A.G. Out Loud!

Hipster Puppies

Anne — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:36:17 +0000

There’s a new website called Hipster Puppies that cracks me up. I’m thinking I might have to get creative with my dogs and send in some pictures. Anyone have ideas for what I should do? Here are some of my favorites!

Thanks to @SarahDisgrace for this find!

I’m Leaving On A Jet Plane

Anne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:36:19 +0000

I’m headed down to Austin, Texas today to attend SXSW. I’m so excited because I am going to get to hear a lot of my “blog idols” speak and meet tons of great people! I’ll still be posting while I’m gone, (thank goodness for the pre-scheduling function on Wordpress), but I won’t be as active on the site as I usually am until after March 15th when I return.

In honor of my trip, I wanted to profile this adorable “Jet Set” sweater by Oscar Newman.

My Little Mood Lifter

Anne — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:29:24 +0000

Look who I found hiding in our pantry! Kind of random, but Leroy decided that he wanted to chill out by his food in the closet. This is one of the many reasons I love my dogs. They make me laugh everyday! Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day life… I have been in that frame of mind in the last few days. We’re leaving town soon and I have been overwhelmed with getting ready to leave. On top of that, I’m trying to shove down the feelings I have about leaving Will for five days.

Will and the dogs will be in very good hands…my parents are staying at our house and I know they will spoil them all like crazy. I’m just having some mother’s guilt, given that it’s the first time leaving Will for more than a few hours. Leave it to Leroy to give me a good chuckle and lighten the mood!

How have your dogs helped you recently?

Shopping with Dogs

Anne — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:36:25 +0000

This is from my local paper, the Omaha World Herald. I hope more businesses follow this trend of letting dogs in. It seems like the coasts are much more dog-friendly when it comes to this kind of thing than we are in the Midwest. Way to go, Canfield’s!

It’s a small dog’s world after all
By Christine Laue
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Canfield’s Sporting Goods is inviting canines into the store as a strategy to survive today’s dog-eat-dog retail world.

In this competitive economy, retailers need to stand out, said Rick Canfield, owner of the outdoor equipment and apparel store at 84th Street and West Center Road. And that includes allowing customers to shop with and show off their four-legged family members.

“It’s really one of those inexpensive ways to get people in the store, and it’s a nice thing to do,” he said. “We don’t care if they buy anything or not. It lifts the spirit of the store to have them in here.”
It also could lift sales.

Since posting a sign reading “Dogs welcome — must be on a leash,” about a month ago, about 50 dogs have accompanied their owners into the store, Canfield said, and the owners have tended to buy things. “Sometimes we’ll have six, seven dogs on a Saturday.”

Employees provide water and doggy treats and request permission to take their pictures for a sort-of doggie guest book on Canfield’s Web site. People who go to the site will see photos of Picasso, a 15-week-old Pomeranian mix, Peewee the pug and Emo, “the first Rhodesian Ridgeback to visit Canfield’s.”

Last Saturday, Yogi, a Pekingese, ventured in with owner Jennifer Schlitter of Bellevue.
Schlitter said she bought the pup that same day from a pet store and then went to Canfield’s with her husband, who needed boots. She remembered previously reading the sign that dogs were allowed and liked that she didn’t have to leave Yogi in the car.

Canfield’s employees treated the pooch like a king, Schlitter said.

“We had a really good experience,” she said. “It was really enjoyable being able to take him in.”

The dogs have behaved so far — none has bitten other dogs or people or had accidents on the floor, Canfield said. “There’s no down side to this at all.”

Canfield came up with the idea after his wife, Sandy, commented that she wished she could take her three dogs into more stores.

Pam Wiese, spokeswoman for the Nebraska Humane Society, said doggie boutiques and national pet supply chains like Petco and Petsmart have long allowed leashed dogs to accompany customers. A few Old Market businesses and other shops do as well, Wiese said.

After making sure it was legal to allow dogs in the store, Canfield decided to give it a try.

“I put a sign up just for fun, and all of a sudden, people started coming in,” he said. “It’s really become kind of an event.”

Canfield’s caters to hunters, who generally own dogs, Wiese said, so allowing dogs inside makes more sense there than for, say, a kitchenware store.

Canfield’s carries some dog supplies and toys, but those items aren’t its focus.

“It’s somewhat uncommon, I think, to allow pets into stores unless it’s a store that specially caters to pet supplies and pets,” Wiese said.

Sales at the longtime Omaha retailer were flat in 2006 through 2008 but improved after the company changed its strategy, Canfield said. As destination shops such as Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s entered the market, Canfield’s shifted its main emphasis away from fishing and hunting and toward camping, kayaking, rock climbing and snowboarding.

Sales increased 10 percent in 2009 and are up 15 percent in the first two months of this year, he said.
By defining a new niche and watching expenses, Canfield’s survived the recession, he said. By welcoming dogs, he hopes to keep on surviving — and to have a lot more fun doing so.

“Dogs have magical powers.”

An Unlikely Friendship

Anne — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:18:51 +0000

Thanks to Sigrid Ruge for this great video of her dog, Amoz and her cat, Embava. Sigrid rescued both animals from her local shelter as adults…we love her for that. I get such a kick out of how loving Embava is with Amoz and then when Amoz tries to reciprocate, she bats him in the face! Classic! Thanks also to Julie Larson for telling me about this great video!

Catch!

Anne — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 06:36:37 +0000

This commercial is pure genius! What a beautiful depiction of dogs! I’m admittedly not a fan of Pedigree Dog Food…their second listed ingredient is “chicken by-product meal”, which is another word for “crap”. (I’m a food snob when it comes to my dogs.) I do, however, love all the programs they have to help shelter dogs. For every Facebook Fan they get they will donate a bowl of food to shelters. Pedigree also does a lot to help educate people about dog adoption and lists other ways to help on their site.

War Dog Suffers From PTSD in Afghanistan

Anne — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:36:00 +0000

This breaks my heart. I guess I have mixed feelings about using dogs in combat if this is the result. This article was especially interesting to me because my Grandpa, Floyd Harmon trained dogs for combat in World War II. I hope they get Gunter back home ASAP and make the effort to rehabilitate him. They owe him that given his service to our country.

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS (Wall Street Journal)

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan—When the Marines cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, one remains in his kennel. Quivering.

Out of the 58 bomb-sniffing dogs the Marines have in Afghanistan, only one—a brown-eyed, floppy-eared yellow Lab named Gunner—is suffering from such severe canine post-traumatic stress disorder that he had to sit out the ongoing offensive in central Helmand Province.

“He’s the only combat-ineffective dog out here,” says his kennel chief, Cpl. Chad McCoy.

Like their human comrades, some war dogs can handle combat, and some can’t. One Marine Corps explosives dog, a black Lab named Daisy, has found 13 hidden bombs since arriving in Afghanistan in October. Zoom, another Lab, refused to associate with the Marines after seeing one serviceman shoot a feral Afghan dog. Only after weeks of retraining, hours of playing with a reindeer squeaky toy and a gusher of good-boy praise was Zoom willing to go back to work.

“With some Marines, PTSD can be from one terrible event, or a cumulative effect,” says Maj. Rob McLellan, 33-year-old operations officer of the 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, who trains duck-hunting dogs back home in Green Bay, Wis. Likewise, he says, the stress sometimes “weighs a dog down to the point where the dog just snaps.”

Gunner snapped.

He graduated from bomb-dog school in Virginia. He could hunt and tolerate gunfire. He could sniff out explosives, including the homemade ammonium-nitrate fertilizer bombs that inflict most allied casualties in Afghanistan. But he was skittish even before he arrived in the combat zone in October and was posted to a front-line battalion. He reached a crisis soon afterwards.

He reacted so nervously to the rattle of gunfire and deep boom of artillery commonplace around military outposts that he never even got a chance to test his mettle on a real patrol. His handlers aren’t sure what pushed Gunner over the edge. His official record is damning, however: Gunner, it reads, “is not mission capable and is a liability if he is to leave the wire.”

Capt. Michael Bellin, an Army veterinarian working with the Marines, says he’s seen canine post-traumatic stress disorder cases before. “I think it’s possible, depending on what they went through,” says Capt. Bellin, 33, from Delafield, Wis.

Gunner was sent to the main kennel at Camp Leatherneck, a rear base. There, bomb dogs recuperate from illness or injury, under the care of Cpl. McCoy, a 25-year-old member of the famed feuding clan from Hickman County, Tenn.

Cpl. McCoy, a sandy-haired man with sunburnt cheeks, tries to strike a balance between encouraging the dogs’ natural whimsy and keeping his own emotional distance. The handlers can’t grow so fond of their charges that they hesitate to send them into danger’s way.

Still, it’s hard to stay very aloof from the slobbering, enthusiastic Labs. Although the dogs generally live in 9-by-9-foot aluminum cages, Cpl. McCoy sometimes lets Gunner sleep on a camouflage-patterned sheet on a cot in his tent.

The Marine Corps gives each dog a military rank, one notch above his handler’s, to reinforce the idea that the dogs deserve respect. Gunner is formally assigned to a gunnery sergeant, so he’s a first sergeant, a high rank among enlisted Marines, human and canine.

For weeks after he arrived at Camp Leatherneck, Gunner refused to leave the kennel compound. Even now almost any sound sends him into a panic. If a shipping container door slams somewhere nearby, Gunner hunches down and bolts for an open cage door. If an artillery round goes off in the distance, he races into Cpl. McCoy’s tent, then weaves around the cages, his tail low and twitchy. Even the click of a camera shutter can send him flashing back to some bad experience only he can recall.

Lately, the corporal has been able to persuade Gunner to take walks around camp, though the dog tugs at his leash in fear and appears to take no pleasure in the activity.

There are moments, however, when Gunner resembles his old self. On a recent day Cpl. McCoy drove him out to the training area to try his nose at finding hidden bombs. The corporal buried three sticks of C-4 plastic explosives in a few inches of dirt.

“He won’t make it 20 feet,” Cpl. McCoy predicted, letting Gunner off the leash some 100 yards from the hidden C-4.

But Gunner surprised him. Despite the roar of helicopters overhead, he ventured out in the direction of the buried explosives, dodging left and right in response to the corporal’s whistles and hand signals.

At no time, though, did he drop his nose to the ground to sniff for explosives. “It’s a miracle he did that well,” the corporal said afterwards, tossing Gunner his red-rubber toy as a reward for his effort.

Next he let another Lab, Mag, give it a try. Mag was in rehab for a condition from which he tired quickly and lost mobility in his tail and legs. But Mag is an enthusiastic bomb hunter.

At Cpl. McCoy’s command—”Back!”—Mag sprinted across the rocky desert, sniffing and searching in instant response to the signals. Soon he caught a whiff of something and dropped to his belly—directly on top of the spot where Cpl. McCoy had buried the C-4.

The corporal assured him he was a good dog and let him play fetch for a few minutes. “This is a constant game to them,” says Cpl. McCoy. “They don’t know it’s life or death.”

Gunner gives the impression that he understands exactly what’s at stake. On the next trial, Cpl. McCoy dispatched him to find explosives buried under a soda can on the side of a dry ditch. There was machine-gun fire audible in the distance, and Gunner got no more than 20 or 30 feet before he changed his mind and circled back to the corporal’s side.

“Gunner’s a lover,” Cpl. McCoy says. “Mag’s a fighter.”

The corporal holds out little hope that Gunner will one day be fit for combat, searching for hidden bombs amid the din of war. He’ll consider it a success if Gunner casts his demons far enough aside to be a good pet for someone back home.

“We’re trying to get him into the dog mind-set,” Cpl. McCoy says.

Jump, Jump!

Anne — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:32:33 +0000

This dog makes my day. Who knew that jumping on a trampoline could bring such joy!

Trampoline Dog – watch more funny videos

Dogs Are The New Kids

Anne — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:55:16 +0000

The people at Best In Show speak the truth.

Just sayin’…

Travel Bug & Question of the Week

Anne — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:36:02 +0000

I have the travel bug. My husband and I have been together for over eight years and we really haven’t taken a vacation together. “But what about your honeymoon?” you ask… See, we didn’t go on a honeymoon. We decided instead to use that money to build a fence in our backyard for our dogs. (Still one of the best decisions we’ve ever made). So the only time we’ve traveled together has been for work conferences or to visit family.

Maybe that’s why this little doggy passport cover by owlsay caught my eye. Don and I are dying to go overseas and explore. On our short list is Germany, Italy and Buenos Aries. Don is obsessed with watching travel shows and reading travel guides…especially when it comes to Rick Steves. I know that when we eventually get to travel, he will be a great travel guide!

Where would you travel to if you could?