It might be an unrealistic expectation, but what do you do when your clients expect your work to be fast, cheap, and good?
My brother has a sign in his office. It reads: “You can have it fast, cheap or good—select any two.” Despite the obvious wisdom of this cliché, some pet owners demand all three:
If you look in veterinary literature, you will find reports of Bull Terriers who destructively bite their own tails. These dogs are so persistent that they often do enough damage to require removal of the tail. The odd thing about this disorder is that removing the tail may not stop the behavior. Some dogs continue to bite at the place where a tail should be.
This month’s column isn’t exactly about behavior. It’s about the broader effects of behavior and why I became a trainer and behaviorist. It all started about 35 years ago. I was out of college with no real desire to pursue my chosen profession: architecture.
Bumper was an Australian Shepherd mix who belonged to my roommate, Dan, when I was a young shelter manager. Dan liked to let Bumper run loose through the neighborhood each evening at dinner time. After dinner, Dan would want Bumper to come home. That’s when the trouble started.
My first cattle dog was named Megan. When I met her, she was four months old and on “death row” at my shelter. She was about to be killed because of the heinous offense of chasing livestock—a task she was genetically designed for. Go figure.
Barking is a problem for just about everyone other than New Zealand shepherds. They use “Huntaway” dogs to drive sheep with incessant barking. I don’t blame the sheep. For most people, incessant barking is a problem. People can be driven from their apartments or condos because their dogs bark incessantly. Shelters have trouble featuring adoptable animals because they cannot hear amid barking dogs in a kennel.
I have a cattle dog that belongs to a common subspecies of domestic dog—canis manducatione—the chewing dog. He does have a small underbite, which makes me think part of his problem is improper occlusion. I will be fixing that problem in the near future, but for the moment (and for the last 10 months) I have been dealing with a super chewer. That brings up the topic of chew toys.
One day, a hearing impaired friend asked Mike Sapp if he had ever known of a dog being trained to assist a deaf person. At the time, it didn’t seem like a particularly momentous occasion, but it was destined to change Mike’s life. Today, almost 30 years and thousands of service and hearing dogs later, Mike is the COO and founder of “Paws with a Cause” in Wayland, Michigan.