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Rosco & Sally Pups 2022, Townsville (2026)

08/06/2023

The puppies are six months old today! I hope everyone is going well 😊

08/04/2023

Took Roy and Wasabi down to our first local agility comp for the year :) Had a look around and a game of tug!

08/04/2023

Salt is visiting for a couple of hours :)

Wasabi flies off to his new home next week!

01/04/2023

Kids are starting to lose their teeth - time to slow down on tug training, especially once those molars start going in a couple more weeks, we've got sore mouths. Expect the chewing to escalate, and offer plenty of opportunities to chew on things they're allowed to chew on (bones, bully sticks, etc) - it'll save your furniture and your sanity!

They turned 16 weeks old this week! Everyone should have had their last core puppy vaccine (ie parvo, distemper, infectious hepatitis), so we're down to the final few days before we're out and about everywhere. Parvo is quite prevalent in Townsville and it's very long lived in soil - in perfect conditions (shady, damp, no frosts) the virus can remain infective for many years, so it's a real balancing act between socialisation during their critical period (which is so important!) and disease risk (parvo can be fatal even with treatment, and has long term effects on their gastrointestinal tract and socialisation).

I've done my best to get the kids out and about in low risk situations, I know I play it safer than some and riskier than others. It's always a tough call, and in my opinion has to be an individual decision driven by knowledge of your pup as an individual and their intended lifestyle. Most of my kids have gone to sporting and working homes, where their confidence and resilience in challenging environments will be a huge factor in their quality of life, so it makes sense to err on the side of socialisation. My Roy in particular will be expected to spend quite a bit of time sitting on stalls and doing demos in crowds of people and dogs (🤞!) so it's really important to me that he's comfortable and confident in those environments, and that's so much more easily achieved through good quality socialisation in his critical period (aka socialisation period) than at any other time in his life. I have always and will always have both rescues and purpose bred dogs, and so much of what I work on for months with my rescues could've been built in just one or two events in puppyhood.

Sorry for the wall of text, have had a few questions and comments about this! Especially within the veterinary industry, we get so focused on the medicine and the tragedies we see every day, I think we sometimes lose sight of the big picture of quality of life for patients and clients, which is hugely behaviour driven.

26/03/2023

Joey in the paper :)

The Australian Army’s latest four-legged recruit may be adorable but he has some mighty big paws to fill in a dangerous profession. See the adorable photos: 👉 https://bit.ly/3JDlTB6