I promised I’d write about the last alternative treatment that I use for my dogs: homeopathic medicine. I’m totally comfortable with someone calling this wackadoo and weirdo, because even I am not comfortable with the explanation given by proponents of the treatment. I’m fine with the first part, in which preparations are given that are…

A comment from a reader inspired this post, about “alternative” medicine for dogs (see the comments for April 15th). In her comment, she expressed great disappointment that I bought into “…wackadoo absolutely scientifically unsupported claptrap.” This is not the first time I’ve been told that my interest in Chinese medicine, acupuncture, chiropracty and natural foods…

Ahhh spring.  Finally the weather is mild enough to let the dogs lie outside and chew on bones. I just love watching my dogs chew on real, fresh bones. Of course, I would never give my dogs cooked bones (I know most of you know already that cooked bones are brittle and tend to splinter.…

As you probably know, we don’t offer a lot of books by other authors on our website, but we’ve just put up Dr. Nancy Kay’s book, Speaking for Spot: Be the Advocate Your Dog Needs to Live a Happy, Healthy, Longer Life. There’s just so much good about this book, and it is such an…

Every morning I start my day writing a list of things that I am grateful for. Sometimes they are big things (Jim, my dogs, opportunities to learn, grow and improve relationships between people and animals) and sometimes they are small (the plaintive Wooo Heee song of courting Chickadees, the deep, purple blue of the first…

I re-read Seligman’s Authentic Happiness this weekend.  Ever read it? Seligman is one of the American Psychologists who decided to focus on mental health rather than mental illness, and yeah for him I say. I’m writing about it here because it got me thinking about our happiness and our dogs. In the book, Seligman asks…

One of my favorite games with Willie is to put him on sit/stay and then hide one of his toys in another room. I release him and tell him to go find his toy. We both think it’s a hoot and get all waggy from the shoulders back together. We’ve played it on and off…

I’m between speaking at Midwest Vet Med Conference in Ohio and speaking at the Interdisciplinary Forum on Applied Animal Behavior in Tucson. I only had time to fly in and out at the Vet Conference, wish I would have had more time to go to some of the other behavior talks. Happily, in Tucson I…

I just finished reading a review copy of Karen Pryor’s new book, Reaching the  Animal Mind (Scribner). I don’t know when it’s coming out, I’ll let you know as soon as I hear (but you can pre-order it on Amazon now). It’s an inspiring book, especially for those that haven’t yet used clicker training on…

Got late today, need to get to campus to lecture (on ethology of agricultural animals, love this topic; showing segments from an amazing video by Ginger Kathrens, Cloud: Wild Stallion of the Rockies–four years of phenomenal cinematography of a pale, white stallion born in the American Rockies through his maturity into a herd stallion).  So…

There’s an interesting discussion going on, on-line, in my university course right now. One of the students asked why some people like non-human animals more than they do members of their own species. There are some extremely interesting comments posted to that question, especially about animals being ‘innocents’ rather than moral agents who can choose…

Much warmer now, might even be up to 20 degrees. Wow, feels like an entirely different place. The lambs are doing beautifully. On Sunday Jim and I opened up the panel dividing the two ewes with lambs and let them all in together. We wanted to wait to be sure that the lambs were well…

It was 26 below this morning on the thermometer by the kitchen window, 36 below at a neighbor’s. I suspect the temperature in the barn, which is down the hill from the house, was somewhere in between. Good grief. I was born in Arizona, and the concept that it is MUCH warmer in the freezer…

What a difference a day makes. Here’s what happened late last week between Will and Redford: Yep, that’s Willie running away. He ran back about five feet, then turned and walked back toward Redford, with me encouraging him.  For reasons I don’t  understand, this time Redford turned and walked away. And here’s what I really…

Has it just been two days since Snicker’s lambs were born? Or two weeks? Here’s the good news: the lambs, at the moment anyway, are doing well. Here’s the bad news: since I last wrote, Snickers tried her best to kill the ewe lamb, both lambs got diarrhea, both lambs began bawling non-stop as lambs…

More tomorrow, gotta run see how the lambs are doing. This photo was taken a few hours ago, when the black lamb in the back was about 10 seconds old… Both lambs were doing well when I left the farm about an hour ago, they were up in minutes and had nursed within 15 minutes…

This morning I tried to get a good photo of Redford confronting Will, but failed miserably. That’s great news… I couldn’t get the photo because every time Will walked within twenty feet of Redford, the ram turned and walked away. I did take a few photos, but my battery died so I can’t upload them…

It’s been a busy weekend at Redstart Farm. The weather was cold, cold and windy, then rainy and windy, then just plain cold this morning at one below. But the snow melted enough so that it’s not too deep to work Will on sheep, so Friday, Saturday and Sunday Will and I got to work…

First off, thanks to everyone at All About Dogs and all the participants of the seminar in Woodbridge, VA. Every audience has a personality all its own (anyone every done temperament tests on audiences?), and this group was a delight from beginning to end. About 150 people and I spent the weekend in an inquiry…

Another gorgeous fall day. Willie and I get to move the lamb flock through the woods every morning. The lambs stay the day in the ‘orchard pasture,’ so called because it’s full of wild apple trees, and the ewe flock gets to forage in the  big, open pasture at the top of the hill. They…

Oh, what a joy to be home in fall on the farm. It may have rained much of the weekend, but that’s okay, we needed the moisture. In spite of the rain I got to spend much of Sunday out in the country with Willie, Lassie and weekend visitor Brody (the Cavalier) out in the…

So I’m working Will, my young Border Collie, last night, asking him to push the lambs into a corner so that I could catch and treat a sick one. (Lambs get diarrhea just like people and dogs do, I suspect it feels just as bad for them as it does for the rest of us.…