Your Questions About Dog Training Boulder

admin answers:

Over the years my life has been saved several times by my dogs.

Once in the late 80’s I had a seizure while sitting on the edge of a bridge overlooking the Colorado river while it was in spring flood. I fell in unconscious. The chesapeake bay retriever I had at the time leaped in after me and dragged me out. She was a trained service dog for mobility and hearing. Never had been trained for any kind of water rescue..

Another time that summer the same dog rescued my little sister who was about 4 . She had decided to sneak onto a little raft and ended up floating downriver. I was fishing downriver a quite ways and saw her upstream floating down, So sent the dog for her as I threw down my fishing gear. My sister thought it was a great game so had not panicked and she trusted the dog . So the dog got her out by grabbing the little raft by the end carefully and fetching her in . My mother was running downstream across the boulders screaming thinking she had just LOST her child. Guess she thought the dog was going to puncture the raft .
She was blown away when she saw the dog save my little sister.
My sister wanted to play that game again.. My mother promptly dragged the little urchin home.

Another of my chessie service dogs around 2000 saved me from getting killed in a crosswalk by some idiot racing through a red light. She pushed me back out of the way but the bumper just clipped her jaw. She broke a few teeth and her jaw was cracked. She did not even let me know she got hurt until I got across the street and back to my truck. .

But there are so many stories of what these working dogs have done over the years to save my life or limb it would take a while to write it all.

admin answers:

HELLO are you there???????? You tell us that she just had puppies. Then you moved with her, you changed her food, are taking the pups away for hours at a time…. She is stressed out and afraid. If your dog feels insecure she can act out. This dog needs structure, and to stay with her pups for awhile to assure her everything is okay. She may think the pups are at the old home, and is trying to get out to go find them. Dogs don’t have an idea of how far away the old place is, they just know they want to go where they felt safe. If she did just whelp, then her hormones are also in flux, and she is just out of her mind with worry and stress. It is a bad idea to change EVERYTHING in a dogs life at one time….. I think you will have to work very hard to show her she is safe, her pups are safe, and get back to a routine with her as soon as possible. Dogs thrive on routine, LIke, the same eating time, same walking time, same place to sleep , etc. It may be a long road, for her to feel relaxed again. If she is vomiting you should go to the vet and have her checked out right away, there are many things associated with having puppies, that can cause a dog to get ill or die.

admin answers:

Yes when I travelled by steam train from London to Carlisle when I was a wee Lassie.

The coaches of the train had separate compartments and each had 6 seats either side. All the seats had little white covers on the headrest and there were blinds to pull down when it was dark outside.

The outside of each compartment had a corridor running the length of the each coach. This was good as you could go down the whole length of the train by running along these corridors apart from the 1st class coaches, which in those days were always situated at the front of the train.

If the guard stopped you running along these corridors you would say you were going to find a toilet. When the train was full up people used to stand in the corridors or sit on their leather suitcases reading books or reading their newspapers.

Steam trains made a different noise from that of the electric and deisel trains of today. They used to rock from side to side and the whilstle used blow when the train went under a tunnel it was all so very exciting.

There is a poem recalling a train journey which might sound naff but it just brought the whole experience of travelling on s steam train to life. I can’t remember the name of this poem but nodoubt someone will remember.

Nostalgia you can’t beat it.

This the poem I was talking about, It has to spoke with the rythm
that a train makes when moving across points and tracks:

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

(W H Auden)

This was derived from two conflicting “internet” sources. Thanks to Peter Ceresole for providing a reconciliation based on the original film, for me the definitive version. (2001-06-27)