing a side-face come on with Bubby in a play bow, and Sassy to the right seeing where she can jump in

Buster to my right on the couch having nothing to do with the fun for now - and the other three taking a breather - and one of my favourite shows on the tv - the Ricky Gervais show!

Bubby saying - "Yes! I'm on top!"

Bubby and Sidney looking like the smiling brothers that they are.

Bubby and Sassy looking happy

Christmas 2012

I hope everyone is having a happy Christmas 2012. The dogs are keeping me busy which is good - this Christmas is very hard for me - it's the first one without my father - my life completely revolved around him and I lost him this year - so things are very different in my house right now.

Tonight I went around took a couple pictures of the very few things that I left in place, that I couldn't bear to remove of the things that reminded me of my Dad -

This chair holds the socks and tshirt that I removed from my Dad the last night that he came from the facility that he had moved to when he couldn't stay with me anymore - which is where he stayed the last 4 months of his life - but he used to come home some weekends - about 2 weeks before he died he came home - and these are the socks and tshirt he was wearing when he arrived - I just cannot bear to disturb them.

This is on the top shelf of his old bedroom - I know I'll never use these - but I just can't bring myself to throw them out.

And of course his shampoo and shower gel will remain in the shower forever.

I hope 2013 brings me and the dogs new positive experiences. 2012 was a bad year from beginning to end. I had family members steal large amounts of money, I was sick all year, work sucked, the person most important to me died, and I had no friends.

Thank dog Christmas comes only once a year to remind us how entirely crappy our lives are. I'm not the wallowing type, so I don't do it very well.

Catching up with some photos

Here are some photos of the dogs to catch up on since I haven't posted in the last couple of months - I've also got a new foster dog - Buster - who came up from Cape Breton who's got some health problems that we're not sure how serious they are at the moment - so we're not sure if he's going to be adoptable or not - but he sure is cute.

Bubby looking smart

Sassy asking to be picked up onto the couch

Sassy and Bubby ON the couch!

This is Buster - isn't he pretty? He's supposed to be a jack russell mix

This is Buster with Sassy - Sassy really likes Buster because he still has his bits and pieces!

This is Bubby and Sidney asking why this horrible flash is going off inside the house!

Sassy showing us all her 4 teeth

Buttercup chillaxin'

This is Buttercup directly after she had just had a deep smell of Sassy's ass - she was intoxicated!

Local Media Going Crazy over New Dog Bite Incident

A pit bull type dog bit a child on Sunday in Dartmouth - and CTV news is now questioning (again) whether or not we should ban pit bulls.

They've got a poll going on asking whether or not pit bulls should be banned - so if you're reading this on December 11th, 2012 - you can go put your voice in there if you want.

The story is that the 4 year old child was with another person at a house - so she didn't know the people at the house she was at where the dog was at - and she bent down to pet the dog - and it bit her on the forehead, and it was a pretty bad bite.

No one can minimize the impact of the bite - the little girl's injuries, and the parents anger should not be brushed away.

The child's owner wants the dog destroyed and restrictions placed on the breed.

As well, city councillor Gloria McCluskey has entered the frey and said "she agrees that mandatory training is needed for pit bull owners. It’s a serious situation and it’s time we looked into this. Some of them are probably lovely dogs, but there’s a history of pit bulls attacking humans and other dogs.”

Last year when there was another incident - we get about one incident per year in the HRM like this - so you can tell that there is really an epidemic of pit bull maulings going on in this end of the country - Gloria McCluskey also got involved - (I guess she fancies herself a dog legislation expert) and at that time she asked City Staff to look into making bylaw A300 tougher in regards to pit bulls - she wanted to "introduce a notice of motion at city hall calling for stiffer fines against the owners of dogs that attack people or pets, and wants consideration for a possible ban on aggressive breeds. "There have been bans in other jurisdictions of breeds known to be aggressive", she said. "people who train their dogs to attack or who have experienced aggressive behaviour from the dog should not be out walking that dog in public without proper controls."

That was in September 2011 - and the report still hasn't come back - it's supposed to come back sometime in the next few months - things happen very slowly at the HRM City Hall I guess when it comes to dogs!

I am not at all interested in re-victimizing the little girl or her parents - when a dog bites a child it is a very serious thing and it should never happen - and when it does happen there should be serious consequences.

But each time it happens people like me have to speak up and say that the dog who bites the child had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE DOGS BREED.

It had to do with the circumstances - who was supervising the dog and the child, what was the dogs background, what was the age of the child - was there an adult present - and if not - WHY NOT?

Why did that child's parent let that child go to that house without an adult present? Why was the adult in the house taking a nap?

These questions have to be answered - because every dog in the province of Nova Scotia could potentially be affected by this incident.

We as dog owners and dog advocates can not let hysteria take over - and let the media, and politicians rule our world like they did in Ontario.

We cannot let that happen.

It is times like this right now - that we need to be very careful - and speak up - in conversations with our friends, our MP's, our city councillors - our dog friends - speak up - and do not let this incident turn into breed specific legislation of any type.

Bylaw A300 as it's written right now is sufficient to deal with the dog bite incident that happened with the poor child on Sunday - I hope that the child's parents take the time to read the bylaw - and talk with animal services and understand that what is place right now is sufficient - in the HRM we have dangerous dog legislation - that deals with dangerous DOGS - not dangerous BREEDS - because that's what we have - DOGS.

I really hope sane heads prevail.

And local media - stop sensationalizing - you are doing no service to your readership - we are watching you right now - and we are close to stopping watching you. Take heed - especially you CTV News.....shame on you.

So much to catch up on - we'll start with Cesar Millan Live

I haven't written a blog post in almost 2 months! I think that's the longest I've ever gone not writing anything. 2012 has been the worst year of my life, no doubt about it - I've slept the whole year away - my thyroid has stopped working and I've recently had to start taking insulin for my diabetes - but that has nothing to do with Cesar Millan.

He was in town yesterday - finishing off his cross Canada tour - so I went against the grain amongst all the people I know and actually went to his show.

A few of the positive local dog trainers put on a concurrent event called "No disclosure" that everyone I know went to - giving people another option other than Cesar - where people could learn about and have their dog training questions answered for free which was an awesome thing to do - they held it at Dalhousie University and I heard they had a wonderful turnout.

I however went to Cesar's show - I was saying that I went there to "bear witness" - what it was was a "love in" for the people who went there - at the end of the evening when Cesar was finishing up the people in the audience actually starting yelling "WE LOVE YOU CESAR!!" Can you imagine 6,000 Canadians yelling that to a 5 foot man? I wanted to cry - he had really whipped the crowd up into quite a frenzy by that point.

The show that Cesar actually put on last night really wasn't a talk about dog training - he came out at the beginning like a rock star - with flashing lights, loud music and a whole bunch of fan fare - and it just got more exciting from there.

We never learned any tips really on how to train our dogs - but we did learn that in order to live a happy life we need to get in touch with our inner happiness and we need to be content with ourselves.

We also learned that Cesar has a new show starting up on Nat Geo Wild where he went to Europe for 6 months and rescued dogs - and three people per episode had to compete for a rescued dog - and at the end of the episode - one person got to take that rescued dog home. It's going to be very exciting and we all were shown several clips from the upcoming new series - and we all should look out for it.

We also learned that Cesar is a much more sensitive man than he used to be - in 2010 he was on top of the world, and then Daddy died - which almost killed him, which we can all relate to - but then a couple months later his wife asked him for a divorce - which then really threw him for a spiral - and soon after he attempted suicide. He only went public with this last month when a one hour biopic about him was shown on Nat Geo Wild - but going through that has really shown him things and made him the man he is today.

He has a passion in life - which is telling people the importance of spaying and neutering animals - and also about the rescuing animals. It is now his mission in life now to save animals across the world - he said that 4-6 million dogs across America are killed every year - but 600 million are killed around the world - and he wants to help stop that.

So that is really interesting.

How can you put down a man who says that he's made it his mission in life to preach the spaying and neutering of animals and to facilitate the rescuing of animals?

We have come upon quite a conundrum.

During the evening though, it was quite interesting - because while he was talking he said that he only came upon 3 actual aggressive dogs in his whole career - and one of them was a dog named Holly - and he asked the crowd what they thought the breed was - I knew immediately what dog it was because that is a very famous dog in the world of Cesar Millan dog cases - and he said it was a labrador retriever.

He was trying to show the crowd that pit bull dogs were not an aggressive dog I think - but really, he was exposing himself to the crowd for his bad habits - and he actually showed the 3 minute clip of when Holly bit him.

I'm going to show the 6 minute clip with the dog trainer breaking down all the things he does wrong.

Here it is -



When he was talking - he said that it took him 9 minutes to take Holly to "submit" - he also said that Holly is part of his "pack" now - because the owners had grown too fearful of her - so Holly now belongs to him.

So - after watching him for 2 hours - he is magnetic - he talked about growing up in Mexico - and then coming to America, and his life and how he trains dogs and rehabilitates them - I would love to hang out with him - but I wouldn't want him to train any of my dogs - because even when he's talking with such fervour about how he wants to save dogs and all that junk - he then goes into a diatribe about how he doesn't kick dogs - it's just a "touch" to distract and wake them up.

I sense that he has changed his techniques a little bit over the years - maybe he has softened up a bit - he talked about how in his travels for his tv show he learned things like that in Puerto Rico dogs are thrown off a bridge to kill them as a type of euthanasia, and that in Spain dogs are hanged as a form of euthanasia - I think those things have really opened his eyes to the world of suffering that dogs have to go through - and he really wants to make change in the world.

But I don't know that his core beliefs have changed - that dogs need to be dominated, that they need to be put down and alpha rolled, and stared down, and have permission in order to do anything.

I have written blog posts over the years about Cesar where I talked about the fact that Cesar has said that dogs don't need love, that the main technique that he uses - flooding - is not an appropriate training technique for most types of dogs and why communication is so much better than domination.

Cesar comes off as really touchy-feely, I really hope that his budding altruistic tendencies will cross over to his rehabilitation work and he will embrace a more positive take in how he looks at his relationship with the dogs he deals with.

He obviously has a lot of love inside his body - I really hope that he can start giving it to the sentient beings that he has dedicated his life to.