Doing some playing around with additional work with child themes and might change up some colors while I’m at it. If something looks screwy please let me know, or if you see a color set that looks off to your eyes also please let me know, otherwise I’ll assume the changes don’t look bad!
Year: 2013
Comment moderation
The number of spam messages is simply nuts. I’ve already shut off commenting on older posts, and have a quite long list of sites and emails and the like that automatically puts the comment in the spam column. And I’m still catching spam comments several times a day. So now I’m turning on the function where everyone’s first post has to be approved by me. At least this way I can keep the spam comments from getting air time. I’m not sure what this means for those of you who’ve commented before, it may require me to approve your first comment too. Just an FYI.
NY SAFE act, the counties don’t wanna…..
Oswego County lawmakers passed a resolution calling for the repeal of the SAFE act. And it looks like they’re not the only ones.
Bird of Prey
I’ve been bad about posting the photos from the trail cameras lately, but to be honest they’ve not been overly interesting. I put out a feed block in an attempt to attract in the deer and turkeys, and instead distracted the regular birds from my feeders. This means 100+ photos a week of chickadees and cardinals…..till yesterday when I checked the cameras and found this following set of photos:
The general concensus on the birder forum I posted the pics to is that this is probably a Coopers Hawk, though there was enough question that it MIGHT be a large Sharpshinned. Made my day though!
Apollo’s new collar
Apollo is coming into his adult temperment. What does that have to do with his new collar, well……
Several weeks ago Apollo slipped his Lupine martingale (a standard slip over the head style). I’ve never seen a dog manage that before, he somehow managed to back out of it such that it didn’t tighten like it normally would have when pulled on, and do so fast enough we couldn’t stop him. He then proceeded to chase the psychotic GSDs (on the property kitty corner to us) into their doggy door. I guess he decided he was tired of being barked at constantly.
That started my search for a new martingale collar, this one with a safety clasp so that it could be sized such that it couldn’t slip over his head, and still be taken on and off easily. Ended up ordering a custom collar from a guy on the mastiff forum I frequent. It arrived today.
Today, hubby was getting ready to take the dogs out for one last potty and sniff the front line before he left for work. Got leashes and collars on everyone, opened the front door, and discovered the UPS guy about to walk up the steps onto the front porch, none of us had noticed the truck pulling up. Apollo DID NOT APPROVE. The UPS guy proved to have enough dog sense to neither run nor freeze, and hubby stopped Apollo short anyway. I suspect however that a large number of our UPS packages will be left on the steps instead of by the door from now on…..
At any rate the collar fits perfectly!
The guy who does these doesn’t have a webpage as such, but he does take orders. If anyone’s interested I can put you in touch!
(disclaimer: I paid for this with my own money and no review was expected or required. The guy who made it did cover my shipping since the style was my idea and he’s sold several of the same style since then)
Pastor Alois Bell
Its people like you who are driving young people away from churches. You should be ashamed of yourself. If you had a problem paying the 18% auto tip then you should have said so upfront as such things are stated on the menu of every restaurant that does that. To instead use God as your excuse for your bad behavior, and to then get the woman fired over it, is simply despicable.
I haven’t posted much about my cats
The dogs tend to be more photogenic, so its easier to focus on them. But a cat update.
For Trouble not much has changed. She still lives up to her name, enticing Arty into chasing her and then swatting him with claws when he does, and trying to eat any piece of plastic bag type material I miss when cleaning up.
Unfortunetly the same can’t be said for Janie. Her health has continued to deteriorate. We keep having to adjust her thyroid meds. She’ll be stable and then her thyroid will go screwy again. One of her last sets of bloodwork showed some odd numbers that the vet thought MIGHT be indicitive of Addisons disease. Addisons is REALLY rare in cats, but its inevitably fatal if not treated, so we tested for it. Came back negetive for Addisons, but possibly positive for Cushings (which is basically the exact opposite). Except its only possibly positive. And while Cushings is technically easily treatable, when you add in her other problems (random pancreatitus, kidneys slowly failing, an out of control thyroid, occasional IBS) we don’t know how the meds will work with her. I HIGHLY suspect that the REAL cause of her out of control thyroid isn’t that her thyroid is getting worse, its that her kidney’s are getting worse resulting in improper dosages of medication actually getting absorbed. But checking her kidney’s requires another ultrasound, which means another day spent at the vets, and every time we do that she comes home sicker from the stress, and we have to re-integrate her into the household cause she smells so odd that none of the other animals want to deal with her…..and I think she’s heading into another bout of pancreatitus on top of needing her thyroid meds adjusted again…..the bad days are starting to outweigh the good ones, and I’m not sure its fair to her to keep prolonging the pain and misery…..
Invite Obama to go skeet shooting
Borepatch has created a petition to get Obama to go skeet shooting with Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn.
Also apparently the Congresswoman only takes email from people in her district. Someone in TN want to let her know about it?
Why I don’t care for Cesar Milan
This post has been building for a while….so sorry if it turns into a rant.
Now, before I get started, I’m not saying that all of what CM teaches is bad. Its not. SOME of his techniques, used on SOME dogs are quite effective. He occasionally makes good points. The problem is that a fair bit of what he DOES, is NOT a good thing.
One of the message boards I frequent is specifically for the owners, breeders, and other folks who enjoy, mastiffs and mastiff type breeds.
We have a member with a severely human aggressive Cane Corso. And before someone states that’s a repetitive statement, no actually, its not. But this dog was mistreated as a youngster and so now will only tolerate her new owner. And she appears to have actually bonded with her new owner, something that is fairly amazing considering her back ground. Her aggression towards other humans appears to be mostly fear based, and she has some other fear issues with a variety of things. Her owner has been slowly working to get her to tolerate cars, for example, in hopes that if he can get her to tolerate cars without being drugged to the gills then maybe he can expand the realm of whats possible. He’s had trouble finding a trainer who’s got experience with fear reactive LARGE dogs. But he IS making progress. Its slow. But it helps that his sole goal is to simply have her not lunging at strangers if they get to close. He doesn’t need her to be a love bug, he just wants her tolerant.
We have another member who’s a big CM fan. And so this CM fan wanders through the thread where the above guy is posting on his progress, and tells him that he just needs to alpha roll his dog to show her who’s boss and all will be fine. I managed to refrain from hitting the roof, but did advise him that alpha rolling a human aggressive dog was a really bad idea….
And see, that’s my first problem with CM. And alot of other trainers to be honest. Alpha rolling, as defined by these folks, is forcing the dog onto his side or stomach in response to bad behavior. Its based on some rather outdated understandings of how wolves work in packs.
Unfortunately that is NOT what a real alpha roll is. A real alpha roll the “dominant” dog does not in anyway force the “submissive” dog to submit. The “submissive” dog rolls himself over, showing his belly in an apology. Its an “ooops, I didn’t mean it, sorry!” offered voluntarily by the “submissive” dog. All that forcing your dog onto his side or back does is show you’re a bigger bully than he is. Now yes, with some dogs, they do calm down when you do that, if that’s what your dog does that cool, consider yourself lucky. But many dogs do NOT calm down when that is done to them, they infact consider it a challenge that must be met. Or in the case of an already fearful dog it can result in the dog becoming fearful of their owner who just proved them-self to be a big bully, and when the dog has already shown a tendency towards fear aggression……
My 2nd problem with CM, is shown in this video:
And since I’m to lazy to type out all that’s wrong please read here where someone else said it better than I would anyway. Suffice to say that this isn’t the only time CM has badly mis-read a dog’s body language, it just doesn’t always end up in a bite.
My 3rd problem with CM:
First he’s showing a perfect example of how NOT to use a choke collar. He never releases it fully, the dog is constantly struggling because CM is constantly restricting the dog’s airflow and jerking on his neck. Then, he kicks the dog, more than once, to elicit a response from the dog. Watch his feet closely, he likes to use the foot furthest from the dog to do it, kicking behind him into the dog’s gut. And then when the dog reacts he chokes him some more. And then he chokes the dog until the dog collapses. His excuse: the dog was fighting me, he was trying to bite me. You know what? Every single living thing on this planet would fight and bite if someone dropped a noose around its neck and cut off the air supply. If you or I choked our dogs to unconsciousness and the animal cruelty folks found out we’d be up on charges in a heart beat. But its CM, he was training the dog, it’s ok.
There….hopefully I have it out of my system so now I can go be polite to the CM fan on the message board instead of telling them just what I think of their animal abusing god…..oh wait, maybe not.