The Border terrier got its name from the area called Cheviot Hills, which is actually near the border of England and Scotland. This is where these dogs were made to attack and terminate predatory foxes.

They have wiry coat that is why they normally appear as scruffy. However, this scruffiness is an attention-grabber that is why owners do not forget to hug their little ball of energy.

The following are some of the basic facts breeders would really love to know about Borders:

Category: Terrier

Living Environment: indoors (highly recommended); outdoors (fenced yard)

Coat: wiry and short; double coated

Colors: tan, red, grizzle and tan, and/or blue and tan

Height: between 11 and 16 inches

Weight: between 11 and 16 pounds

Temperament:

Naturally,

• they are scruffy, hard and bold hunters

• they are active as puppies but mellow down as they mature

• they are not friendly with rabbits, rats, hamsters, and even birds

• they are economical to feed

• their activity die down when left alone all day as they really love to please people especially their owners

When properly trained,

• they can get along with the household cats but not with cats in the neighborhood

• they may even catch a burglar

• they may lose timidity when accustomed to active environments

Breeders should note of the following health issues:

• Canine Epileptoid Cramping Syndrome or CES, also called as “Spike’s disease”, which is a hereditary, neurological, metabolic and muscle disorder that is sometimes confused with canine epilepsy

• Cataract, or loss of transparency of one or both lenses of the eyes

• Cryptorchidism, wherein testicles do not descend into the scrotum

• Deafness

• Skin problems and a few skin allergies

Care and Exercise:

• Their coat needs weekly brushing.

• They should be professionally groomed at least twice a year.

• They should bathe only when necessary since they shed little to no hair. Their physique requires a regular exercise routine which includes a daily play time while on leash.

• They should be on leash while walking in public places because of their hunting instincts.

Origin/History:

The exact origins of Border terriers are obscure but many breeders accepted the story that the variety was developed in the Cheviot Hills area, which is near the border of Scotland and England. The Borders have been used as hunters of rabbits and hares. They can even keep up with running horses with their short yet sturdy legs. They were also used by farmers to lure predatory foxes into their dens before killing them.

They were also trained to hunt otters, marten, and even fierce badgers. Like most terriers that were once molded as hunters, they also evolved as pets and became lovely, friendly, and loyal companion dogs. They also take part in dog shows and they can easily grab their audience attention with their agility, appearance, and bright disposition.

The breed was registered by the British Kennel Club in 1920 and by the American Club ten years after.

At present, Borders are highly favored as companion dogs and pets due to their adaptability, friendliness, and winning personality. Nonetheless, they can be reliable when it comes to tracking down vermin. In fact, some of their esteemed talents include hunting, guarding the family, and performing tricks and sports that require competitive obedience.

Like most terriers, you can be rest assured to have a loyal and bright companion dogs if you give your attention and affection to a Border. You can be sure that they can definitely drive away your bore!

Dog Crate Training

You know what it is like. You have collected your new dog and very excited to have a new friend. All you want to do is love and cuddle him, but you know deep down the training starts as soon as you get him home. Do you crate train or not? Dogs’ instincts will help with this sort of training as they are by nature den animals and he will therefore feel happy and secure in his crate. Because of this he will not want to soil where he sleeps. This will make house training a lot easier for you. Your part in crate training your dog is to persuade him that the crate is his bed now.

Dog crate training involves rewarding a dog for entering the crate and staying in there.The idea is to use the crate as part of a play session, letting the dog feed in the crate, and having your dog explore and use until it is part of his daily life. Always pick a crate that is the right size for your dog. The crate needs to be just big enough for the dog to stand in and turn around. If the crate is too big it defeats the purpose of crate training.

When your new dog or puppy first gets home and he is first in his crate he might howl and cry wanting to get out. Expect this and restrain yourself. It is very natural for your dog to be out with you. Remember you need to let him know where his place is in the family unit. Crate training is the best way to house train your dog or puppy and if you let him out and allow him to free reign in your house be prepared for the mess that will surely happen.

Getting started with dog crate training.

Make the crate a comfortable, pleasant place for your dog. It is a good idea to let him have his favourite toy in the crate with him. It can be a toy or a piece of clothing he is fond of but if your dog destroys these things then minimise what goes into the crate.

Associate the crate with pleasant things so feed him in his crate and give him reward treats.

If he has had an accident scold him then put him outside and not in the crate. If you scold him then put him in his crate he will associate bad feelings with the crate and will make training him very difficult.

When it is time to put your dog in the crate at night, leave him and do not keep checking him. He will settle down in his own time.

It is worth remembering that your dog will mess his crate at some point. Try not to put anything in his den that cannot be easily cleaned. Crate training works though because your dog does not really want to mess his den so will encourage him to hold it for as long as possible. Take him outside in the garden or open area at night before you put him in his crate for the night. In the morning put your dog out as early as possible.

Remember young puppies cannot hold their bladder for too long. When they are younger than 12 weeks they really need to go outside every couple of hours or so. You will have to use your own judgement on the duration you keep your dog in his crate.

Make the crate training positive

Always do your best to make the crate a positive experience. Never use the crate as a punishment. You want your dog to see his crate as somewhere safe. When you first use the crate be prepared for your puppy or dog to make a fuss. Your dog will get used to his crate even though to begin with he will cry and howl but have patience because crate training your dog is the right decision. Give your dog lot of treats when he goes into his crate and he will eventually go in on his own accord. As with any kind of dog training take it slowly as you do not want your dog or puppy to feel uncomfortable.

Is dog crate training cruel?

Some people look upon crate training as cruel to dogs. Obviously if you leave your dog in his crate for hours at a time, it is. When you are at home let your dog out of the crate. Sometimes it will be impossible to be at home during the day, when you are at work for instance, try to get someone to take him out for a walk or consider taking your dog to a doggie daycare if possible. This will also help your dog mix with other dogs as well.

When you need to travel in your car and you take your dog with you, a crate is the safest way for your dog to travel. It will keep him from getting in your way and causing havoc if he sees a cat or other animal on the side of the road or in a field. If your dog is already used to a crate it will help him to go into the crate without feeling stressed. All in all less stressful for you as well.

It is really up to you whether you decide to crate train. Use it properly and it will help with your house training which it turn means a happier dog and a happier you.

Enjoy training your dog.

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Let’s face reality – the person who enjoys brushing their dog’s teeth is about as rare as a one-armed trapeze artist! I mean – uggghhhh. But then, most New Yorkers don’t enjoy bagging their puppy’s poop either. They do it anyway!

Dental disease is no fun no matter what your species. This purpose of this article is to give you some helpful information, and a few practical tips, about what you can do at home to keep your dog’s teeth and gums healthy.

It’s clear that daily brushing and flossing is extremely important for human oral hygiene. In fact, it’s been shown that keeping the teeth, gums and tongue clean actually helps prevent heart disease in humans. It makes sense, then, that keeping your pet’s teeth, gums and tongue clean on a regular basis will also be very beneficial to its health and well-being.

Perhaps the first best thing you can do for your dog’s dental health is to feed it a nutritious, healthy and well-balanced diet. At least part of your dog’s diet should be dry and crunchy. As your pet crunches away its teeth are getting the benefit of the food’s hard surfaces removing plaque. This benefit will be absent if your dog is not given some sort of dry hard food every day.

The same effect can be achieved with dog bones – the real dead animal variety or the human-made variety. The treats you provide your dog are an important part of its diet. Its a good idea to be watchful about everything your pet eats, including snacky treats. Raw beef bones are great to help with dental hygiene by keeping the teeth clean and plaque-free. Chewing a crunchy treat once or twice a day will also help remove plaque and keep your dog’s mouth healthy. Healthy treats can also give your dog better breath. Yahoo.

But a healthy diet will only go so far – you should also brush your pet’s teeth periodically to minimize plaque and tartar buildup. Toothbrushes for pets of all sizes can be purchased at your local pet store or online. Tooth pastes made especially for dogs can and should also be purchased. And used! Another good practice, along with brushing your pet’s teeth, is to wipe its gums with a dental wipe from the pet store, or even a clean moistened cloth.

Do your dog a big favor and look after its dental health. Use common sense, the vet’s advice, and even the advice of your friendly pet store clerk. Diet, brushing, wiping the gums, healthy snacks – develop a routine for your pet’s teeth and stick to it.

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For owners of working dogs, a training collar that works as hard as your dog is a necessary tool. The Tri-Tronics Sport series are the most durable training collars on today’s market, being one hundred percent waterproof and designed to take the abuse given them by an active working dog. For example, hunting dogs will thrash through underbrush to grab game, dive into water, crawl into tiny spaces that are far too small, and do other things that average family pets don’t do. For this reason, you will require a very durable collar that will stand through the toughest abuse.

Once you’ve made the decision to use a electronic dog collar you’re making an investment into training equipment that you’ll want to make sure works for you. As an industry leader, Tri-Tronics will guarantee its products’ durability, and this is what keeps them at the top of the market.

Tri-Tronics understands that you want a convenient and lightweight system and they’ve taken advantage of state of the art technology to provide compact and durable receivers and transmitters that are of the highest quality. One of the advantages of their systems is that they are designed to work well whether it’s in warm weather and bare hands or in the coldest weather with gloved hands.

In addition to their compact size and their durability, you can even use the Tri-Tronic sports series to train up to three dogs at one time. Multiple dogs can easily be confused if you’re using systems that are not set up to deal with them properly. Tri-Tronics sports series are specially designed with numerous (20) levels of stimulation in both continuous and intermittent settings. One of the most significant advantages to this number of settings is that some behaviors may be easily corrected with one level of stimulation but others may require more or less correction. Tri-Tronics has taken all of this into consideration in developing their sports series.

Tri-Tronics has also taken into consideration that your working dog isn’t always going to be close by and allows you to control up to three dogs that are as much as one half mile away from you making it easy to keep track of what’s happening with each of them.

If you’re interested in not only electronic stimulation but also sound correction, you will still find what you need with the Tri-Tronics sports series since they also have a beeper option. Remember that when you are attempting training, not only is electronic and sound correction helpful, but praise is also another helpful (and often more effective) method of training – using all of the tools available to you when training your dog makes training much easier and much more lasting. The Tritronics system provides a full range of tools to help you train a happy, healthy, and obedient working dog.

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Training your gun dogs to hunt, whether it’s for flushing, pointing, or retrieving, there are great tools at your disposal. Bird and Dummy Launchers are available with remote control devices that can be used together or separately to fill your training needs.

Remote Bird and Dummy Launchers

Whether you are using a dummy launcher or a bird launcher, you can use a remote control that allows you to train your dog without having another person present with you. Without the remote, you would need at least one other person to assist in your training which of course can distract your dog.

Other extras with bird launchers include bird calls, sounds, and beeps that can be used to train your dog in field craft and hunting. Which kind of launcher (bird or dummy) will depend on the specific type of training you are doing with your dog. Your goal is to make an effective and confident hunting companion and launchers can be an essential tool towards this goal.

Bumper Launchers

This is your secret weapon in teaching your dog to learn to retrieve came. The dummy launcher is for those who work alone and you allow you to launch your dummies at a height and distance that is far greater than throwing it yourself. This allows your dog to learn to retrieve game that is further away. This is especially helpful when you consider that if you were using hand launching followed by shooting; your dog would become accustomed to fetching game at close distances. One of the best features of the remote launchers is that you can use the accompanying sounds to train your dog to react as if he were hunting actual game (ducks, pheasant, etc.).

Bird Launchers

For training pointing or flushing dogs, bird launchers will work perfectly. A great benefit to bird launchers is that you can actually set it up to launch multiple birds to simulate real hunting. The good thing is, dogs are bred to hunt so your main focus is to train your dog to respect another dog’s point, as well as flush out birds. A bird launcher will give you a good shot at achieving this type of training. Trainers of pointing dogs have been successful in using these for years now, and even those who train flushing dogs are starting to use these tools more often. Because a bird launcher is designed with a spring latch which will release prey fairly low, it can quickly help your dog learn the skills needed for hunting quail as well as pheasant.

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Heartworm, or roundworm, is very serious can affect all types of gun dogs. With gun dogs, working dogs, and other outdoor dogs, you must be especially concerned because they are more susceptible to heartworm. The worse case scenario is that an affected dog can pass it on to humans, as well as other dogs. In turn, you can also pass on heartworm to your own dog.

Prevention of heartworm is crucial, especially when you consider that once your dog is infected with this parasite it made lead to death. Of greater concern is other in animals that come in contact with your dog such as coyotes, fox’s, and others may have roundworm and may transmit that disease to your dog.

Preventing Roundworm/Heartworm

Prevention can come in the form of tablet or food additive when given to your dog as a preventative measure. A tablet can be ingested orally and mahy come in the form of a dog treat, and food additives can be added or mixed with food. Most of these treatments are monthly applications. Remember to give it to your dog each month. Use a calendar if it helps you remember.

In areas where there are four seasons, the primary carrier of roundworm is mosquitoes, which ingest infected blood and then give it to another animal as they sting them. In areas with less harsh seasonal changes, roundworm is more often transmitted from animal to animal. In all cases, giving your gun dog preventive treatment every month, no matter the time of year, is a best practice.

Symptoms of Roundworm

In its early stages, roundworm is very hard to detect since your dog won’t show any physcial signs of illness. Your vet can test for the disease, or skilled vets can tell by observation. It is typical of heartworm to gestate for several months before affecting your dog. During this stage of the illness, the disease can easily be treated, but it is best when your dog is asymptomatic.

Typically a dog infected with the round worm becomes lethargic and not necessarily interested in is normal daily activities. You may notice a cough or weight loss in addition to these other symptoms. Contact your veterinarian immediately because in addition to roundworm there may be other infections that may be causing the symptoms.

Diagnosis and Treatment of Roundworm

Diagnosing roundworms requires a blood test. During the blood test one step will be to determine whether the roundworms are male or female which will help direct your veterinarian to the proper treatment course.

Roundworm treatment is extensive and may be very expensive to treat. Aside from that the treatment is very difficult for your dog and in fact may result in his needing dialysis. Almost all dogs will be listless, suffer weight loss, and has other symptoms while the Worms are discharged. Follow-up treatments will be necessary to ensure that all of the Worms are eliminate it from your dog system.

Damage to organs can also be a result of roundworm infection and can mean lifelong treatment for that as well. This is why it’s so important to catch the infection as early as possible and to not delay in getting treatment for it.

When you have any sort of hunting dog, you should always keep in mind that you should always keep your dog’s health as top priority. There are also lots of different hunting dog supplies that you should have on hand for your dog such as electronic dog collars or dog collars.

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BEIJING — China’s latest must-have luxury for the ultra-rich, to go with mansions and sports cars, is a large, slobbery dog with massive amounts of hair best known for herding sheep in Tibet.

Tibetan Mastiff

Once banned by the Communist Party as bourgeois, pet ownership is booming in China, and the Tibetan mastiff is the dog of the moment for those who want to spread their wealth beyond stocks and real estate.

“I used to invest in German shepherds, but Tibetan mastiffs are what’s hot right now,” said Sui Huizheng, a business owner who has about 20 of the dogs and attended the 6th annual China Tibetan Mastiff Expo this past weekend.

Hundreds of the hairy dogs were on hand, and owners and handlers marched the most expensive ones down catwalks as though they were fashion models. Some carried the names of wealthy Americans like “Warren Buffett,” while others were called “God” and “Prince.” Among the owners was a controversial running coach who trained world track champions in the 1980s.

Their hoped-for prize: breeders willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a mate for their mastiff. Sui spent $43,000 for a large platform and a poster-plastered booth to show off his dogs. One breeding session with Sui’s top mastiff King goes for $40,000.

The craze seems to defy sales patterns and common sense elsewhere, especially for a dog that is common, has thick, lion-mane-like hair, grows to 180 pounds (80 kilograms) and is known for being fierce.

“I can understand racehorses and diamonds, but I don’t understand why someone would want to pay half a million dollars for a dog,” said Martha Feltenstein, president of the American Tibetan Mastiff Association. “They have a relatively short life expectancy and are not especially rare, so it’s quite puzzling why they are fetching such a high price in China.”

In the U.S., Tibetan mastiff pups can be bought for as little as several hundred dollars, Feltenstein said.

Breeders in China say adult Tibetan mastiffs sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and can even go for more than $100,000.

One of them sold for more than half a million dollars last year to a woman in northern China who then sent 30 black Mercedes-Benz and other luxury cars to fetch the dog from the airport, according to a report in the state-run China Daily.

After splurging on real estate in Australia, American thoroughbreds and European designer fashions, China’s rich see the Tibetan mastiffs as a new status symbol. China is now home to an estimated 825,000 millionaires, its most in modern history, and its luxury goods market is one of the fastest growing in the world. Among the must-haves for rich men in northeast China, the official Xinhua News Agency recently said was a young beautiful wife, a Lamborghini and a Tibetan mastiff, “the bigger and more ferocious the better.”

“You could call it a local luxury brand,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, a Shanghai-based tax specialist who who compiles a popular annual list of China’s richest people. “Luxury brands are growing at phenomenal rates in China and owning a Tibetan mastiff is another channel for increasing your credibility and showing off your rich status.”

The mastiffs, themselves, look like money, resembling a lion that is a traditional symbol of good fortune.

“We want a breed of dog that is home grown, and this guardian dog is perfect because it is also a symbol of good luck for Chinese people throughout history,” said Wu Yunliang, the owner of “Warren Buffett” and nearly 20 other mastiffs. He keeps them in the northern city of Taiyuan where he owns a nursing home.

Potential profits from mastiff breeding are what drew Sui, the businessman-breeder, who said he isn’t a dog lover. “I don’t touch or play with them much,” Sui said. He leaves the brushing and fluffing of his dogs to nearly a dozen handlers.

Passers-by were told only to admire the dogs from afar and not get near them because they’re hostile to strangers — all the better for protecting flocks and herders on the isolated Tibetan plateau, where they originated.

Retired track coach Ma Junren became fascinated with the mastiffs when he was training female distance runners on the Tibetan plateau in the late 1980s. Ma claimed the high-altitude training and concoctions of turtle blood and caterpillar fungus he fed the runners helped them set world records. But some of his athletes were later caught using banned performance-boosting substances. Ma retired, denying wrongdoing.

At the expo, he exhorted breeders to raise their standards so that China can gain entry to the World Canine Organization (Federation Cynologique Internationale), an international federation of kennel clubs. The organization has so far kept China out over lax controls on vaccinations, several breeders said.

“I hope all our Tibetan mastiff lovers are honest. We don’t want to see thieves, criminals or cheaters around us,” Ma said.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Crufts was won by a gundog called Yogi in Birmingham, England.

The Hungarian Vizsla took the coveted title of Best in Show 2010.