Major Scare

I had to go to Denver for non-dog-related business last week and while I was gone, near tragedy struck... We were dogsitting another RR (Carmella) for friends of ours while they went to their son's wedding in TN and our "smart" RR enabled three of them to escape our fenced area early on Sunday morning after they were let out at 6 a.m.

Carmella got hit by a car at the end of our 800' driveway, with Pearl and Sissy looking on. She was able to stagger with them back thru the gate and into the house when Gerry realized something had happened and rushed her to the emergency vet.

She had severe head trauma with a fractured jaw and lacerated tongue and it was touch and go as to whether anything else had been fractured or whether her brain was traumatized enough to begin swelling. Our friends' daughter is an EVT at the vet school in Cary and she took her up there early Monday morning for testing. Remarkably, she didn't suffer any neurological damage. They will have to watch a large hematoma on her neck/back in the vicinity of a vertabral chip, which seems to be pinching a nerve to her front leg and causing some wobbling, but otherwise, she is now doing well and on the road to recovery.

Oddly enough, one of our rescue fosters, Shaka, taught the others how to open our latch doors and chain link gate latch late last year. Our neighbor forgot to put the pin back in its slot when he re-latched it the day before and Pearl must have been bored or wanting to chase the guinea hens next door when Ger let her out.

We are so thankful it's not any worse than it is... Nothing worse than being trusted with the care of someone else's dog when something bad happens on your watch...

Grandpa Jagar vacations with Grammie

Mom, dad & Aidan went to a family reunion for a few days. Jagar (grandpa to Pearl & others) stayed with his human Grammie. Grammie has a 3 yr old English Mastiff named Legen. Well, Jag has gotten older (almost 8) and doesn't care for playing very much these days. He mostly runs from his human brother Aidan (3) & avoids puppies (Reba & another pup visited last month) at all costs! Legen attempted to play with him, but Jag wanted to relax on his vacation. After eating his food & Legen's, he just found a comfy bed or couch & veg'd all wkend! Boy was he happy to get home last nite! He licked Aidan's face & then ran away. That's big! I'm waiting for pictures from Jag & Leg's play time. Will send when I get them.

Puppy Update

All the puppies from Pearl's March litter are now placed. Abram, the male with the kink in his tail and to-be-service-dog is just a stunning boy. He reminds Gerry and me a lot of his uncle Simon from his puppy pics. Although we don't have any puppy pics of Max, he and Simon had the same daddy, so I suspect he favors him too. In any case, he is doing very well other than a squeaky voice from spending an hour or two barking yesterday. He weighed 24.3# yesterday at not-quite 13 wks.

I don't consider my dogs smaller than normal, but there are sure a lot more puppies out there that weigh 5# or more MORE than my guys do at the same age. My guys catch up later, but are definitely not what you would call heavily muscled. Our girls run from 60-85#, males 80-100#.

It's important for large breed dogs (anything that will be over 50# as adult) to develop "bone" slowly to ensure soundness in later years, but how fast/slow is best is anyone's guess. Feed a dog food suitable for all life stages (it'll say so on the bag) and don't over or underfeed. If you can see all their ribs, they aren't getting enough. If you CAN'T see their ribcage at all, you're probably feeding them too much. Don't give them a lot of heavily processed treats and make sure they get something to chew to keep their teeth free from plaque. Once a puppy stops nursing, he/she should never be "plump". Once you start training a dog, make sure you back off on the dogfood to compensate for the higher value treats you use during training.

Reba, who is the female we kept to show, is running neck and neck with Abram size-wise, although a pound or too lighter. Her face is definitely female, as compared to Abram's, which is a good thing to me. I am what is know as a "head" freak - I like male heads to be doggy and female heads to be less doggy, clearly denoting a female but also clearly a ridgeback. Sissy's head is the epitome of a standard female head, IMHO. We'll see how she does in the ring...

Fill us in on what's happening with you and your critters...

Mary

Uploading Photos

hey folks,

here's a place to upload all those pics you keep talking about sending me (haha). If Blogger can't handle the big files, I'll just move the blog to my website. here's some details as to how to accomplish uploads

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41641&query=pictures&topic=&type=f

Here is a fairly recent pic of puppies...

mary

Introductory Blog

I tried to do this once before but obviously am too tech-illiterate to figure it all out. I haven't gotten any smarter, but my need for sharing overcame my inadequacy!

Several of you have contacted me with questions regarding vaccination protocols, crate behaviors, training and food, so my intent is to have this be the place to share with everyone my (and some experts) experiences, in addition to any learnings you'd like to share with us other Hope Ridge (or ridgebacks in general) lovers.