Animalix - Magazine

  Discussions on dealing with aggressive dogs usually turns in the direction of how to deal with these situations when they occur but should be directed to prevention. People speak of correction and control in training when they should speak of refocusing and promoting correct behavior. As a long term Flyball team member, captain of a consistent top ten team, owner of several successful Flyball dogs, and mostly as a professional trainer who has a large amount of experience in solving aggression cases; I am going to put my two cents in. First of all, let's clarify prey-drive versus chase drive. A prey driven dog will chase with a great deal of focus on the object it is pursuing and a definite goal of attaining access to its target. A chase driven dog will also chase but usually not with the same intensity or absolute drive to reach its target as the end goal. Many of you have done chase games with both types of dogs. The prey driven dog will drive as hard as it can until it reaches ...

Whether you realize it or not, your dog playing with a squeaker toy could be them expressing prey drive. The same goes for them chasing a ball or fetching a stick. When a dog is staring down a squirrel or sniffing along the path where a cat has just been, that is many generations of carnivorous predatory behavior at work. Prey drive is what motivates carnivores to continue to hunt for their next meal. While pet dogs rarely need to hunt for food, the silent staring, the stalking, the chasing, and the biting (whether to grab or kill) are all part of the prey drive. The prey is usually a small animal, such as a cat, frog, squirrel or bird, but some dogs will hunt deer or even other dogs. Sometimes these normal prey drive instincts cross into behavior that is not appropriate for modern dog life. When your dog is chasing cats, deer, squirrels, or other small dogs, their strong sense of prey drive poses safety concerns. People, pets, and wildlife can be in danger if a dog’s prey drive escala...

  On one side, the dogs ate the traditional diet of kibble the dry food in the bowl. Here's what's really cool. On the other side, they replicated that same bowl, but they just didn't cook it. It's the same bowl and cooked with fresh vegetables and fresh meat. And so what kind of impact would that have on animals under a microscope, the results were unbelievable. The animals that ate the bowl uncooked, not only had a better microbiome, but a more diverse microbiome. So when I traveled to the university in London King's College, Dr. Tim Spector, one of the most cited scientists in the entire world microbiologist, he told me, my friend, the more diverse that your dog and cat's bellies are, the longer they'll live. And if there's ever a time to add a little bit of fresh food at the good Lord put on this planet for all of us to share, share with your pets. Okay, the last tip of the day for you guys, what would it be? environmental factors. Now, this is a tou...

  The second tip we were talking about, and this one is really important. caloric restriction. If you talk to the top scientists in the world, you said How did we go from 11.3 years all the way to 10? How did we do that? Scientists will tell you it's caloric restriction. That's the problem. Why? If we were to look at the pet obesity statistics worldwide right now, let's take the top eight countries in the world, my friends, we are seeing a huge increase in pet obesity. If you were to average all the major countries around the world, over 51% of animals, dogs and cats are overweight or obese today. That's a huge problem. So what can we do? In the first study of its kind, scientists wanted to know what would happen if they took two groups of dogs. One group is the way that we all feed our dogs. Just put food in the bowl he'll eat when he wants to eat. And then the other group, let's just take 25% out of the bowl. What did that do to the overall longevity of the an...

  And if Tigger could explain herself very quickly to you guys, she probably tell you, she loves pizza. She hates cats. And there's a scuole family that's on the other side of the fence. Every morning, they tease her. She hates them too. But that's not the most incredible part of the story. This dogs pet parents, Julie Morris and Brady unknowingly had no idea. They were raising the 10th all this dog in the world today, a 22 year old Pitbull. Which is incredible, he still going strong. And so for a lot of pet parents today, when we say 22 We're like, jeez, Holy smokes. You know, we've heard of like the 14 or the 15 year old dog, but 22? Is it achievable? What if I told you, my friends that once upon a time, the 20 year old dog may have been a natural thing. You see if we go back 8000 years ago, before the Bible. In the second oldest surviving piece of Western literature, there was a story that was written by Homer. And the story was called the Odyssey. In what you...