Winterize your dog.

Preventive winter paw care will save you from a multitude of problems and make your dog much happier. Just as humans get dry or cracked skin on hands and feet, a dog's pads can crack as well. Periodically check your pet's pads and if they are dry, massage some petroleum jelly or coconut oil into the pad till it absorbs. Hard frozen ground can cause other problems as well, such as paw pad tears, cuts, or abrasions. Simple abrasions can be treated at home by a novice by thoroughly cleaning the cut and applying a sterile pad and covering with vet rap or an Ace bandage. Deeper or wider cuts or avulsions should be taken care of by a vet. While you inspecting the dog's pads you should carefully trim the excess hair from around the claws and pads. This excess hair will trap ice, snow, and snow melting chemicals and can cause discomfort to the dog.

Speaking of snow melting chemicals, many are toxic or can irritate a dog's skin and/or digestive systems. Sand or natural Kitty Litter can be used to give grip on a frozen surface and they will not hurt your pets. If you must use some kind of ice melt, check the packaging for "pet safe" and get it up from the sidewalk as soon as possible. Avoid antifreeze like the plague. A small amount of this sweet-smelling liquid can quickly and painfully kill a dog. Most of these problems can be addressed by using dog booties. Yes, the dog will hate the boots and they look silly, but after dealing with many torn pads while working border collies for K-9 SAR and herding for 13 years, I have found it a small price to pay.

Two wrongs

Two wrongs don't make a right. Late last month, I ran across a news story recounting how an Ohio woman spotted a landscaper destroying a goose nest so he could put down mulch. The woman called the cops and then the state wildlife people. The state guy explained to the cops and landscaper that he could not disturb the nest. In fact you can, if you register with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. I do this every year. The geese are protected by international treaty and the rules and fines can be severe. It was also explained to the woman that it was illegal for her to be feeding the geese.
I have to float-test eggs before addling to make sure that they are not too far along in their development. Feeding geese leads to geese getting used to humans and losing their fear of us.
How about we all just leave the WILD in wildlife and stop feeding them and disturbing their nests unless you are a wildlife professional.

Why is killing always the first option?

Why is killing always the first option?

According to the Associated Press, the North Little Rock City Council bowed to
public pressure and reversed its decision to allow a hunt in a city park to
remove 130 resident Canada Geese. The council had to pass a waiver to their
ordinance banning the discharging of firearms within city limits for the hunt.
The hunt has not been canceled and participating hunters are still required to
attend one of two training sessions in case the hunt does go on.

According to local residents, the town does not enforce its ordinance prohibiting the feeding of waterfowl at the park and has not tried any non-lethal methods of control.

It's a rather simple logic puzzle. Why are the geese choosing to stay in the park and create a mess? The answer is food and safety. Parks cut the grass short and park patrons feed bread and corn to the geese. Parks require dogs to be on leash and the landscaping discourages natural predators. Lots of free food and no one bothers you! Where can I get a deal like that?

When you cut grass short, you remove the older growth that does not taste good. The sugar content is much higher within an inch or two of the ground, so cutting grass short actually encourages geese to stick around for sweeter snacks. Letting the grass grow to as little as four inches in length greatly alters the taste and geese will avoid it. This obviously can not be done on places suck as sports fields and gardens, but selectively doing this will cause the geese to concentrate in other areas where you can more effectively employ targeted non-lethal methods.

People feeding the geese provide a steady stream of free food and help support a larger population than the area could do so otherwise. It removes the natural fear geese have of humans and they start ganging up on people for a free handout. Geese in these conditions start to eat anything dropped on the ground such as nuts, bolts, screws, nails, and glass. These items get stuck or cut the digestive system of the geese. It is known as "Hardware Disease," one of the leading causes of goose death.

Trained border collies change the environment by providing a "perceived predatory presence" in the park. You are changing that safety factor part of the equation. The geese will start to associate the park with danger and avoid it.

We could just kill all the geese, but that does nothing to address the underlying causes of the goose problem. Yes, you removed the problem geese. But guess what - geese fly! Others will fly over your park and see "Goose Heaven." They are going to stop by, and soon your park will look exactly the same.

Every summer the USDA has teams that collect geese when they are flightless and throw them in gas chambers. The geese bang about in agony, slowly suffocating for several minutes. The local population gets upset and before the goose crap has a chance to degrade, the rest of the local population starts to fly and a new bunch of geese fly in. They have been doing this for decades and goose populations have grown exponentially -- because it does not work.

I remember looking out over one of my clients' lakes and seeing a thousand geese. That's all it is now ... a memory. They have had one day in the last two months with geese, and then there were only a dozen. Address the underlying causes of a problem and you will solve it.

If you have a boat with a hole in it, you can get a bigger bucket or you can patch the hole. It's up to you, but I would rather fish than bail.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/b302920128fa4f90b4b3d3f283d45846/AR--Goose-Hunt/

Step away and no one gets hurt.

The other day I arrived at one of my sites and found 25 people gathered around a few pairs of geese feeding and trying to pet them. Most were moms and their small children. I'll post later about the potential health problems to people and humans from this behavior. Now I will just address the safety aspect.

In the early spring, geese start to pair for breeding and become quite aggressive and territorial. Every year there are numerous stories about people being injured when they are suddenly attacked by "friendly geese." I know they look cute and harmless, that is till they are flying at you at full speed from behind.

Now for the part people are going to get mad about. In most cases the attack was caused by the carelessness of the person attacked. The geese do not need you to feed them, and trying to get close to them is asking for trouble. All the goose knows is that they are protecting their mate, nesting site, and eggs or young. If you find yourself faced with an aggressive goose, do not turn your back on it. Spread your arms wide and "hiss" loudly at the goose as you slowly back away. OK, so people may look at you funny, but it beats a trip to the ER.

Use the gooses language to convey the message. You want the goose to think you are too big for them to fight. If you turn your back and run, it's telling the goose that he has made you back down, which for some reason just triggers them to push you away faster by attacking. Slowly backing away with your arms spread says I'm bigger and not afraid to fight you.

I use this approach every year with great success. In Spring I temporally push the geese off their nests to oil(birth control) or count their eggs and have only been attacked once. Yep, you guessed it, I was in a hurry and was not paying attention. Fortunately I had bent over to pick up a pen and the goose missed me. Remember that these are wild animals and not the stuff of fairy tales or Disney movies. Treat them with the respect they deserve - especially during breeding and nesting season - and you will get along fine.

Al Frankin I love you.

Senator Al Franken's first Bill is a measure to provide service dogs to all injured veterans. What a great idea! Please contact your senators and congressperson and ask them to support this bill. It's about time we started taking care of our service people who have given so much for our freedom. These dogs are amazing.

Copied from the Baltimore Sun's Unleashed blog.
July 25, 2009
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/features/mutts/blog/2009/07/frankens_1st_bill_service_dogs.html

Franken's 1st bill: Service dogs for vets
Brand new Sen. Al Franken's very first bill? It would create a program to give service dogs to all injured veterans.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Luis Carlos Montalvan, a disabled Iraq war veteran, suggested the idea to Franken months earlier at the presidential inaugural ball in Washington.

"It was really like a dream come true," Montalvan, a journalism student in New York City, told the paper.

According to the paper, Montalvan told Franken that his service dog named Tuesday helps him deal with life after suffering fractured vertebrae and a head injury in an attack near the Iraq-Syrian border in 2007.

"There is going to be a clear return on investment here," Franken told the paper. "My hope is that at the end of this they'll go, 'A ha! These dogs pay for themselves or more than pay for themselves, we have fewer suicides, fewer incidents of hospitalization, less costs in prescription drugs and more productivity.' "

Pain Rays, Plane Crashes, and Gas Chambers.

So the other day I was commenting on a story in the online edition of Wired Magazine about a Reported US Air Force plan to use 40 million dollar pain beam generators to move geese off of runways. This is the machine that they would not send to Iraq or Afghanistan because it would not be humane to use for crowd control.
I made the point that it would cost millions of tax dollars to purchase, man, and maintain each of these pain rays every year and that it's much cheaper to spend the $30,000 a year to hire a Border Collie Service like mine to do the job.
I also pointed out that it's a felony in most places to intentionally inflict pain on an animal.
I was jumped on by a guy because he could not believe someone would charge that much to run their dog on a runway a few times a week. After all, he only pays someone $15 a day to walk his dog. My job is considerably more complex than he realizes. Yes, $30k sounds like a bit much, but that is actually someone on site almost every day and on-call service. It worked out to be about $25 an hour before taxes and expenses.
Ok, so let's get the basic stuff out of the way. Despite the media blitzkrieg surrounding the "Miracle on the Hudson" incident, planes are not constantly dropping out of the air because they are hitting geese. Most bird strikes are seagulls, not geese. Most bird strikes happen at small general aviation airports. They are hit by small prop planes and helicopters. Almost every rare injury is minor.
I read the FAA's recent bird report and in the 18-year time frame it covers - 1990 to 2007 - there was 1 aircraft struck by Canada geese that resulted in 2 human deaths. Just to put that in perspective, in that same time frame there was one incident with one human death cause when a plane hit a HORSE. Yes, you heard that correctly, a HORSE! (Source FAA Bird Strike Report page 54 table 15.)
Are they going to construct a giant horse zapper?
The FAA report actually blames part of the problem on airlines replacing their older 4-engine planes with quieter 2-engine planes.
It seems as if groups like the USDA's Wildlife Management Services Division are using the Hudson crash to justify their jobs. USDA Wildlife Management kills thousands of wild animals each year, including several protected species. They herd geese into gas chambers when they are flightless. According to a USDA source, Congress has been asked to make this information exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Last summer, the agency justified the killings by saying goose droppings can cause disease, but this year all they can say is Hudson plane crash. They even used this excuse to explain why they were killing geese on a NY golf course that was several miles from JFK.
Now this is where it gets strange. They used the Hudson crash to justify killing non-migratory geese in June, but the plane hit migratory geese in February. These are effectively two different types of geese. It's like killing the cow because the bull kicked you.
The real kicker is that their lethal program does not work. Say you have a park and you have the USDA show up in mid-June to kill 100 geese there. You may think your problem is solved, and it is till late July when this year's goslings from nearby properties start flying. For example, one of my customers who had no geese all summer had 52 young geese show up last week. In a week I have trained them that when they see my silver pickup, they need to leave. I did not even get to stop the truck tonight before they left the property. If they had hired the USDA, they would have been goose free for 4 to 6 weeks.
If you want to actually solve the problem of geese near airports, you need to change the environment that is attracting them. Adding a perceived predatory presence, like a border collie, actually does that. Pain Rays and gas chambers are not humane, not cost effective, and they do not work.

Night Surprises

Part of my job is to control goose reproduction on my sites. Resident Canada geese have grown to more than 90,000 in the state of Maryland. To accomplish this, I cover the eggs with vegetable oil which prevents the eggs from developing. Momma Goose does not like this and I have had several close calls. The other night I was oiling some eggs to prevent them from hatching. I was working at night, because the site is too busy during the day and it’s easier in this case to deal with the eggs without answering 100 questions.

I was at the nest site area and moved up to the first nest. There I found, using my head (literally), that the tree it was under was actually an unusually tall thorn bush. I oiled the eggs after removing most of the thorns from my arms.

I was proceeding to the next nest when I noticed a stick that was oddly shaped and bigger than the others around it. For some reason, I stopped to examine the stick and noticed the fanged head on it.

Note: it’s hard to distinguish between a copperhead and a rat snake by flashlight.

I like snakes, and figured he had the right of way. We agreed that one of us should leave, so I found a real stick and touched his tail with it. He left and I nervously finished the next nest.

The third nest was that of a domestic goose and, since I have no permit to touch it, I just counted the eggs. She had laid over thirty, but it was clear that she was not trying to hatch any of them. Thank God for that tender mercy.