Rebecca, Irena Farm

Exp handler in NC looking for help getting back into sheep and stockdogs after long break. Currently in Northwest of state but willing to drive...moving end of year to Charlotte area. My dog is well bred, was well started, but we are both rusty as an old harrow left in the weather. Can and will trade flock grunt work (hooves, shearing help, worming, etc). Contact Becca Shouse: text is best, (276)Four F1ve One-4315

In a phobia the sensitivity (where one sees a reaction to a trigger) has crossed the line into dysfunction (inability to function normally around the trigger). Dr. Dodman's protocols are largely behavioral (training) - so seems odd to me to hear he is ignorant of training. It was during discussions with him (for another reason) that I got my approach to dealing with thunderphobia - one which is 10% pharma based and 90% behavioral mod (training). The pharma is so subtle that I can usually use herbals (valerian, camomile, l-tryptophan, GABA, melatonin). The point isn't to sedate but to modify brain chemistry to overcome the inability to "stand down" that defines the border between a phobia and a sensitivity. This was ten years ago I last talked to him (maybe Mr. McCaig has talked to him more recently? But I doubt Liz's information is less informed, lol!). And behavioral modification has advanced a great deal since then! Not to mention our understanding of how the meds work. Humans have gotten less shy of applying human protocols in the veterinary field, as they have realized the result is that advances happen more rapidly there, many times! This is a topic very close to home for me - and I had no idea when I first worked with Dr. Dodman many years ago how important it would end up being for me personally.

Because breeding is super important, and breeders are important to the breed (lol), it's easy to step on toes. Public internet forums are difficult places to say things that can be sensitive. It's easy to keep discussion pleasant on general topics, and not give offense. When one gets into names, and individual cases - it's very natural to feel defensive. After all, one never knows who is out there reading these things. A careless word is impossible to take back.

Kristine/Root Beer, sent you a PM re: noise phobia. I think Sue hit the nail on the head here. It's a year later now - Working livestock is where the ideal of the Border Collie breed lies. It doesn't matter how many wonderful, amazing things individual dogs can do. Come to Rural Hill, NC - the sheepdog trial - in November and there will also be dockdogs there. You will see, I hope, my Sam jump 22 feet straight off a dock into a pool. Also jump eight feet out off the dock and five feet up to grab a small bumper off a pole suspended above the water. It's very cool. It is not what Border Collies are all about though. He's also my service dog. You can see him do that, too. Not even that is what Border Collies are all about. Turn around and watch the Open trial. That's it. Sam won't be ready yet but Ted will be there. This isn't to say looking for health issues isn't a worthwhile cause (dang, lots of negatives there ). But here we run smack up against selection decisions. The big problem, of course, is that when one starts making decisions about what to exclude (and what to concentrate) - which is different from how the breed was selected before, one will end up with a different type of dog. Ipso facto.

Sam's training as a full access service dog is the most intense training in which I've personally been involved. Eg, I have not personally had any contact with SAR or other public service canine training. Minimum standards here: http://www.iaadp.org/iaadp-minimum-training-standards-for-public-access.html I have found, indeed, from a practical standpoint that these are indeed minimum standards. Sam is already beyond this (um, except that darn sit/down/stay). But he has miles to go on the public access training *I* need. This does not count individual assistance task training. So you'd think I'd be eager to preserve this if he required medical intervention to keep going - a blown knee, something like that. But if there's any question that he might be in pain while doing his job subsequently, Sam's buddy Lynn the Border Maltriever gets moved up into the harness to access training. Of course Sam would get maximum medical intervention. And through his help we've entered a world of activities we can choose to continue depending on his range of motion: lure coursing, dock diving, stockdog trials, obedience (rally probably). Would Sam know the difference? Absolutely. This is hard, hard work and still he knocks things over to "paws up" and stick his head through the harness collar. The pack weighs three pounds, not a lot but he wears it all day, and he not only begs for it, he knows when something is missing from it. Sam badly bruised a toe a couple months ago and it took forever to heal. He would look fine and we would go out with just a cape and harness and he'd be limping in a few hours, especially if we were walking on gravel. He healed up just fine once I realized exactly what it was. Before then it was horribly frightening and heartbreaking. This is precisely what I do not want. it has completely changed my perspective on this issue. My life without Sam is very limited. But there is no justification for improving my quality of living at the price of one twinge of preventable ongoing discomfort on his part. Notice I said preventable.

I would expand that to say, "Companion animal breeders are especially weird." I was on a natural cat raising forum briefly. It took maybe three visits to make me stabby.

There's wishful thinking. That's ibased on an unrealistic view that results can occur without personal actions, or actions that are irrelevant to the actual outcome desired. We were talking about "hope" earlier and I wanted to point out, this is the kind of "hope" that was in mind. Then there's real hope. That's the expectation that my actions will have results. It's linked to faith, which looks for truth - hope acts on that. I see bald eagles all the time now in Chesapeake because enough people turned their belief system to understand that raptors are important enough to change their behavior. The reality for me is that I'm both genetically predisposed, and permanently damaged. I can say, "Well, here is my little world, here is what I'm capable of. Lower my jump heights. Play NADAC cause it's easier. CPE anyone? Tunnelers?" Or I can adapt, find out really creative ways to expand my world, find OTHER things that bring out my strengths, box this thing into something I can laugh at instead of letting it shape what I do. Dogs don't have that choice. We give them jobs, then shape every interaction with that job at our pleasure. If they are lucky, we let them "end on a good note" that day. Yeah. Okay.

Goodness. I'm with Julie. I have a condition with no cure. Sucks for me huh? Move on folks, nothing to see here, that's how the world crumbles.

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, A tale of a fateful thread. [skip a couple lines] A member got mobile access and asked a question that day [yeah, I know, just sing really fast] Thirty pages later Thirty pages later! I am amazed at the patience and willingness to keep on with this discussion, of the experts here on the Board in the fields of genetics, research, biology, and science in general. Thank you!

All the answers to our questions are on a forum, from which we cannot even copy information. Apologies to Dr. Mecklenburg, but when the information is out of the silo where I can sort through it at my own brain damaged pace, I'll consider ETS from a scientific standpoint. Until then, I'm just seeing a lot of US Cleanrun people saying, "What a marvelous new outfit the emperor is wearing today!"

But Utility? French Ring? Rally? Military dog and police dog training? I'm pretty sure because that sort of thing should have been mentioned in public documentation. The point is that there IS no preliminary case study available for review. We have something someone claims may be a genetic defect in Border Collies, that affects physical performance. But there is no scientific data for those of us who ALSO are concerned about physical performance in our dogs, to examine. Just, see this one vet (not a researcher), read this article in a sport magazine (not a study, not peer reviewed). Best of all, join an email list which focuses on a subject on barely understand anymore, it's gotten so technical, and ask your questions there. What if we said the answers to any questions on CEA could only be found on the cowdog forum? Go on and ask some agility related questions there.

Whoa. (No pun intended!) If true, that would have been awfully fast!

I've privately mentioned adding a bit of potassium salt to the diet for these dogs to several people. Has anyone tried it? I've been doing this regularly for years for other reasons and have had two dogs with probable EIC/BCC littermates, and one possible actual BCC dog herself. Never had a serious problem. I work sheep daily, and play hard, hike, and have played flyball in the past and now I lure course. I'm wondering whether anyone would be willing to try the potassium salt to see whether it helps an active case. I have the correct figures for Optimum healthy amounts from 2009 so nothing is overdone or thrown off. PM me or my email is in my profile, I think.

Mentioning flyball makes me think of other contexts where there IS jumping, just not the exact kind as in agility. Flyball as mentioned. That would be easy to go check out. Raise the jumps maybe? Watch the boxwork. Talk about the need for depth perception. How about a swimmer's turn at high speed while grabbing a ball shooting from a hole, aand preparing for step/jump?! These swimmer'd turns are often trained by placing a solid jump or bar jump immediately before the box. Then there is Schutzhund, Utility, French Ring, Service Dog, Law Enforcement, and Military training. Have any of these venues run into a similar issue? Science would demand investigation into these similar but much older training fiekds. I'm just surprised there is already money backing this stage of data collection without this kind of basic preliminary research.

Kristine/Root Beer, I have eleven dogs here, plus.of course i've had many rescues. For various reasons i've had to deal with noise phobias in them. Some were learned behaviors, some were trauma, some were almost certainly genetic. Many rescued I have no way of knowing the background. I am not a "If I have a hammer, every problem is a nail" type of trainer. Quite the opposite. But I've found that noise phobia responds to the same method of rehabilitation regardless of the origin. When I fostered, I had no choice but to appraoch every dog as if the symptoms were 100% treatable. I also worked with dogs considered to be incorrigibly aggressive. My method was/is very outside the box and took one to two years. Again, I get the willies when someone says, "They'll just always be this way." Gus was taken back by his breeder and sold to us for puppy price when it was discovered he has early onset deafness. Poor guy, trained to work at ranch level but no more. A deaf dog can't drive, right, can't see hand signals with his back turned? Turns out I'm an idiot. I learned last year he's perfectly capable of somehow feeling, maybe from the pressure on the sheep, Flank commands and stops, and even corrections, that twelve year old stinker, when he is completely out of sight! He's also still got enough hearing to hear whistles if I hammer them at short distances, but that rattles the sheep. I know the facts about these challenges. That's what I need to proceed. Since I'm not a breeder, whether it's genetic or not doesn't matter while dealing with the dog in front of me. I just don't see it. There are serious disorders like metabolic problems and some of the pathological disorders that will be awesome to find simple markers for. Like the MDR1delta mutation. What a relief for a rescuer.

Kass dog. Awesome. Someone start a registry. ;) <----- etc And someone forgot to tell Sam's great-great something grandfather about the crazy red dog principle. Or great great grandmother? I forget. Anyway, Hype's got good stuff on both sides. if she turns out to have this awful ETS thing you just send her here. I'll need a backup SD and a new working trainee by that time.

I had this world shattering revelation at a clinic a few years ago. I saw a girl there with two young dogs, really, really nice. She handled nicely too. They were working at the pronovice level for the younger, and each for the one a few months older, though the girl didn't trial, just farmed. She had gotten them both as pups and trained them entirely herself. She'd never trained a dog on livestock in her life. THAT is a useful type of dog. I resolved id go to that breeder for my next pup if possible. That was Sam,.

Winkies. I don't know why auto correct turned winkies into submission.

Winkies. I don't know why auto correct turned winkies into submission.

Winkies. I don't know why auto correct turned winkies into submission.

About twelve or more actually. When did the BCSA add "Herding" programs? I'd date it from that beccause then a breeder could play strictly within a sandbox completely disconnected from commercial livestock production. Hmm. I know one sport bred dog. Two girls I know, and one girl you'd need to hide if you still lived in VA 45 min from me. You have forgotten how to count Ms. Engineer. <-- hoping that's enough submission and smilies!

Seriously. I beg people to purchase fish from responsible breeders. Birds and other small animals too. It's so worth it. Beta splendens do need at least a bit of spunk, enough to "flare" occasionally, so their trimmings will stay healthy. Shyness can cause reluctance to swim freely and surface for air. Just as with anything though, too much fight and they have stress related issues. Balance is everything. In a working breed as finely tuned as the Border Collie, I do fear there will be even more disappointment waiting for breeders working with this generation pool. Root Beer, you've suggested a couple times that the ETS issue may be something that only exists in the agility bred dogs. I highly doubt it. There simply is not any clear division yet. Whatever it is, I'm sure it has its origins firmly in the working genetics. What if they do find a distinctive marker, and it is anticipatory. This is the same skill which guided my Sam pup to start alerting on my idiopathic disasociative episodes. Having Sam's early warning has allowed me to reduce my meds by half, get back to driving and teaching my kids, and his trained tasks make sure I'm safe in public situations. Eliminate the problem and also eliminate the population of medical alert dogs in the "agility Border Collie" breed? Bummer. I'm grateful for those who remain committed to the true balanced working stockdog.

What Rave said, honestly. As long as "everyone does what is right in her own eyes," no real breed split overall, happens. We've seen this with obedience. And another, pets. Those "standards" are far older than sports. It's still not uncommon for me to talk over a pedigree with an old timer, reach a bitch, and have them say, "Her? Nuthin' but someone's damn pet!" But everyone does their own thing in those respects, or they used to (obedience has gotten really mixed up with conformation now I think). What we'd love not to see is another stupid genotypical (is that the right word?) split. Right now you COULD, I believe strongly, take genetic material from the agility world, a great deal of it, and shape it back into useful working dogs. They've simply, from what I've seen, muddled back into the amorphous helter-skelter balls of chase/follow/bring that some of the early sheepdog lines came from. Once a clear divide happens, ie ETS, with everyone agreeing on one point that is a breeding go/no go, there WILL be a shift and point of no return.

Alchemist, I believe there are already studies for the other three, which are at more mature stages if research. This is one of my concerns. Why not get behind the ABCA studies of those? I think there is an AKC supported epilepsy study as well. Why spread out the attention even more? People are going to get confused. "No, we already did that."

Okay, as a practical matter today, I don't think you can be "for or against breeding Border Collies for agility." I don't really see this as a fair question. The question would be, "Do you support the standard of breeding Border Collies strictly with livestock work ability in mind?" the difference is subtle. You might be an agility breeder who has discovered the marvelous truth (being slightly facetious) that farm work keeps her bitches temperamentally and physically sound and balanced, and takes them to proven Open level studs. To answer Rave's question, have we just discovered sport breeding (LOL!)? It goes to the above. Others on this thread have already pointed to this. A test for an issue that pertains only to agility (not even other dog sports!), ipso facto creates a distinct agility standard. Now lets say my breeder above adds ETS to her culling standards on her bitches, so she only breeds good farm dogs who are also clear for ETS. She is then an "agility breeder" in spite of all the other work she might do to keep stock sense balanced in her lines. This is a return to the old conformation question of a basketball team of {the best players who are also over 6'5}. At that point, "Are you for or against breeding FOR agility?" becomes in my mind, a fair question, not something to be weighed on a case by case basis. Edited to add: IS "agility" the sport supposed to be capitalized? I'm trying to find a reference by a long time participant such as Rave for comparison and can't. I don't want to be rude if it supposed to be a proper noun now, Root Beer. You don't capitalize "Stockwork" so it's not a personal preference to set off dog activities.