Environmental Hazards

Two stunning standard poodles, one pure white, the other charcoal gray, were wandering loose on Santa Cruz’s Seacliff Beach in early June, not far from a busy road. Jeff, the concerned citizen who corralled the dogs, was dismayed to find they had no tags, so he was unable to return them to their home. He put a “Dogs Found” ad in the newspaper and kept the dogs for three days, sure that someone would be looking for such wonderful animals, but no one called. With some ambivalence, he loaded them into his car and delivered them to the nearby Santa Cruz SPCA. They are obviously well-loved dogs, he reassured himself. They will be safe; the owner will come for them.

With temperatures in the 90s and 100s in recent weeks, Whole Dog Journal decided it was a perfect time to test products designed to keep canines cool during the dog days of summer. We found a number of products that utilize the same technology: polymer crystals that absorb several times their weight in water, then release the water over a period of several days. The evaporation of the water creates the cooling effect.

I was trying to be a responsible dog owner. We lived in a rural area of Northern California, in a house with no fenced yard. My boyfriend's Irish Setter had recently been shot and killed while chasing a neighbor's goats. A hard lesson to learn, and one I wasn't about to repeat. So when we were leaving the ranch for a day I insisted we tie up our recently acquired St. Bernard, Bear. We tied him to a tree, made sure he had access to plenty of water and shade and was nowhere near a fence that he could climb over. Confident that we had done the right thing, we drove off.

When I was growing up, I knew a family that kept a dog just for finding and killing skunks. My friends lived on a big cattle ranch, and all their dogs had jobs. They had a couple of Australian Kelpies for working cattle, a number of tall, rangy hounds for hunting wild pigs, and then there was poor Frank, the skunk dog. I don't remember where my friends had obtained Frank, or even what breed of dog he was, but I recall that there had been numerous cases of rabies in the county where I lived as a child, and that skunks were the main carriers.

We all love seeing our dogs run and frolic on turf – but we seldom consider the chemicals that may be dangerous to their health.

Car rides. Some dogs love them. Some dogs hate them. Helping car anxiety in dogs, and getting a calm passenger is a step-by-step process.

In previous issues Whole Dog Journal reviewed products designed to make picking up dog poop easier. We also compared some commercial poop bags

Non-dog folks turn pale at the thought. But responsible dog owners, knowing how important it is to clean up after our dogs, think nothing of reaching down and picking up a fresh, fragrant pile of Fido's feces with our hands. Oh, not our bare hands, of course, but often with nothing more than a couple of millimeters of flimsy plastic between epidermis and excrement. No big deal. Until, that is, one of those handy plastic bags breaks. Intrepid as committed poop-pickers may be, even we will blanche at the thought of . . . well, you can imagine.

Because we feel deeply that dog training should be pleasurable and effective, and because we have personally witnessed innumerable successful demonstrations of completely pain- and fear-free training, we have taken the position that training tools and methods that inflict pain are inferior (a strong word, we know) to those that do not.