Giveaway: Dog-ma The Zen of Slobber

On Sunday, I posted a review of the book Dog-ma The Zen of Slobber. Now, it is time for a giveaway!

This fabulous giveaway is brought to you by 

author Barbara Boswell Brunner,  Beck Valley Books and Pets With Opinions

5 Lucky winners will each receive a Signed Book from the author.

Open US/CA or ebook Worldwide

Ending on Sunday 14th April; at 11.59pm EST

Barbara's vivid and dramatic stories, told with a wicked sense of humor, will make you laugh out loud. She definitely gets what living with rescued dogs (nine of them!) is all about. This book will inspire you with the couple's unstinting love, devotion, and respect for dogs as family members. You'll be glad to include it in your treasured collection of great dog books.

When Barbara meets her future husband, Ray, it is love-and dog-at first sight. Over the course of thirty-two years, seventeen relocations and nine dogs, their mutual love of dogs guides them on their unconventional path. The love that Barbara and Ray get in return is literally lifesaving, with one dog attacking a lethal intruder and another discovering Barbara’s cancer. Her own survival story underscores the story of how her dogs become survivors themselves.

Each new dog adds its own dynamic to the family, sometimes upending it. From Turbo (whose Spock-like ears may have provided super powers), Barbara learns about the will to live; Lexington demonstrates incredible patience and an inexplicable love of golf; Madison teaches that laughter is truly the best medicine and that the whole “nine lives thing” is not reserved just for cats; Morgan should be sainted for tolerating Izzy, who is as cute as she is bad. Barbara is certain that somewhere in doggie heaven there is a poster that says “If you are sick, injured or in need of really expensive medical care, FIND THESE HUMANS!”

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Book Review: Dogma The Zen Of Slobber

I was offered the opportunity to do another book review, this time of the book Dog-ma, the Zen of Slobber. I love reading, so was eager to read this book and share it with my followers. 

Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot. The writing is witty, snappy, and really gives character and depth to the stories. Since the book is basically a collection of short stories about Barbara and Ray's dogs, all woven together into a complete book, it is easy to read a bit at a time without losing the thread of the story. I started reading this book at a flyball tournament before going to bed for the night between tournament days. Even though I was tired I found the book very engaging, making me want to stay up to keep reading even though my logic told me I needed sleep for the next day. 

Like most dog related books, there are a few things I didn't care for in this. Over the course of the story, there are references to some practices (purchasing puppies from places other than reputable breeders, cropping ears of dogs not intended for show) that I don't approve of. Probably the biggest one for me was the lack of containment of their dogs and the use of an underground fence to keep the dogs home when unsupervised. I do feel a little like inexperienced dog owners may decide to use an underground fence based on its use in this book.

Even so, these points were more of slight bothersome points than something that ruined the book. It was still well worth the read, just as Marley and Me was worth the read despite some similar issues in that story. Overall, I found the book a fun read of mostly fun stories mixed in with sadness for just the right balance of lightheartedness and deeper emotions. It is a book I would be happy to pass on to more readers.


Below, you can find a few pictures of the book itself, a summary of the book, a brief about the author section, and links to where you can purchase a copy.

For dog lovers everywhere.......Barbara's vivid and dramatic stories, told with a wicked sense of humor, will make you laugh out loud. She definitely gets what living with rescued dogs (nine of them!) is all about. This book will inspire you with the couple's unstinting love, devotion, and respect for dogs as family members. You'll be glad to include it in your treasured collection of great dog books.

When Barbara meets her future husband, Ray, it is love-and dog-at first sight. Over the course of thirty-two years, seventeen relocations and nine dogs, their mutual love of dogs guides them on their unconventional path. The love that Barbara and Ray get in return is literally lifesaving, with one dog attacking a lethal intruder and another discovering Barbara’s cancer. Her own survival story underscores the story of how her dogs become survivors themselves. 

Each new dog adds its own dynamic to the family, sometimes upending it. From Turbo (whose Spock-like ears may have provided super powers), Barbara learns about the will to live; Lexington demonstrates incredible patience and an inexplicable love of golf; Madison teaches that laughter is truly the
best medicine and that the whole “nine lives thing” is not reserved just for cats; Morgan should be sainted for tolerating Izzy, who is as cute as she is bad. Barbara is certain that somewhere in doggie heaven there is a poster that says “If you are sick, injured or in need of really expensive medical care, FIND THESE HUMANS!”

Author on Facebook          Author's Website          Author on Twitter 

About Barbara Boswell Brunner 

Barbara grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania with her parents, sister and always a dog, or two or three. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from a small women's college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Meeting her husband in Washington, DC, they continued together on a journey as self-proclaimed dog addicts. In the ensuing years, she founded three successful businesses in the Pacific Northwest and is a prolific fundraiser for breast cancer research. She and her husband are retired and now reside in Southwest Florida with two dogs and copious amounts of dog fur. She is currently working on indulging her well known flip flop addiction.  



Buy the book from ....

Author's Website

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Barnes and Noble

   

printed version           ebook version 

I received this book to review through Beck Valley Books Book Tours, all the opinions above are 100% my own.

Black and White Sunday: Reading

Make sure to check out the review of the book Koira is reading. And then stop by on Tuesday for a Giveaway!

Sun and Water

The river at the park is too high, fast, and cold to let the dogs swim during the winter. Normally, the beaches are flooded during the winter and the water is a churning mess of brown. I guess that means it really is spring time already.

Of course, Pallo only goes swimming for a good reason, like a ball.

Where as Koira, though she dearly loves playing fetch in the water, will go swimming even without any reason to.

Koira seriously loves playing fetch at this little beach. It is just off the main walking trail, really close to the parking lot. In the summer when the fields are no longer open to off leash dogs, we do the walking trails more, and Koira always wants to stop and play here.

What do you think, does she care that it is technically still too cold for real swimming?

As annoying as it is, Koira loves playing fetch at this beach so much that simply walking down there elicits excited jumping, body slamming, and barking in demand for the ball to be thrown.

I know I shouldn't reinforce that kind of behavior, but really, I like playing like this too. And, as long as she only does it in the one place, it isn't too bad. Besides, could you say no to this face?

Hope all of you are thawing out and getting to see the beginnings of a glorious new spring.

Metal Allergies in Dogs

Edited to add: For an update on how we are doing with the metal allergies Koira has, check out my more recent post about it. It includes some products that we are using and love, such as collars without exposed metal, which can be hard to find otherwise. http://mylifewithflyballdogs.blogspot.com/2015/03/dealing-with-metal-allergies-in-dogs.html

First off, I am in no way an expert. I am not a vet, dermatologist, or anything else like that. What I am is the owner of a dog with an allergy to metal. If you suspect your dog has an allergy to metal or anything else, you should bring it up with your vet.

Long time readers will recall that Koira has some metal allergies that cause issues with collars, other dog equipment, vet appointments, and other sorts of fun stuff. Most likely this allergy is not to metal in general but to nickel. Nickel is the most common source of metal allergy in humans, though it is more common in women than in men. Exposure to nickel, such as by having your ears pierced, can increase your chances of becoming allergic to nickel (which is possibly why this allergy is more common in women). Once you have the allergy, you are likely affected for life, though you may go through periods of increased sensitivity, most often due to exposure.

Most of the information I have found while doing research is about nickel allergies in humans. However, there is no reason to believe that dogs have any lower rates than humans. It is possible that many dogs with this allergy go un-diagnosed because their fur prevents contact with nickel, prevents their owners from seeing the rash that occurs, or because they simply aren't taken to a vet.

I am 100% positive that Koira has an allergy to metal. I am relatively positive that this allergy is specifically to nickel, though this is a theory based on my research into human metal allergies, so may be erroneous.

When Koira was younger, she developed a really nasty rash on her neck and chest. The rash was red and very obvious due to both her fur in the area being both very thin and white. Thickening of the skin and oozing blisters came and went, occasionally getting a bit better, and sometimes getting very bad indeed. At one of the bad turns, someone even asked me if I fought my dog (as in organized dog fighting) because her neck looked so ravaged. In addition to the sores and rash on her neck, Koira's ears were affected. The tips of her ears were literally falling off in chunks. The fur and dead chunks of skin would come off in my hands when I pet her or investigated the funky looking areas on her ears. Though the ears improved and regressed as much as the rest of the rash, they were bad enough at times that I seriously thought about having her ears cropped.

As you can imagine, I tried a lot of things to help her. I put her onto an allergy formula food (Natural Balance). No improvement. I started home cooking meals for her so I could carefully control every ingredient added. No improvement. I bought her a leather collar, thinking it might be irritation from the nylon collar she was wearing. No improvement. I even took to putting a bandanna on Koira instead of a collar, but since I dangled her tags from that, there was still very little improvement. During this time, Koira also got a staph infection on her neck, chest, and belly. The theory of my vet at the time was that she had cut herself on grass and developed a staph infection from those cuts. Koira also had bad dandruff, especially on her neck and shoulders, but pretty much all down her back.

Finally, one day, completely out of the blue, a friend of mine suggested that Koira might be allergic to metal. It was like a light bulb going off. I pulled off Koira's collar and tags. I purchased plastic and ceramic bowls to replace the metal food and water bowls. I coated the hook snaps on my leashes with clear nail polish. And Koira's horrible running sores and rashes went away. Her ears (which I can only assume were coming into contact with her tags when she shook her head) improved immediately. Within days, my beautiful girl had clear skin, with nothing but a few healing scabs left over.

Since that time, I have made Koira's collars myself using heavy duty nylon hardware instead of metal. I do not put tags on her. For a while, I did try using fabric bags to hold her tags, but I never found one that kept them secure and prevented them from touching her completely. Since she is micro chipped (she did have a serious neck and face swelling in reaction to being micro chipped, but has not had any continued problems with the chip after the first couple of weeks), I have decided that her well being and comfort is more important than her wearing her tags.

When we have to go to the vet for shots or other procedures that might involve contact with metal, I make sure to dose Koira with Benadryl before we go and again later in the day. It mostly prevents site reactions. (And, yes, stainless steel DOES contain nickel.) I honestly do not know what I would do if Koira were to require something like pins to hold together a broken bone. I just hope we never have to find out.

I am bringing up all of this because I have been looking longingly at some leather collars. I really wish I could get Koira and Pallo nice matching supple leather collars to wear. But leather collars come with metal hardware. Brass does not always contain nickel. But, since I don't know how to find out if the hardware being used contains nickel or not, and I don't know for sure that it is only nickel that Koira is allergic to, I don't know what to do. Do I buy a couple of really nice dog collars, test the hardware with this nickel testing kit and then just not use them if the test is positive? It would certainly be a lot of money to spend on the collars and the test kit only to find out I can't use them.

I will admit that in the past few weeks Koira has been occasionally wearing a new collar that has a stainless steel D ring on it. The collar is an LED light up collar that she only wears out to the park and so far I have not seen any reactions. I am not, however, so foolish as to hope she is "over" this allergy- that doesn't happen. I am sure that if she were to be exposed to more metal, the full reaction would come back relatively quickly. And I don't really want to risk that.

In any case, I didn't really write this post just because I want a nice collar for my dog. I wrote it more because, while doing all of the reading and research about metal allergies this evening in an attempt to find some kind of hardware that might be safe for my dog to wear, I came across almost no mention of metal allergies in dogs. And those that I did see were mostly passing mention of it in a forum thread.

So, if anyone has a dog they think or know has a metal allergy and wants to ask any questions or share any knowledge, I would love to hear from you. If you stumble on this blog post by searching the web for what could be causing the oozing rashes your dog has, I hope this can give you something to try out to help your dog.

Wordless Wednesday: Shadow dog

Facebook Training Challenges

So, a few days ago, I posted a status update on Facebook. It went something like:

"Think I can teach Pallo to stick his nose in a bowl of water and blow bubbles before the end of the night?"

The first comment on this status was a friend of mine, who simply said "dare ya."

Hah! Well, I couldn't resist daring her back, to try to teach HER dog to blow bubbles before I could teach MY dog to do it. She took up the challenge and we invited a few other facebook friends to participate as well. In all, I think we had five people take up that challenge late on a Thursday evening. And, we all had a total blast.

We all successfully trained this trick not just in that one night, but in about 10 minutes for each of us. We all ended up totally soaked, and all had a ton of fun. I don't think any of us thought, starting out, that blowing bubbles would be such a fast and easy trick to train. Or that we would have such fun training it.

A few minutes after we finished with training bubbles, one of the participants had an awesome idea. That we should have a Facebook group specifically for doing training challenges like this. So, before I even did anything else, I went and created one. And now, I invite you to join us.

The basic is pretty simple. Members of the group can create events where they give a time period and a trick to train, and everyone who wants to "attend" the event simply does their best to train their dog to do the suggested trick in the time allotted. Three types of challenges exist:

Blitz: Super fast, low-or-no notice challenge
Challenge: Notice of 12 hours or more, up to a few hours of training time
Epic: a trick that will require many hours of training over the course of days or weeks

So, if you are interested in joining us and are on facebook, come on over! The only purpose of this group is to have fun with dog training and help motivate each other to get up and do some silly fun training. No politics, no training discussions outside of the challenges, just good clean fun with a common goal. 

Mischief Monday: Woof

I love having the dogs pose for me. Generally, they do pretty well with it, even posing in some pretty funky positions.

Or posing with each other, and not hogging the camera too much.

But, sometimes Koira gets a bit impatient about the photo op, and then, she tells me about it. Loudly.

Black and White Sunday: Outline

Chomp!

Playing on the wide angle side of things.

Wrestling

I have always been so glad that Koira and Pallo get along so well. It wasn't an instant thing. When I first introduced Koira to Pallo at Linn County Dog Control before deciding to adopt him, they were pretty singularly uninterested in each other. Somehow, though, they have become wonderful playmates.

One of the things always guaranteed to make me smile is taking the dogs to the park, letting them off leash, and seeing them tear off into the distance together, Pallo leaping and corgi talking loudly the whole way. Then, it becomes a rough and tumble game of chase and wrestling all mixed into one.

The initial run, complete with full body checks


The dodge-and-weave


Which way is he going to go?


They always look just so incredibly excited and happy when playing like this at the park


And then the real wrestling begins with the full on body checks, snarling corgi talk, scruff grabs


The suspense-filled pause, as Koira does her best border collie impression- the calm before the sudden action and intense chasing starting up again


Pallo is always the chasee, while Koira is the chaser. Pallo's slower running speed means he has to be more creative with his dodging and turning.


Here he comes! Luckily, both dogs are pretty respectful of people walking or standing, and rarely come close to slamming into you. Even if this picture does make it look like Pallo is about to leap onto your face.


They do a lot of on-the-ground wrestling as well, to break up the craziness and speed of the running and chasing. Pallo normally ends up on the ground, looking nasty and possessed, while Koira chews on his legs or scruff. But don't worry, Pallo seems to enjoy this, and isn't shy about letting Koira know when he has had enough.


And really, this is Pallo's "play with me" face. It may be accompanied by some nasty sounding snarls and plenty of ugly faces, but it really is how he initiates play. It confuses some dogs at the park, I think.


Did you know your dogs were going to get along when you adopted your second? Do they get along? What do you do if you get a second dog and the crew just doesn't make friends? I think I totally lucked out on how much Koira and Pallo like each other, even if they don't do adorable things like cuddling in the house (I am totally jealous of all of you with dogs who cuddle each other, BTW).

Wordless Wednesday: Oh So Graceful

Smug

Is it just me, or does Koira look smug?