Wise advice from Lynn Taylor Rick in today's Rapid City Journal:
Terry Besler sees it all the time: dogs and owners who just don’t match up."A lot of times, people come to my classes because they want to give the dog one last chance," she said.
Besler teaches Happy Tails Dog Training classes in Rapid City. Her classes include puppy kindergarten, basics commands and agility classes.
Besler says that many of the issues people have with their dogs can be traced to a bad match between family and dog.
Often, it’s the high energy dog that has been adopted into a family without the time or inclination to provide enough exercise or stimulation.
That’s one of the reasons breeds such as border collies are found in abundance at the pound. “You don’t want to get a border collie if you work 16 hours a day,” Besler said. “They’re a dog that needs mental stimulation and lots of it. If they don’t get it, they will think of something to stimulate themselves on their own.”
When it comes to choosing a pet, too many people make impulse buys, Rapid City veterinarian Christine Teets said.
They see a cute puppy and take it home without much knowledge of the breed and its needs. This accounts for at least some of the 2,643 dogs left at the Humane Society of the Black Hills last year, 565 of which were eventually euthanized.
Dogs could help make better wine. From the Press Democrat (CA):
Joy, a bouncy golden retriever with a nose for bad bugs, may be the wine industry's newest weapon in the costly battle against a nasty vineyard pest.Joy and four littermates are being trained as "sniffer dogs" to search for vine mealybugs, the latest predator to invade Napa and Sonoma vineyards.
Press Democrat Photo
Vine mealybugs are cryptic critters barely visible to the human eye but they secrete a scent that Joy and her siblings have been trained to sniff out. Humans are unable to detect the scent of mealybugs."The idea is to use these dogs to find a vine mealybug infestation in its early stages so we can isolate and, hopefully, eradicate the insects before they spread to additional vineyards," said Katey Taylor, viticulturist at Domaine Chandon in the Napa Valley.
There's a lot at stake because the vine mealybug is a particularly insidious bug. It infests all parts of the vine, producing a sugary excretion known as honeydew that is an ideal environment for black, sooty mold and other diseases. When the honeydew and black mold ooze over ripened grapes, the fruit can't be used for wine.
"As a grower, you can't be asleep at the wheel with this pest. The bottom line is that an infestation leaves the fruit unmarketable," said Sonoma County viticulture adviser Rhonda Smith of the University of California Cooperative Extension.
Dogs, Taylor said, promise to be more efficient, cost effective and accurate than humans in canvasing the more than 100,000 acres of Napa and Sonoma vineyards that could be harboring the vine mealybug, originally from the Mediterranean regions of Europe and found in Africa and the Middle East.
