Marble

lady is just gorgeous, and she has a big personal space (unlike dresden) so she wants to be petted and all that but she won't sit with you or sleep right next to you, she'd rather be in the same room where you are but like eight feet away...........i often look up and she's just hanging out looking at me with her eyes all bright and pretty and with a big smile......she's doing it right now as a matter of fact. what cracks me up about dresden is for one thing, she has never ever once looked innocent, she always looks like she's up to something. the funniest thing about her is all of her drawn out groaning and whining and sighing all combined with yawns and scratching the floor of her crate when she moves, usually when she wants to be let out of her crate in the morning........

he sounds awesome! let us know what happens and when you are going to see him..........GOOD LUCK TO YOU AND FREEBEE

yeah, my parents had a weimeraner and my mother took german classes at some point so she pronounces the w as a v, so now i do too, people always look at me funny........i've always thought they were awesome dogs.....

thanks you all :) she is improving so much with people and it is incredibly nice, if i could just get her to listen better :) she has a selective hearing problem..........

hope he coninues to improve behle :) is his fur growing back quickly? i still have that picture of his bald leg in my head.......

i've had three purebred labs and now have two mutts, lady is an american eskimo mix and dresden is an australian cattle dog/doberman mix. they are the healhiest, most interesting (good and bad) dogs i've ever owned, at this point, although i admire many pure breeds i don't think i'd own one.........

You all know how bad Dresden has been, I took her to the beach this spring and she was a nightmare with everything......and when my four neices and nephews came last fall (she was still really young) she was really bad with them and had to be leashed all the time she was around them. Well, I have been really worried that she would never be good around kids and the last week or so my nephews and niece have been visiting again and she has been GREAT with them, one of the boys has a lot of issues and she has been especially good with him. I am so so relieved! It's almost like having a partway normal dog all of a sudden! Except for a couple jumping incidents she has been very sweet and tolerant :) I'm still sort of shocked at how good she's been......... :D

as an add-on to my post yesterday, i have been working with dresden on several things - sit, down, etc- and she has gotten pretty good, a couple days ago i started teaching her "heel" (now bearing in mind that this is a very impatient dog that pulls ALL the time), i've only worked with her twice (and the first time was in my yard) and she is already getting it! it really is impressive how much dogs will do for you on their own if you're not forcing and jerking and if you reward the positive behavior! :):):)

wow, your stories make dresden look angelic.........she likes to get into things but usually they are small temptations like used kleenex, socks and the like......

i've just started clicker training and even though my dog is a maniac it has been very effective, if you can find a trainer it would be well worth it though, as coordinating the process and timing the click would be easier with someone experienced to help.......good luck, let us know how it goes! :)

He's gorgeous!

here we go, from the great links bk posted.......thanks bk, i really enjoyed reading over them, it is good to see in depth, detailed information instead of the usual shallow articles that just touch on issues. she really has inproved in many ways compared to where she was when i first got her but she also has a long way to go still........she's still growing too......here are some comments from the first site that i thought were really good, i especially like the first one :) [b]I agree some time should be allowed while the dog's nervous energy matures before serious training begins. And heelers tend to be very dominance-oriented. Many domesticated dogs, while they display the standard dominance-submission behaviors of wild dogs, do so sort of lackadaisically and it isn't all that important to them. Many heelers find this posturing an essential part of meeting any new dog. Mine only mouths me, as a greeting. And, with training and maturity, the behavior is slowly diminishing[/b]

maybe a big part of dresden's issue is that i did not adopt her till she was already four months, and she had been at the pound for two weeks......i have no idea where she was before that but i saw her the day after the pound picked her up and she was your typical healthy, active puppy. or maybe it's the dobie/acd mix.........who knows. she's coming but she has these stages where she won't do anything i tell her unless i'm standing over her........and we do practice. my dogs (i've always had labs previous to my current two) for some reason have always been hard for me to train, i know before it was because i did not know much but i know a lot more now and am doing a lot of things right...... i was just curious what your experieces had been like with your dogs.....i was hoping i was not the only one with a difficult dog......slim made me jealous........

hey, i've been wondering two things...... first, have a lot of you felt like you spent so much energy just keeping your 12-18 month puppy in line that you were not able to accomplish much in the way of serious training? like more challenging things than sit, down, short stays, tricks and stuff along those lines? second, when your dog reached 18-24 months did you feel like training went more easily and your dog caught on faster? just curious, dresden is going through another one of her many challenging stages.....just curious what your experiences have been like with your dogs :) THANKS!!!!!!

i'm with bk, my favorites are the two mutts i have right now, they are awesome, even though dresden really needs to grow up (like right now, i'm ready for this puppy crap to be over with......she's about 14 months) i'd love to have a english mastiff, a weimeraner, a whippet, a greyhound, a pointer, a brittany, a doberman, i like a bunch of terriers, etc etc etc. ELLIE- your dog is absolutely amazingly breathtaking awesome looking!!!!!!! do you have some more pictures?????? please :)

i can't wait to see pictures, he sounds awesome!

poor puppy, that is sad, please keep us updated.

hey behle- i hope he gets better fast! he looks so embarassed about his leg, his hair will be back before he knows it. he, at least he has nice muscular legs to strut around :) although i guess dogs might not think that way..........

Well done Paul and Slim, very impressive responses!

[quote name='"bk_blue"']I want a Dobe, I want a Dobe, I want a Dobe *stops drooling* :lol: [quote] ditto ditto ditto, i love dobies and every time i see one it gets worse, although my brother has a female red dobie and she is a really wierd dog, all insecure and very extremely aloof, like beyond aloof. she's also on meds (replacement hormones.....) so she doesn't pee all over the place when she gets remotely excited...which is a lot. all that to say that even though i really want one i'd get one from someone who was a really good breeder or i'd adopt a dog from the pound...... as for the original question.....lady was saved by my brothers friends mother whose son (:)) snagged her from some idiot who had been abusing her, (she was scared to death anytime we went to pet her, but she got over that in about a week, she's pretty resilient somehow), the mother had been awesome and took her to the vet and got her taken care of and everything. my brother had her for several years and then he was overwhelmed by running his own business and working twelve hour days while in school full-time so we took her and have had her since, and dresden i adopted from the pound here last august.

[quote name='Horsefeathers!'][quote name='courtnek'][quote]1 Standard Poodle (male~ Perry-NO) 1 Toy Poodle (female~ Peanut) 1 Black Lab (male~ Tucker Dedicated) 1 Pit Bull/Boxer mix (female~ Penny) 1 Mini Schnauzer (male~ Simon) 2 Lhasa Apso doggers (male and female~ Fred and Missy) 1 Chihuahua Mastiff... ok, no such thing, technically, but he's huge for a Chi (male~ Chico) [/quote] GEEZ Horsefeathers! you running a kennel there? :lol: :lol: :lol:[/quote] Nope, they're pretty much running me instead of the other way around. Oh well, if I'm lucky, I get a corner of the bed... the corner with NO covers. :-?[/quote] Although with that many dogs on the bed do you need covers :):):)

I just have to put in my two cents. For starters, way back in the dark ages when I was a child ( slight exageration but I just had a birthday so I feel old), we had labs and fed them Purina, for a while it at least did not do really bad damage but then we had one start really really bad diarhhea (SP??), as soon as we switched her food she was fine, like immediatly fine. PURINA IS TRASH. Then we fed Nutro Max, Lamb and Rice, of course since it was better than Purina we thought everything was great, their coats were nice and they acted healthy so we thought they were fine, and that's what my dogs ate until last fall. Then I got Dresden, a young dog at the time. My brother talked my into Eukanaba, and not knowing any better I fed that to her. She was such a psychotic maniac that I almost took her back to the pound more than once, and that says a lot because I don't give up easily. After four months of heck with her and almost throwing it the towel, I ran across an article by Liz Palika. Her basic point was that too many carbohydrates will make dogs hyperactive and annoying, like way way hyperactive. She'd done studies of the results of changing to a lower carb diet for many years and had all kinds of results listed so I switched Dresden onto DIAMOND dog food. I have never ever in my life seen such a fast behavior change, in less than three days I could see a substantial difference in her behavior, and her poops. EUKANABA is trash. Expensive trash in pretty bags, all you have to do is look at the texture, it's all corn meal and crap. I have now switched both my dogs onto Diamond and I would highly recommend it to anyone, I read up on it and I don't pretend to be a food expert but the results of feeding it are amazing. They both look gorgeous, and other people tell me that a lot, I'm not just biased :) I coud rant and rave about Diamond food and how it changed our lives and how it's the dogs bark, and on and on but I won't. Look at their ingredient list and see what you think.........:)

your little puppy is beautiful!!!!!!!!!!!! great pictures.........keep them coming :)

i wish you lots of wisdom in this, i've had three labs all with very serious health problems, i love them but i'd never have another one, it is to hearbreaking for me. they all had really bad hip problems and a myriad of other health problems. i would really really really recommend going all the way and seeing them in their environment and checking out the parents very very carefully. GOOD LUCK :)

hey, let us know how it goes! is blitz going with you to meet him? :) let us know what the puppy is like, sounds really cute,.