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skycat

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Everything posted by skycat

  1. skycat
    That is one hell of a good set-up for bitch and pups The only thing I would do is to cover the bars in front of the whelping box to give the bitch more privacy. I have a vaguely similar set-up, and I always hang blankets over the bars in front of the bed, even if no other dogs are likely to go in the shed. Cuts any draughts too. I tie the blankets on to the outside of the bars: put them on the inside once and the bitch ripped them down to create even more bedding. Very young pups can get lost under a lot of bedding, and then squashed. Use sheets of newspaper under towels for the actual w
  2. skycat
    It's not just the feeding, but the younger the pup the more care it will need. Not good to leave very young pups on their own, so unless you can rear it in the house (best for all pups anyway) I wouldn't even consider getting a pup until it is 8 weeks old. They do settle into their new homes faster if they are only 6 weeks old, but they also need constant company. Get a crate and keep it indoors, but obviously this can only be done if there is someone 'dog friendly' at home all day who will undertake house training etc. A crate is not a substitute for day time care: you can't leave it shut in
  3. skycat
    You don't say how old your pups are, but puppies need a good diet far more than an adult dog: they need the very best when they are growing. The state of the adult reflects how well it was fed whilst growing: strong bones etc. Feeding cheap kibble to pups is false economy. I never let any of my dogs feed unsupervised, ever. It should only take a few moments to feed a heap of dogs. If the bitch is eating the pups' food then shut her away while you feed. Food shouldn't be left down for dogs, especially if they are all kennelled together. It can encourage bullying as well as greed. Chicken w
  4. skycat
    Jai: empty your inbox.
  5. skycat
    My personal opinion is this: that those who openly break the law with no thought for the consequences and how it may affect the lurcher population and its owners as a whole, should be ostracised, and if possible, educated as to the problems they pose us as a community. By community I mean those who are striving to improve the general perception of those who work their dogs. We are proud to work our dogs in a time-honoured tradition. We are not arrogant. There is a big difference between pride and arrogance. The law as it stands is unjust, we all know this, but openly baiting those in power wil
  6. skycat
    I am here again! Thank you Flynn, very kind of you. A momentary glitch now sorted out. Age has a few advantages, and dare I say it, having seen many times over the years the results of bitter infighting destroy any chance of success in a project, I have an overview which, although sometimes hard to put into words, may be of use to this new group. The words 'afraid' and 'fear' at what drives a lot of people to react in the way they do. We are afraid that whatever we do won't achieve anything. We are afraid of losing our few remaining rights. We are afraid of being mocked or belittled by ou
  7. skycat
    This younger generation (and they're not all young either) see what they do as a form of rebellion, or they're just that thick that they don't realise the implications of of what the do and say. They are also very selfish as they don't care that their actions affect everyone who works a lurcher, and to my mind they are not true hunters anyway as they have no respect for their quarry. These people are deliberately flouting the law (unjust though it is). If we want lurcher work to be accepted by the powers that be as a legitimate and honorable activity; if we want to change the landowners' perc
  8. skycat
    Less is more. If the pup retrieves well once, leave it for a bit. Nothing puts a dog off so much as doing something over and over again, unless it is the right sort of Collie or terrier based pup that lives to do stuff with you. I didn't catch how old the pup is, but don't forget that variety is everything to most pups. And they can only learn as much as their brains allow at any given age. A long time ago they found that kids learned much better and more enthusiastically when they didn't have to repeat things over and over again, like reciting multiplications tables for ages. Make all learnin
  9. skycat
    JD, the way I see it is that we DO need to publicise what we do, but in a better light, and we do need to publicly distance ourselves from the idiots who post on Facebook being inhumane and illegal. It is only by educating the public that we will show that not all those who work lurchers are in the 'bad brigade'. We also need to try and educate the idiots: a long shot and a hard thing to do I am well aware, but all these things take a long time, a very long time. If we do nothing we shall never clean up our image. I disagree with you inasmuch that we already have the CA to do all this for us:
  10. skycat
    Recharge: made especially for racing Greyhounds.
  11. skycat
    I often noticed when watching young dogs course on unfamiliar ground, going a long way on the back of a hare, and out of sight on the fens ... they would always follow their exact line back, regardless of where their owner was standing. If we had moved a bit, only a hundred yards or so, the dog would then make its way from person to person to find its owner. Once the dogs had gained a bit more experience, even if they hadn't been on a piece of ground before, they'd be less likely to have to follow their own line back, and you could see them being more aware of their surroundings, looking aroun
  12. skycat
    What a shame: just goes to show that dogs can suffer from the same sort of problems as humans. I've known a couple with serious mental problems, not caused by bad upbringing: just not wired right.
  13. skycat
    Giro: I was joking: hence the laughing smiley? But I do think it is important to teach young lurcher owners how to defuse potentially difficult situations. When we are young we don't necessarily have good communication skills at our fingertips, and especially not if we are being bullied or harassed by someone. I shall never forget, many years ago, going foxing with a farmer friend. As we walked back down a very isolated country lane, him carrying a big dog fox, a woman came out of her house wailing that we had killed her lovely foxy friend who came to visit. My farmer friend explained that it
  14. skycat
    DB: you are saying that the dog owns you, and I think that half the problem people have with Salukis is that they fail to understand that these dogs have a totally different mindset to the breeds/types that evolved in Western society. It is engrained in our culture to have this 'me say, you obey' relationship with dogs, and the very thought of having a dog that demands to be treated as an equal is something that most cannot get their heads around. Treating a dog with respect is something they could never achieve. But to me it has to work both ways: if I want my dog's respect then I also have t
  15. skycat
    Every excursion out with the lurchers is a bloody PR exercise these days! I know it's easy enough for me as a middle-aged woman to talk rationally and reasonably to some horrified dog walker who has just seen one of my dogs catch a rabbit, but for the young lad out with his dog there is so much prejudice involved, and most members of the public wouldn't even want to speak to such a lad as their perceptions have been skewed by the media and antis. Neither will the lad have the faintest idea of how to talk in the right way: there is so much defiant aggression in young people: I know, I was actua
  16. skycat
    This is where things are very different for most people these days: not only must we heavily socialise our lurchers in this overcrowded island we live on in order to make them safe with livestock etc, but most of us want our dogs to retrieve what they catch. Whilst running about in a pack is a great and natural start for a puppy, it doesn't do anything for the type of one-to-one relationship that most people want with their lurcher and the training we put in place to create that bond.
  17. skycat
    If they are white and hard then he is getting possibly too much bone. I don't mind white and hard bullets every so often, but not all the time. Adding more minced raw veg adds fibre and can soften the stools slightly. Make sure he's getting enough red meat/tripe etc. Variety is key to successful raw feeding. Add crumbled brown bread, porridge oats for fibre and carbs as well. Lack of fibre can also make the stools too small and unable to express the anal glands properly.
  18. skycat
    Must have Saluki in it
  19. skycat
    I generally find that pork rib bones are very hard. A lot depends on how your dog eats bones. Some take a couple of crunches and try to swallow lumps, which doesn't do them any good at all. If you have a dog that takes its time, and is left in peace and quiet to chew up a bone, then fine, though constantly chewing on any hard bone does increase the risk of broken teeth. It also depends on how old the animal was when it was killed. I find that even lamb vertebrae ( adult sheep not a young lamb) can be very hard indeed, so I prefer to stick to lamb rib bones which are not as hard as pork bones i
  20. skycat
    That's half the problem: we have bred certain types of lurchers to have so much drive that mentally they want to do extreme things at a much earlier age than their bodies are capable of.
  21. skycat
    For me, serious hard work would involve running rabbits on the lamp for several hours, or a day's hard coursing: 3-4 good winter hares on very testing ground where the hare would be likely to run for at least 3-5 minutes. A lot of running down hill and jumping fences endlessly on to hard landing would also be on my list of don't do's. What I do is general mooching about, bushing. Ferreting, short runs out on the lamp on land I know well and that I consider reasonably safe: not massively rough ground full of holes that a pup can go wrong-footed in: cattle-poached ground gone hard for example.
  22. skycat
    So we need to keep telling people about this: keep pushing the information so that more and more owners become aware.
  23. skycat
    Just found this diagram on the net: it shows how old a puppy is, roughly, before its growth plates finish growing. Growth plates are the soft bone that produces bone whilst growing. Over exercise, especially hard running, can damage the growth plates and be the cause of many types of injury later in life: a very good diagram I thought, and when you consider that the skeleton of a large type of dog may not finish growing until around 18 months of age ... . Jumping, hard chasing, leaping into the air for balls etc: all these things can damage the growth plates which may cause the bones to deform
  24. skycat
    One of my best coursing bitches, heavily Saluki saturated, was very 'nervy', if you can call it that. She spooked at bin bags on the side of the road when out biking; she was super touch sensitive, totally couldn't stand crowds or pushy dogs that barged into her, but on a hare she was committed, clever and just amazing to watch and retrieved all her hares with a wagging tail and a shine in her eyes. I prefer to call her highly sensitive rather than nervy, and she had been very well socialised when I got her at around 10 weeks of age. In fact I first saw her on a lead, with 7 other litter mates
  25. skycat
    Well said Tomo. At the risk of upsetting these 'real dog men' I'd suggest that some, not all, have less interest in the art of hunting, and possibly less idea of the true value of a canine team mate than those of us who work our dogs in a variety of scenarios which might include ferreting, lamping and bushing.
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