ok, i have waited this long because i couldn't narrow it down. my first love at a raptor dates back to kindergarten- the bald eagle. actually it is pretty "ironic": i can remember asking my mom for a quarter to "help save the bald eagles" i don't know if it was the teacher, or if it was the school, but i remember i needed to take it to class. so, here i was 30 years later, fighting development of plum island as a preserve for their winter and nesting sight. i am proof that educating children and raising their awareness works! now, on the other extreme, i just love the kestrel. this is strange for me because i am a "bigger the better" kind of person- irish wolfhound definitely preferred over a small dg, give me a horse- make it a "heavy horse" there is just something about the spirit of the bird being bigger than its size. i really think they have taht warrior spirit despite that apparant fragility i have heard of when kept captive. although i have never had experience with them. owl are just too tough to decide between. again, the raptors seem to win me over despite size- oh, that screech owl's song! a am partial to barn owls simply because ot the endangered/threatened status. i have never seen one! the great horned does win over the barred, but that doesn't make the barred any less "endearing." i do like the turkey vulture, too. so that about sums it up (love red tails in flight calls, they are always saying something) i ahven't gone in to many species. mostly i am trying to stick to the ones of my area. but, the harpy eagle, now there is a magnificent bird! anyone see jeff corwin with the harpy on his arm? it kept pecking his head. i say pecking because with that kind of strenght it was more like a love tap!

sue36- that sort of behaviour ("shovel nosing"...cute!!!) should be discouraged. The dog shouldn't tell you when it expects you to pet it and by doing so you're rewarding that sort of demanding behaviour. I don't think that it's an agression thing but it's definitely a dominance/demanding thing. It depends on the dog as to whether it's going to lead to problems. That said, our incredibly submissive rottie does this & I don't mind it. I do make her sit and I'll stop if she hooks a paw around my leg to bring me closer but she does lean right into you & mush herself as close as possible, putting her head underneath your hand, etc. I'm probably wrong in doing so but I allow her to do this with me, my better half, some select friends, etc. She was such an untrained mess when we got her and SO afraid of any strange person to enter the house that I always praised her when she'd let herself be petted (always on the neck) or take the initiative to go up & sniff at an offered hand. sigh...our last rottie would actually place her rump under a dangling hand & rub herself on it to encourage the owner of the hand to give her butt scratches (this is on the dog's back, right next to the tail, a spot especially loved by rotties). Horribly ill mannered but I didn't know nearly as much about training & behaviour as I do now. And I miss it terribly. She was a WONDERFUL dog and she just loved contact with people. I don't take my Amber to dog parks. The only time that she's unleashed around "strange" dogs was during agility class when she's working the course. Dog parks bother me because I may know my dog and any "issues' that she might have pretty well but I don't know yours. And as submissive as Amber is there's always the risk that if she (or any dog) feels threatened by another dog she could snap. Back to Carolyn's original post, sharon sd was very succinct in her observations. Tell your friend why you don't want the dog in the house. I guess that I had just assumed that the friend already knew that the dog's urinating indoors was a problem. As previous posters have mentioned I would have been MORTIFIED if it was my dog urinating in someone's home & never brought them back again...after first having scrubbed the carpets for them. Unfortunately Carolyn's friend doesn't seem to realize that the dog's behaviour is a problem. Berlin- Thankfully my friends don't seem to mind my inadvertant work with their dogs but it's so funny as we have a dear friend with a very dignified and well behaved but never formally trained pit bull mix. Oh she knows her basic commands but she can't really see the need to do them (he's a veteranarian & she comes to work with him each day and as a result is so horribly spoiled but for all that a lovely dog). Oh the put upon expression on her face when I tell her to sit for a treat! She knows that she's not getting it until her butt's on the ground but it's as if she keeps on hoping that I'm going to change my mind & give it to her anyway. "You can't possibly mean for me to sit...on the floor...like a DOG...can you?" Too much. Nina

The things you don't like about other peoples dogs, you may not believe it now, but having your own, a lot of times those annoying things end up being the things you love about them the most. One of my dogs is a beagle/lab and beagles were near the top of my list of dog breeds i did not want, and she is everything I thought she'd be, but I love her personality. She does bark but it is fairy easy to teach the "quiet" command to a dog once you've taught them speak. Dogs won't track in much, mine aren't on flea and tick preventative because i am uncomfortable with it and i know i don' have any fleas in my yard, and i just tick check them daily during normal affection, but as easy way to avoid that is just to use a flea/tick preventative from the start and you won't have a problem. Most will have fleas when you get them so the pill from the vet that kills fleas before it's in the house plus a bath with blue dawn dishsoap will get rid of any fleas and you won't have a problem. Mine sleep in bed and they are allowed on the couches and they don't track a whole lot of dirt in. I can't imagine not having a fenced in yard with my dogs though, my life would be miserable and so would theirs. They like to run around out back and hang out. My beagle/lab came from a house with cats when she was a puppy and still 3 years later she loves cats. So gentle and submissive around them, and she is a very hyper playful dog you would not expect to be good with cats. I was a cat person and I love having dogs. A big thing to consider is how much work they are. They are like kids you can't just leave them like you can cats. Especially one that hasn't been trained because they will wreck stuff. Crate training is great for this though, and they learn pretty quickly. You can train a dog out of almost anything, but there are some things that you are better off just adjusting your life to. Trash picking is one of those things, a trash picker is usually going to trash pick given the opportunity and chance alone, so we shut our bathroom doors instead of leaving temptation out there. A digger is gonna dig especially when it comes to hounds, and while you can train some out of it sometimes you just have to give them a designated digging spot. Jumping up is very easily corrected I've worked with a lot of fosters and it's the easiest thing to stop. Crotch sniffing more difficult but I would say most don't have that problem. intact males mostly. They CAN be very well trained and it doesn't take a ton of work to do so. They will learn a lot of things without you even teaching it to them, mine picked up room names and i can tell them which room to go to and they will go. If told to get off they won't come back up until invited. You can teach them to go to their crate very easily, and use that command when people knock on the door, and soon they will learn knocks on the door mean crate until invited out. The key is to get basic commands down and use them to teach the dog more complicated commands. One big thing I can't stress enough, if you get a puppy do not adopt a puppy from someone who has the litter and is adopting them out at 6 weeks. 8-9 weeks is the responsible thing to do. I've fostered litters and they learn bite inhibition starting at week 7, any dog leaving before that will have the mouthing problem and it's very annoying to have a dog mouthing constantly and so much more work to train that when two more weeks with it's siblings and it would learn most of it on their own. If you want to avoid a dog gutting things it's simple, never give them any toys with stuffing. There are plenty of stuffing free toys to keep a dog happy. Give them plush toys to tear into and they do not understand why it's ok to do that and not gut pillows etc. One plush toy removed and corrected the second the dog starts to gut it so they learn gutting is bad. Clicker training is someting i can't recommend enough. It is one of the best training tools out there. People don't understand why their dog isn't learning things because they have people with different tones, a clicker is cheap and the dog will remember that click means good and the click can come immediately after the dog has correctly done what you wanted. So many people praise their dog too late and the dog has no idea what it's getting praised for, and so many people have monotone voices that a dog can't distinguish positive from negative. That is also the cause of so many dogs not listening to commands, a stern voice is needed, i could take any dog ive trained who knows the "off" command, or get off. or down. and will do it immediately. Now tell them to do it but say it in a cheerful voice and no they are not going to do it. They are taught commands in stern voices, they obey stern voices, not voices that mix in with normal conversation that they hear all the time. It's not mean it's communicating with your dog. The biggest thing is to understand that your dog doesn't know what you want. If your dog isn't trained yet, you can't throw out commands and expect them to understand. You can't expect them not to do bad things, they aren't doing it to make you mad, they are following their instincts and you need to teach them what you want from them. you need to show them the behavior you like and what you don't like. Dogs like to please, training sessions are a great bonding experience and provide a lot of mental stimulation which a dog needs just as much as physical to tire them out. They are happy when you are happy, the moment you first teach a dog a trick and they do it and understand it you will understand by the look on their face that they are happy, and how awesome it is to have been able to communicate your wants to them and have them understand. Great bonding, training sessions, not necessarily from a trainer, just you and the dog are highly beneficial even for adult dogs as an ongoing thing it strengthens your relationship with the dog. It's really not work either,, it's just taking a few minutes to work with them. Socialization is also key,and it doesn't stop with dog to dog interation and dog to human interaction. It involves experience and situations as well. You don't want a dog afraid of storms or who won't go out in the rain, so when it's raining, excited play time in the rain so the dog sees it as a good thing. Car rides. you leaving the house, come back with something for the dog and they will learn that you leaving can be rewarding. Even with the worst barkers that i couldn't train 'quiet' effectively, i could train lay down and stay, and that is usually effective in stopping them from barking.

Cats LOVE freshly turned ground, it is like a giant litter box for them, my mom couldn't keep her petunias because her cats kept digging them up, they also love her bird of paradise, and it is in the house, it is just a cats nature. I adopted a cat that was born in the wild, I tried to keep him inside, he would not so I started leaving him out, my neighbor came over one day and told me he had laid on one of her hostas and killed it, I immediatly brought him in, he cried and cried, about 2 months later I was staying at my moms and my husband accidently let him out, well he is not one of those people who will run a cat down to bring it back in, the next day when I got home he was curled up on our porch sick, it was Sunday and we live in a small area with no emergency vets, I took him in first thing Monday morning and he died in my arms in the waiting room. Poisoned. My 9 year old son (it was his cat) made me promise before I took him to bring him home no matter what. so here I am out in the yard with 2 bawling children (and myself) trying to bury Chrys, and of course all my neighbors are right there saying how awful it was, meanwhile the whole time in the back of my mind all I could think of was that one of those neighbors was responsible for this even though it was really our responsibility to keep our cat inside, one day later another neighbor who owned the mom to Chrys and had his brother came over crying, someone had poisoned the brother too, so there I was again burying another cat because she just could not do it. No more outdoor cats for me period. she has another outdoor cat that kills squirrls all the time, and I am forever going over there and disposing the bodies for her, just yesterday I was in my tulip garden and lo and behold, cat potty. but for some reason I cannot get worked up over it, I of course said a dirty word when I ran into it , but I would never think of doing something to someones pet because of it. there is about a 50 percent ratio of outside cat owners here, it aggravates me because they do not even try to keep them in (one was trying to go in and the owner just ever so gently pushed her back out and shut the door) when we was trying to do the right thing we got punished anyway. The main reason I don't mind all the outdoor cats is because we have NO MICE, that is worth it to me, but I will never claim another outdoor stray, if I even get caught feeding one it becomes my problem in the minds of my neighbors (they have to be watching me constantly, I swear!) I have had to haul 10 so far to my moms, I am so glad she has that nice big barn on her farm!