Butch, alone.

After losing his life long partner, Angel, last week, Butch seemed a bit lost or maybe that's just Butch being Butch.

For adoption information on Butch and other dogs (and cats and other animals), please visit Toronto Animal Services.

Breed based canine aggression study

Brent over at KC Dog Blog has an excellent piece discussing the results of a recent study on dog aggression based on breed. Of particular interest is Pit Bulls. Turns out they rank as one of the most people friendly dogs around. However, Pit Bulls don't do so well with other dogs, about the same as Chihuahuas and Jack Russel Terriers.

What's even more significant, though, is that there is a wider variance within any particular breed than there is between different breeds. In other words, whatever the breed reputation, there is a good chance the dog won't fit the stereotype. Which just goes back to what most sane people have been saying all along: each dog deserves to be judged on its own merit.

Fortunately, unfortunately

This little curiosity of a story is about Horrie, a mascot for an Australian Battalion during WW2. From Australian War Memorial:

Horrie the Wog Dog was a white Egyptian terrier cross puppy who was found in the Ikingi Mariut area of the Western Desert by VX13091 Private James 'Jim' Bell Moody, a dispatch rider attached to 2/1 Machine Gun Battalion. Jim took him back to his signals platoon but Horrie was soon adopted by the entire battalion.

Horrie went on to survive many adventures and became a bit of a canine hero for the battalion working as a messenger and an early warning system for enemy aircraft.

Fortunately, the little dog was eventually smuggled back to Australia and sent to live with Private Moody's father.

Unfortunately, due to strict protocols about bringing animals back from the front, Horrie was shot by quarantine officials. These events were reported in the press resulting in some public outrage, as evidenced by this letter ...

click on image to enlarge

... and other letters as well (here and here).

There was even an investigation about the people who wrote the letters and whether or not they should be charged for libel.

60 years later, though, the real story was revealed.

Fortunately, Horrie wasn't shot.

Unfortunately, Moody had found an abandoned, look-a-like dog from the local pound and presented that one to the executioner in place of Horrie.

The real Horrie was sent to live out his life near Corryong in northern Victoria where he is said to have sired many puppies.

Bang head against wall

The Toronto Humane Society has recently been importing dogs from other jurisdictions for adoption in Toronto (looks like they're learning a few lessons from TAS) and they've been blowing their horn about it which is great if it results in more animals being saved.

Their most recent northern batch is a group of puppies from Cobalt. Here's the ad:


So, they've been health checked, vaccinated, micro chipped. But something's missing and you probably already know what that is. These dogs are being adopted out without having been spayed or neutered. Once more, the THS is adopting out potential breeders.

So, I give the THS a call. The woman who answers the phone is very friendly. I ask about the puppies and how they're doing and about their health and breeding and their vaccinations and the micro-chipping and then I ask about the spaying and neutering. She tells me it's my responsibility to get it done at which point I've got about a dozen more questions like what if I don't want to get my pup speutered, or what if I change my mind after I adopt, or what if I say I'll get them done but really have no intention of doing so, or what if I give the pup away before I get it speutered ... and on and on ... except that at that point I'm told there's an emergency call on the other line and I'm put on hold. I wait a few minutes and the woman comes back on and asks me if I want to keep holding but I tell her thanks, I've got the info I need.

I can't help but think it can't be just penny pinching but that THS management might actually be against spaying and neutering on a philosophical level. If you look on their website, at almost any given time, there are several unspeutered dogs up for adoption. Why? If there's a good reason to not speuter or delay speutering in a particular case, then what is it?

One of the core principles behind reducing the number of abandoned animals is to spay and neuter thereby guaranteeing that more of them aren't produced in the first place. Why is it that Toronto's largest multi-million dollar a year animal welfare agency continues to set such a poor example of that?

Goodbye Angel

Angel had been feeling a bit sick recently and she wasn't putting on any weight despite having a good appetite. Over the weekend, she took a sudden turn for the worse and developed breathing problems. She was brought into a vet who diagnosed her with some severe lung disease (I'm not sure about the details) and it was decided to euthanize her.

Her partner, Butch is now alone and although he has to adjust to being a single dog, hopefully, that will make finding a home for him a bit easier. He's been at TAS South much too long.


Angel, I hope you're up in heaven, ensconced on some soul's warm lap, barking to your heart's content while you wait for the day you're together with your best friend once again.

Dog bite - part 2

An online Great Dane group I sometimes check in with, recently had a member write in about his concerns with his dog who had bit a vet's assistant. The dog was left at the vet's office for observation one morning because it had very bad diarrhea and vomiting. The assistant was holding the dog's head as it was being given a shot when the dog bit her twice, badly enough that she had to go to the hospital. The dog was so enraged that it forced the vet and the assistant into a back room where they stayed until the dog calmed down. They managed to get the dog into a kennel but it proceeded to destroy the wooden door of the kennel and they had to move it to another kennel where it did the same thing.

When the owners went to pick up their dog, they were asked not to return with it. Two days later, the dog bit the wife and at that point the couple decided to drop the dog off at Toronto Animal Services for observation (rabies hold) and euthanasia. Previous to these bite incidences, the dog was described as a "true gentle giant" whom the family had grown to love. The family was devastated and the dog is now, or very soon will be, dead. It is indeed a tragedy all around.

On the surface, the story seems pretty straightforward. A big dog bites, can no longer be trusted, get rid of it before it causes more injuries. While I have real sympathy for all the people involved, I can't help but think that maybe some terrible mistakes were made which lead up to the bite incidences. The first may have been at the vet's office.

Four years ago, Stella, my own Great Dane, had to go into the vet for some surgery. I thought they might have some problems with her because she was absolutely petrified of the place but they figured they could handle her so I left her with them.

Around noon, I got a call. It was the vet's office saying they had called the surgery off and I had to bring Stella home because she'd crawled into the back of her kennel and refused to let anyone near her. She didn't bite anyone, but probably would have if anyone had pushed it. They were experienced enough to know when a dog was too much to handle.

So, here's the thing. The other dog's vet and the assistant should have been experienced enough as well to know when too much is too much especially with a big dog. The dog was probably giving off all sorts of leave me alone signals and that means that either they should have muzzled him or called off the procedure. I'm not excusing the dog's behaviour and I feel really bad for the tech who was bitten but when it comes down to it, the humans should have known better.

That time when I was asked to take Stella home, I rescheduled the surgery for later in the week and that second time I stayed with her and though she was still scared, I held her for her shots and I held her as she was going under. Everything, behaviour-wise anyway, went smoothly. And also, now, whenever I take Stella to the vet, she's muzzled while the vet examines her. I know, it sounds bad - muzzling - but it isn't. It's precautionary and necessary because I want to be able to bring Stella to her vet and I want the vet and staff to feel safe and able to do their jobs properly.

The second mistake that may have occurred with the other Great Dane is what happened after it was brought home. When a person undergoes a traumatic experience, it usually takes a while to psychologically recover from it. I don't see why that would be any different for a dog.

I made a huge mistake with Stella a couple of months after I first got her. One night it was raining quite hard and the backyard was a big mud pit. I let Stella out for a pee and when she didn't come in after a few minutes, I went out to see what was going on because I didn't want her getting any wetter and muddier than absolutely necessary. I can't remember now what she was doing but whatever it was, I ended up grabbing her collar to lead her back inside.

Now Stella initially had a thing with people grabbing onto her collar which I thought we had all sorted out with lots of positive reinforcement with praise and treats but I was mistaken. Maybe because of the storm, maybe because she sensed my impatience, maybe because of some flashback to a bad experience with her previous owner, she thought that by my grabbing her collar, she was going to be punished for something and instead of following me back into the house, she submissively flopped onto her side right into a big puddle of mud. Instead of realizing that she was scared and was already doing all she could to appease me, all I could think about was the mess of a dog I would now have to clean up. So, I pulled up on her collar to try to get her to stand up out of the mud. That's when she bit me and she bit me hard. My hand started bleeding from several puncture wounds and I was shocked but when I looked down at Stella, I saw that she was even worse off. As a matter of fact she was so scared, she was shaking and had a hard time catching her breathe. I tried to coax her out of the mud without grabbing her collar but now every move I made made her flinch. Besides the throbbing hand, I felt terrible about what I had done to her.

It took a few days before things got back to normal between Stella and myself. Stella was traumatized by that experience and we were walking on eggshells around each other. Stella knew she had done something terrible when she bit me and was expecting to still be punished for it at any moment. I was trying my hardest to not force her into any defensive posture because I was thinking that any bond we had would be irreparably damaged, if it wasn't already, if I allowed another incident to occur.

It took a few days but Stella recovered and she started to trust me again but I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had chosen incorrectly and instead of giving her time to ease out of her anxiety, I had played the tough guy and forced her to submit further to my will. Would she have bit me again? And would I have sent her off to be euthanized because she was a problem dog?

Dogs can bite but almost never do which is amazing if you consider all the idiotic and sometimes nasty things we humans put them through. If they do bite, it's usually for good reason, a good reason for them anyway. Maybe because they bite so infrequently, we sometimes forget that they can bite at all and so when they do, we freak out and think it's the end of the world, well, the end of the world for the dog anyway. It's become almost taboo to even admit to such behaviour - not surprising given some of the legal repercussions in our Disneyfied world view of dogs where there are villain dogs and hero dogs and nothing in between.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we make is made even before a dog is brought home. We expect them to be toothless angels. Great Danes, for example, are billed far and wide as "gentle giants" and while many, maybe even the majority, most definitely are, assuming that all dogs of the breed have the same mellow personalities creates false expectations. I suspect (and I'm not saying that's what happened in the particular case I mentioned above) that many people have taken home a Great Dane under the assumption that it would fulfill all expectations of being a super laid back couch potato who would never snarl, let alone bite, another living creature. To believe a dog, any dog, but especially a 130 pound plus dog, would never bite under any conditions is a false premise and to not take realistic precautions - precautions like being carefully observant, practicing humane training, being prepared to use physical restraints like kennels or muzzles - doesn't do the dog any favours. Later, if something bad does happen, to be utterly shocked that the dog could have committed such a crime and then to quickly abandon the dog because it's too much to handle, isn't fair.

I don't want to point a finger at the Great Dane owners I used in the example above as being bad dog owners. I don't know. I wasn't there. They probably tried their best to give their dog a good home. Given the mistakes I've made with Stella and other dogs, I know how easy it is to find oneself in a situation which seems both terrible and heartbreaking at the same time. I was lucky I muddled through it okay with Stella and since then, from time spent with the dogs at the park and at TAS and everywhere else, I've learned that while dogs are wonderful creatures, they are not plush toys. They can bite but a bite doesn't always mean the dog is bad. Very often, it happens because the dog knows no other way out. It sees no other way of resolving a dire situation. In those cases, it's our job, as responsible and ethical dog owners, to put away the emotional baggage we have with dog bites and figure out how to give our dogs a way out of the corner, something that works for everyone.

Serbia: one year later

Cathrine had lived in Serbia a few years back and while she was there, she had done a lot of dog rescue work. Recently, she returned for a visit to Beograd (Belgrade) and wrote about the situation there now.

After a year in Dhaka, I went back to Beograd, to stay with Daniela Đeorđević of the Animal Rescue Center. Nela is the smartest and most organized of the Beograd animal welfare leaders, and a new mother.

Nela runs two businesses, rescues dogs, looks after her daughter arranges sterilizations and veterinary care, organizes the transportation of adoptable dogs to a partner in Germany, deals with the people who care for street animals and the lunatics in the animal welfare community, helps get visiting vets to Srbija for sterilization programs, travels to the kennel where she pays for rescue boarding, deals with her workers, her husband, her mother, and a houseful of animals that are either unadoptable or being treated for diseases that stand between them and a good home.

Nela and Nian

Beograd has changed in the year since I left. It's cleaner. People look less stressed, perhaps because, with the capture of Radovan Karadić, the EU has moved forward on Srbija's membership. While the world is in the economic doldrums, Srbija is no worse off than it was. For Srbijans, that is cause for rejoicing.

There are fewer street dogs. The majority wear the red collar that says they have been through the municipal Capture, Sterilize, Return program. Nela tells me that the number is now about 5,000, down from 20,000 plus in 2005.

Snuggles: the red collar means she's been through the city's CSR program

Not that everything is rosy. Street cats are as numerous and as badly off as ever. There is a large pool of unsterilized dogs, whose fear of humans makes them wily, and fast. Nela, Jelena, Stanko and I spent two days trying to capture two females in a pack fed by one woman too poor to pay for the surgery. These dogs live under constant threat from hostile neighbours. They were too fast for us: we managed to catch only one.

THE WILY FEMALES: they adore their protector, but no amount of sedative could make them too sleepy to elude us.

Most people resist the idea of sterilization, preferring to dump unwanted litters on the street or the garbage. While I was there, eight puppies appeared in the park across from Nela's house. Nela rescued them, but thousands of unwanted animals die every year in Srbija.

The city, under its new mayor, Dragan Đilas, promised no more slaughter of street animals. It continued the CSR program of Đilas' predecessor, appointed a veterinarian to oversee animal control, and is almost finished building the first of three adoption centers for the rehoming of street animals captured by the animal control officers.

This is not the end of the problem: dogs not adopted in a short period will be euthanized. The animal welfare activists, still fighting the brutality of much of the public, are now also trying to get the period extended, or to figure out a way to 'adopt' unadopted dogs – all this without co-operating or, if possible, even speaking to each other.

The Srbijan penchant for internecine warfare has not changed at all.

Since I have left, ARC no longer has space to keep their rescues: either they stay in Nela's house, which is also the office of her bookkeeping business and her hair salon, or they must be boarded. Nela pays the full costs for every rescue out of her own pocket. The only assistance she gets is one moderate monthly donation from a supporter abroad.

Nela has also connected with Claudia in Germany. Between them, they have a regular schedule of transportation for dogs likely to find homes in Germany. Like Nela in Srbija, Claudia does all the work on the German end, keeping in touch with a number of no-kill rescue and shelter groups, finding spots for Srbijan dogs, getting the pictures and stories from Nela, meeting the transport, and ferrying the dogs either to the shelters or, if we are all lucky, right to their new homes.

Unwanted puppy: now at home in Germany

Staying with Nela is like living in a zoo. Every area in the house is someone's territory. The front hall belongs to Nela's old German Shepherds: they need to be close to the door because getting out to do their business is not as easy as it used to be. The kitchen belongs to Maggie, the cat, who defends it against all comers. The living room-bookkeeping business belongs to Simon, a very defensive little dog even less stranger friendly than my own Magic. Piaf, a cat, sticks to the stairs and the master bedroom upstairs, but she shares these with Snuggles, a lab cross waiting to have a benign tumour removed from her front leg. Snuggles had another name, but I rechristened her after the first night: no doubt about it, Snuggles lives for love! There are two ferrets and an aquarium on the upstairs landing, and another aquarium in the kitchen. The bathroom was the refuge of Đoia (Joia), a terrified refugee from abuse who is now in a special foster home in Germany, where she is making great strides in recovery.

Đoia: the dog in the bathroom

Not all were so lucky. There was a small terrace outside my room. On it, we kept Babydoll. Babydoll was known to ARC: we'd done her sterilization, and, last we had seen, she was back in her neighbourhood, doing fine. But she got sick, and the vet her caretaker took her to misdiagnosed her. She got treatment, but did not improve. We took her in and started IV treatment – Nela is as good or better at standard veterinary treatments as any vet tech in North America – but Babydoll still did not get better. We went for a second opinion to vets I knew and trusted. The blood tests came back screaming distemper.

By that time it was too late. Within 24 hours, Babydoll was dead. Anđelko, Nela's husband, buried her in the front yard. We ranted. We wept. We got up and went back to work.

Babydoll: victim of fatal misdiagnosis

Two days later, we received a ten day old kitten, thrown into the garbage in a sealed plastic bag. Despite love, cuddles and milk substitute every two hours, he could not recover from that casual cruelty. Anđelko buried him in the front yard. We ranted. We wept. We got up and went back to work.

Next year, I plan to go again, for twice as long. Despite the visible progress, there is still a lot to do. Too much for the few and tireless volunteers. Too much for the mother of a baby girl. Despite the losses and the pain, it is worth it, every second of it. Because the victories mean another life saved.

Like Lilly. Lilly is at present being boarded, waiting her turn to go to a good home, in Srbija or in Germany. When she was captured, she was so terrified of people that she would try to dig through the crate to escape. She cringed if anyone looked at her: touching her was out of the question.

But the folk at the boarding kennel put a lot of time into Lilly, well beyond what they were being paid for. And she came around. When Nela took me to the kennel, there she was, leaping happily around her protectors, getting her ears rubbed, smiling and wiggling and, finally, collapsing into a happy heap of exhaustion beside us.

We are working up a new website for ARC. Guess who is our poster dog for rehabilitation?

Lilly