Aerie

I love you people!!! Baby socks!! Freaking genius. We only have a bajillion of those things sitting around. I shall put one of those on her when she goes out, that'll be much nicer than wrapping it and unwrapping it. It's still looking good and she's still not bothering it...so far so good. Thanks folks!

My mom and her friend were playing with the dogs yesterday morning around 8:30. Mom came in and woke me up, telling me that Recon had cut her foot and I needed to come down and take a look. They were just going to wrap it up, but the amount of blood I saw (they'd stopped it by then) was pretty ghastly and she was looking pretty pathetic. So I took a look...she let me poke it a good bit and I wanted to see just how deep it was so I pulled the skin a little...it was down to the bone. Luckily, our regular vet was open for emergencies yesterday so I took her in. After an hour in there with them they had her all fixed up...though it required several stitches and a huge dose of antibiotics. The bowl (no one has any idea how the dang bowl got out there, much less how it got broken) sliced all the way to the bone, and cut a blood vessel, too. It was pretty horrendous and I was having a mini panic attack, but the doc did a beautiful job making it better. I took the bandage off this evening because it seemed the leg was swelling a bit and I didn't want circulation cut off. Swelling is down now, but I'm having to keep her on the pain meds because she whimpers a great deal when it starts wearing off. And Recon isn't vocal at all, so I know she's hurting. She wasn't putting any weight on it at all this morning, but as of tonight she was trying to play with her toys again, so I guess she's feeling better. My poor baby She was miserable in the e-collar so we tried a muzzle... But she was miserable in that, too. She was trying to chew on it yesterday, but today she's mostly left it alone. She's licked it once or twice, but no chewing and no fretting with it. She is still definitely limping. Here's the line of the cut - you can see that she cut the pad of her foot, too, but it wasn't bad enough for a stitch. The wound itself looks really really good. I was expecting it to look a lot worse with how bad it was. I'm impressed so far with how it's healing. I wonder, though, if I should leave it as it is, or wrap it again - although a bit looser this time. He did say that the bandage was mostly to keep the bleeding down while that blood vessel did its thing and told me I could take it off and leave it off as long as there was no bleeding. So I guess it's ok to leave it off? I am so not good at this. I feel so bad for her.

Wow....Dazzle is pretty amazing. And you're an excellent trainer. I don't know how "cool" it'd be in a video, but you could possibly teach her to toy match....get two toys of each type and show her one, ask her to get the matching one. I had a friend whose doberman could do that and it was neat to watch. Anyway, cool vid!!

I have a little bitch (Eilidh) who, on about 10 goats and a dozen or so cows, has shown some potential. Or at least so my stepfather says (I know nothing about herding, really, but he runs a farm so uses dogs daily). She's quick and she listens well when on stock and is just really keen. But we can't push her or try her on bigger groups or for longer distances.... because she's already had to have surgery on one hip - and she's about to have to have replacement done on the other. Oh, and then there's the part where she's SO super shy that we can barely get her to the vet without sedating her. Oh, and she gets started easily and will snap at people out of fear - including myself and my mother - who she adores. She is terrified of new situations, sounds, places, scents, and people. She is SO hyper and will not settle until she's nearly exhausted herself. I have had her since she was approximately 6-7 weeks old - she has never been abused. She has been socialized as a youngster, taken care of, treated nicely, trained with consistency and patience, and just generally treated well. There is no reason for her to act the way she does - except bad genes. Her full sister is gorgeous. She's played on stock but not enough to judge her ability. She's calm, obedient, not at all skittish, really people-friendly, she loves to ride in the car and her hips are only "slightly" bad - not enough to tell by just looking at her. She's been spayed, though, because her owner is rational and doesn't want to breed unknown dogs even though she MAY turn out to be decent on the cows. Why? Because she might deliver a litter of 10 little Eilidh dogs because those genes are lurking in there somewhere. I love Eilidh a LOT. I put in a lot of time and effort with her every day. But my God, I would not wish her on any other person in this world because really, she must be miserable, and she doesn't exactly make day to day living easy. Your dog is shy already. I couldn't even IMAGINE breeding Eilidh and ending up with a litter like that. How could you? It really just isn't fair, and it's actually kind of cruel.

Thanks guys. Yeah, that nice, peaceful, wonderful time period has definitely passed. My mother's terrors...er, I mean terriers...plus the BCs....oh my goodness. Oh well, it was sure nice while it lasted!!

Recon gets 1 cup of kibble mixed with 1/4 cup water and 4 teaspoons of canned food twice a day. She has to "go outside" twice a day generally. I feed chicken soup for the pet lover's soul adult formula. FWIW, I know she's not a BC, but Sage eats 1/4 of a cup of the same food mixed with a little water and canned food and she also takes a trip outside twice a day.

Firstly...hi. I hope everyone here is doing lovely. All things are good on this end - Eilidh's hip has healed and she's as good as (well, better than) new. Recon has been heartworm free for a year now, thank goodness, and all is fine and lovely on that note. Sage has developed a flea allergy because our wonderful neighbors have an infestation and we're having an all out battle against the bloodsuckers (the fleas, not the neighbors)....so that's fun. We've survived the first year of BYB-bred Eilidh's puppyhood. Let me tell you, that dog is a handful. My first year with Recon and with Combat (and Recon joined us when Combat was just 6 months old, so I had TWO adolescent BCs at once) went SO much smoother than with Eilidh. For the record, I see a definite difference between (bred-for-working-ability) Combat and Recon and (probably bred for color) Eilidh...in terms of personality, attitude, intelligence, OCD type behaviours (and by that I mean negative ones that pop up randomly, not the fixation on stock that one would want with a working dog.), Eilidh is just, to put it plainly, a nut. She's also timid and can be aggressive when reacting out of fear...and she's fearful of quite a bit. This is a dog that has never been abused, was raised from tiny puppyhood in a structured, positive, BC-friendly home, has been socialized as much as I possibly can socialize her....I think she's just got bad wiring. But we love her. Anyway, the point of this post is...everyone got their vaccinations today, so everyone is tuckered out. It's so QUIET in my house. I think I love it. But I'm also weirded out...no one is bringing a ball to drop in my lap. It's crazy. That's all. Just a general hi to you guys. Take care!

Recon is 3 years old and weighs anywhere between 31 pounds and 35 pounds. When she's at 31 she's a bit too skinny, but keeping weight on her is a chore. I wish I had her metabolism. Eilidh is just under a year old and probably weighs about 40 pounds. She's a tad overweight, though.

I used the "down" time after Recon's spay to teach her different tricks. I don't recall which ones exactly she learned at that point, but it was several of them. Lots of mental stimulation. She's a ball fanatic, though, so she kept wanting it to be thrown... to get around that, I made her lay down, then rolled the ball to her. She got to where she'd push the ball back to me with her nose...so we spent a LOT of time rolling the ball back and forth between us. It was fun for her (I guess, anyway, she seemed to love it) and it kept her from moving a lot....so maybe you could teach your pup that?

Prayers said and good thoughts sent... So sorry to hear about this

Thanks for the kind words, guys. I didn't realize how attached I still was to him. Going to get feed isn't the same without him there to greet us. Poor Jim is still broken up about it. Originally, Swoosh went to Jim's wife - she was going to do the agility thing with him. Jim, however, discovered that Swoosh was good on stock so Swoosh worked the dairy instead. He says it's really a double blow - he misses him as a companion and it hits him even harder every day when he goes to bring in the cows and he has to do it alone. I am so sad for him.

I know a lot of you probably don't remember, but some of the older (as in, been on the boards longer, i'm NOT calling anyone "old"...oh dear) members probably will... Several years (wow, been a while) back I took in a female BC who was badly neglected. Horribly so, in fact, and she was also pregnant. She was vetted as much as possible after I got her and fed well and taken care of and loved and cuddled, but soon after giving birth to the puppies her heart gave out. I bottle fed them round the clock till my sweet Recon became their foster mom...for some weird reason even producing milk for the little buggers. (she's gone on to do that once more, when our kitten kept insisting on nursing off of her, so I guess she's just....milky?) Swoosh was the puppy I almost lost - he was the last one born, Kip was extremely tired, and he was a big puppy. He was stuck for a while, inhaled quite a bit of fluids, and just had a really rough start. Had to really fight to get him to breathe...so I was very very attached to him from the beginning. Anyway, two of the puppies were brought down here to Mississippi. I saw Swoosh's (the puppies) owner in the feed store the other day and inquired about him as I always do. I found out that he had to be put to sleep just about two weeks ago. He started having seizures and they weren't able to take him off the IV drips after a while, so they decided to let him go. RIP little guy. Here's the lil fatty on day 1: And here he is doing exactly what Border Collie puppies NEVER do....get into mischief: I wish I had an adult picture of him. He was a beautiful guy. Sorry for rambling on, I'm just really sad to hear about it. Recon adored playing with him when we met up at the feed store. She was even looking around Jim's truck for Swoosh when we were there that day.

Such sweeties!! No idea what she is, but that pupper is a darling.

My neighbor has a deaf dog. Mason is the old girl's name and she's a GSD, born deaf. She's 10 now and puts my Recon to shame with the number of different commands she knows. Hand signals and light signals (neighbor also does the blinking porch light thing to call her in at night) and is very very quick and responsive. She has a standard poodle sister who will, when the dogs are called in during the day, go in front of Mason and turn her back towards the door. Once that has happened, she heads to the door on her own. She's friendly. She's fully house-trained. She's never met a stranger. Does not bark at the mailman, yay! She's also awesome during the 4th of July, Mardi Gras parades, New Years, thunderstorms, hurricanes, you name it. Oh, wait...I'm supposed to be listing negatives...erm....well, I'll think on it.

Recon destroyed my cell phone about two months ago. She has a hard-plastic fetish, it's odd. Only things she's ever chewed were a pair of headphones (the microphone off of it), the cell phone, a neosporin cap, and a bottle of lotion (the corner (hard) part of it, and the top). I got lucky - the "nice" phone rep that I was talking to forgot to mute me and called me "crazy" as well as a "whiner who just wanted her way" and that I needed to "shut up and get over it". (I was insisting they give me an advertised price, even though it was an error. I had been told by a previous rep that that was fine.) Anyway, when she got back on the phone, I calmly and very politely asked for her name and ID number, she gave it, then I repeated what she had said and asked for her supervisor. I got a free phone. Shipped overnight. Geez I love this dog.