OzVet

Yesterday we bought Ginger (my parent’s Brittany) a Buster Cube. (Here’s a really good picture of a Buster Cube). It’s a medium-sized plastic cube with a hole at one end. Inside the cube is a maze-like path created by projections of plastic. How it works is you (the owner) put dog food or treats inside [...]

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So, I’ve begun clicker training with Ginger, my parent’s sweet, smart 3-year-old Brittany who has had very little formal obedience training. (Prior to beginning clicker training, she was fairly well mannered, as your average pet dog goes. She could sit, shake, walk on a leash and knew what parts of the house she could/couldn’t go. [...]

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This is from Dragonfly Farm’s levels program for training a dog using positive reinforcement (clicker training). However, it applied equally as well to other species.
Humans are natural lumpers. We think “This dog needs to learn a 60′ retrieve over a kangaroo” and we don’t stop to think if the dog has ever MET a kangaroo, [...]

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I went out to see the horses briefly this evening right as it was getting dark.
I saw both Jupiter and Venus tonight, which was pretty neat.
Casey Jane, however, was quite concerned about my flashlight. But, she’s a lot more confident these days. So, instead of bolting off, she just followed me around the pasture at [...]

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Here’s a well trained dog!
This dog, who’s about a year old, just won StartPet 2008. Really fun video, you can tell how excited and willing to please the dog is. Both the dog and owner look like they’re having a blast. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upLdskCXAhU
 
This is another really interesting video. It shows how fast a behavior can be aquired [...]

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Animals have all sorts of wonderful and wild ways of warding of predators. Frogs, for instance, will often “scream” when touched by a predator to startle the predator and allow the frog to escape. Also, some will urinate as they jump away to cover their scent and to leave the predator with a bad taste.
What [...]

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One interesting thing about vet medicine is many of the procedures vets do are optional procedures that may improve quality of life, but sometimes are purely aesthetic or purely to make the owner happier. (Think, for example, of things like docking tails and ears, declawing cats, and even things such as spaying and neutering.)
Also, many [...]

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So, here’s a neat little horse mystery I came up with yesterday after some online research I was doing. Hope you enjoy!
You work as a detective at the local police station in Anytown, USA. It’s Saturday morning, and you’ve gone into the office to see if you can’t finish up several things you were working [...]

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A horse cannot breathe through it’s mouth, it can only breathe through it’s nose. So, that’s why you don’t ever see a horse panting or breathing hard through it’s mouth after a hard workout.
Also, horses can’t throw up (which is why they end up with colic and bloat and all sorts of other wonderful [...]

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I recently finished Burton Raffel’s translation of Das Nibelungenlied, which was absolutely wonderful. His translation of the High Middle German is fantastic. The poem flows with a structure and rhythm and is almost hauntingly beautiful. The Yale Press review compares the story to both the Illiad and The Godfather. As well, I found many themes [...]

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