Posted by Angela Granchelli on October 30, 2011 0 Comments
If you missed our TV appearance, no worries you can check it out on Facebook. It was fun! Thanks Heidi, Michelle, Sean, Leanne, and Deb. And the gorgeous poochies of course...
We knew this would be a great opportunity to showcase a couple of our favorite local rescued dogs!
Bosco owns a great firefighter named Sean O'Hanley. Sean rescued Bosco the Heinz 57 since he was waiting a long time for his forever home. At best guess he is a Rottie/Shepherd mix. He's well trained and well socialized...full of confidence and good spirit.
We met Sean years ago when delivering a foster dog to him. He has fostered quite a few big hard to handle poochies who needed to learn to behave so they could get great new homes. He often fosters for the Animal Rescue Coalition who have placed many dogs with families over the years.
Mick owns the local contact for Dalmatian Rescue, Michelle Raoul Winters. Mick is a 5 year old Jack Russell Terrier who Michelle adopted from the local SPCA. Animal Control had seized him and some other dogs from
a puppy mill set up. Mick spent almost his first 3 years living in a crate. You would never know it to meet him as he's full of love and joy.
These lucky pooches and their wonderful owners are going to make us very proud tomorrow morning in our doggy fashion show!
Posted by Angela Granchelli on September 23, 2011 0 Comments
Our good friend Silvia Jay is a Nova Scotia based trainer and behavior expert. She has shared this little tidbit of information and for our Hounds Around Town customers. You can read more on Silvia's methodologies and ideas about dogs on her blogs.
the Hounds Around Town company mascot, Nelson, with a few of his friends
Positive Reinforcement
Dogs are marvelous creatures. They share
many of our emotions, and even some of our cognizance. Indeed, dogs seem
smarter to me these days than they were when I began working with them more
than 15 years ago, and I believe that is probably due to my heightened
awareness and ways I relate with them.
Leading universities, for example Budapest
in Hungary and even Harvard, recognized dogs’ brainy capabilities a few years
ago, and there is an increasing interest to study them beyond the Skinner box
stimulus-response machine, or status-seeking predator mentality. Thanks to the
work of behavioral scientists and progressive dog professionals, dogs are perceived
by many people as animals with great potential to comprehend our ways, and able
to learn a wide variety of sometimes complex behaviors that benefit us.
But there are others who still see dogs as
demanding and innately dominant; animals that will challenge us unless we have
our guard up, “show him who’s alpha” right from the start, and are on top of it
from then on.
Yes, dogs are manipulative opportunists. But
what sounds nasty is really just an attribute
every other animal on earth, including the
human kind, possesses. They function like we do, have basic needs, want stuff
and seek pleasure. That we have a problem with it has more to do with our
rosy-bubble image that they are the
loyal-best-friend-who-loves-and-follows-us-unconditionally-regardless-what-we-do;
a serf we find nowhere else. When he behaves in a normal mammalian way, we are
disappointed and perturbed. “How dare he demands? Just takes things? Dominant,
ungrateful little furthing!”
Fret no more. The good news is that we can
harness the opportunistic, hedonistic characteristics and done right it can be
our fasted route to a well-behaved pooch.
There are people, layowners and dog
professionals alike, who think that positive reinforcement, reward-based trainers,
are a bunch of mushy-hearted, clickety-clicking women throwing treats
everywhere. Fact is that positive reinforcement is neither clicker nor food
dependent, although you can use both, but means that you know what motivates
your dog’s actions, what he wants generally and at the moment, put it under
your control and make access to it contingent on his behavior. In other words, your
dog needs to please you before you release him to what pleases him.
How do we teach him what pleases us? We can
wait for the desired behavior and capture it. Or we can shape it by rewarding
increments. Or we can lure it. Important is that when you get it that you
reward it, cause then your dog will offer it again. He will. Trust me. He will
offer it to prompt you to give him access to what he wants, and once he does
that reliably, you can add a word – a command, also called cue, to the action
so that he learns to connect the behavior with the word. Once he has learned that,
you can ask, request the behavior at your will. And please use words. That is
how we humans communicate. We don’t grunt or growl, or poke and bump into
someone whose attention we want to get. We talk. And the dog lives with us, not
the other way around, and therefore should rise to our levels as much as it is possible
for his species. The beauty is that the recent studies on canine cognizance,
together with anecdotal evidence, show us that dogs have amazing receptive
human language skills. Chaser, the famous Border collie, and you can Google
that, is able to distinguish 1022 words - independently verified.
We just need to be patient and consistent,
more playful and rewarding and less punitive and regimental, and every pooch
can rise to new heights.
Positive Reinforcement done right works,
and makes you boss, or alpha if you insist on that term. You never have to pin your
dog to score a physical point, or correct him on his choker chain or rope. You
just gotta know what floats his boat, what his currency is, and then pay him
only after he worked for you.
Yes, training is that simple, and because
you don’t punish, he will indeed become your best friend, the one who
envisioned when you acquired him.
Posted by Angela Granchelli on August 17, 2011 0 Comments
It is that time of the year when our fall/winter shipment of
dog coats arrives.
Here is one of our favorite customer photos showing the ever energetic, Mick, in his Whistler coat. Thank you Emily!
Even though most dogs come with their own coat, the majority
of them would benefit from a man-made dog coat.
Dogs are domesticated animals, not wolves.For the most part the modern dog is simply
not suited to sub-zero temperatures.
Many modern breeds have very short fur and many are single
coated and get cold very easily.Some
examples are Chihuahuas, Dobermans, Pointers, Dalmatians, Weimaraners, Vizslas,
Boxers, Greyhounds, and Great Danes.Just to name a few.And if you
happen to have a Mexican Hairless dog we definitely expect to hear from
you!
There are a few Arctic breeds with thick coats, but even if
you own a Husky it might be nice for him to at least have a raincoat.After all, nobody likes a wet stinky dog.
We have some new sizes and colours this year that we are
pretty excited about.Our extremely
popular Whistler Zip Line is launching in Purple.This coat is also coming out in a Giant size
32 this year which is designed to fit Bull Mastiffs and large Great Danes in
this size.
We’ve also brought our long time best seller the West Coast
Rain Wear in a striking new Dandelion print.
Honestly, we have something to fit every dog.In 8 years we’ve never had a dog we couldn’t
find a coat for in our inventory.We
have become experts at fitting breeds who are traditionally difficult to fit.
Some of our more common breed requests and the coats we recommend
for them here at Hounds Around Town are:
Weimaraner – Pioneer Soft Shell in size XL will fit almost
all Weimaraners perfectly and the XL in the Pacific Spirit Fleece is sized the
same and will also fit great
Great Dane – size 30 Whistler Zip Line – owner of Danes
often purchase the Pacific Spirit Fleece in XXL as well
Boxer – size 24 Whistler Zip Line
Bull Mastiff – sometimes the size
30 in the Whistler Zip Line works but the new size 32 in that style is going to
work even better
Of course we get orders from customers with all different
breeds and outfit popular breeds such as Labrador Retrievers and Pugs too.
And we even have a few discontinued coats in stock that were a
fantastic fit for Daschunds and other long breeds.
Just ask if you aren’t sure…we
are always happy to help.
Posted by Angela Granchelli on April 04, 2011 0 Comments
Would you ban Border Collies?
It sounds absurd, doesn’t it?
We believe banning any breed of dog is
absurd.
This is an excerpt from one of our WOOF! interviews at Haligonia.ca
with local dog trainer and animal welfare advocate, Tara Bayne, back in
2009.
Most dog laws are reactive, and we discuss better, more
proactive solutions.
We don’t ban cars when an irresponsible owner of one
endangers public safety.Why would we
ban dogs?
Owners need to be more responsible, and held accountable for
the actions of their canines.
Everyone benefits when dogs are bred, raised, trained, and
socialized properly. WOOF!
Posted by Angela Granchelli on March 17, 2011 0 Comments
We recently did a survey to our newsletter subscribers.
One of the questions was "Did your dog come from an animal shelter or rescue group?".
And the really neat thing about that is, we discovered that 34.6% of our survey respondents have rescued dogs.
We are a company who is very active in the rescue community so this is really exciting information. What is even more interesting though, are some of the breeds our customers have adopted from rescues.
Among the answers there were a few that stood out:
papillon/chihuahua/doxie mix
andalusion hounds (rescued from Spain)
treeing walker coonhound
min pin
australian stumpy tail cattle dog (LOL)
bluetick coonhound
nova scotia duck tolling retriever
hungarian puli
great pyrenees
chinese crested
chocolate lab
boston terrier
basenji
australian shepherd
shih tzu crosses
bichon/poodle mix
rhodesian ridgeback mix
This just goes to show that every breed you can imagine can be found in animal shelters or with rescue groups.
And there's nothing wrong with a good old fashioned mutt anyway!
Wherever your dogs come from we are glad you love them and treat them all. Pats to your hounds!
at the haligonia.ca studio in downtown Halifax. There were an entire of series of video interviews with Nova Scotian dog-businesses and government representatives, but the footage went missing in a break-in at the studio unfortunately. We are trying to retrieve a few more of the videos with the help of the staff at haligonia.ca and hope to find a few, or we may just start doing some new interviews.
Welcome to Hounds Around Town
We are located in Nova Scotia, Canada
22 Logiealmond Close, Dartmouth, NS, B3B 0C8
we are a dog-friendly company
we support Canadian products whene...
