Golden Mountain Dog Solutions ~ Blog

It’s been decided that from here on in we’ll be publishing all our dog related articles over at our Large Fierce Mammal website. We have a lot to say about dog handling, training, life with dogs in general, and LFM gets a lot of attention from a very wide audience. Sad to say, a blog dedicated exclusively to dog issues tends to attract pretty much exclusively “dog people”,and if you’re going to reach a wider audience on such critical matters as, say, breed bans, then preaching to the choir is not the best approach. This decision only affects the blog here, and has no effect on the rest of the Golden Mountain Dog Solutions website.

So keep an eye on LFM, and subscribe so you don’t miss anything. Clicking on the “Dogs” category will give you instant access to all items of relevance.

Thanks for reading!

This is not an invisible fence.

It periodically happens that a dog can no longer remain in its present home and we are called upon to be involved in the re-homing process. Some of these dogs have issues and require rehabilitation before they can be placed, others do not, but no matter what, the adoption of any dog through Golden Mountain Dog Solutions requires the signing of an Adoption Agreement. This Agreement is non-negotiable, each item in it exists for sound reasons, and the adoption process ends immediately for any candidate that refuses to sign it as written.

Item 11 in our Adoption Agreement states:

“The Dog is not to be confined within an area contained by an “Invisible Fence” or any similar product designed to automatically administer electric shocks or other corrective signals, nor shall it be subjected to the effects of systems or equipment designed to control barking or otherwise modify its behaviour through electric shocks, exposure to sound waves, or to  radiation of any frequency.”

This policy isn’t unique to Golden Mountain Dog Solutions. There are other animal rescue organizations that include some version of this stipulation in their own adoption contracts.

Randy has addressed this subject in detail in this article posted 18 June 2010 to his personal website, so other than the preamble you’ve just read having been taken pretty much word for word from that post, we’ll leave you to get the rest straight from the source.

Pepper, in the astoundingly brief and yet still magical process of recharging his Border Collie batteries.

The following article was first published on Randy’s personal blog – Large Fierce Mammal – on 5 June 2010.

I once had a Border Collie named Pepper that every Sunday I took to participate in flyball at a school soccer field located about a 35 minute drive from where we lived at the time. The drive involved travelling most of the way on a major highway, then a turn off at a particular exit that had very specific significance for Pepper – the exit ramp led to a stop sign from which a right turn would take us past our veterinarian’s office while a left turn led to the flyball field.

Pepper loved to travel but routinely was snoozing by the time we reached the highway. Nevertheless, he was always on his feet and watching about a minute before we arrived at the critical exit. Turning onto the exit ramp started his tail wagging slowly and this continued as we arrived at the fateful stop sign. If I turned right, the tail wagging stopped and Pepper would once again curl up on the back seat, feigning disinterest, but turning left, now that was a different matter! The tail wagged the dog, and I never failed to arrived at the flyball field without the right side of my head sporting a world class cow lick. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may already know if you’ve been to our Adoptable Dogs page today, beautiful lovable Lucy has been adopted! Many applications were processed on the road to placing her, and along the way we met a lot of great people. That’s a lot of disappointed people, we know, but in the end there is only one Lucy and this process is about her and her future. We take that stand with every dog we undertake to place.

With no intended slight to any of our applicants, we feel certain that our final decision was the best one for Lucy and her new family. We wish them all the best and will always be there for them if they need us!

Special thanks go out to our foster “dog father” Peter Thompson who not only housed Lucy during the adoption process, but also hosted our applicants when we met with them to introduce her. Now he needs a new girlfriend to lie on top of him while he watches TV. Good luck Peter!

An article posted this week by CBC titled “NS veterinarians ban tail docking” announced that the NSVMA has forbidden its members from performing any surgical procedures intended solely to alter an animal’s appearance. Among the procedures affected are tail docking and ear cropping.

This is a step that is long overdue. These surgeries are predominantly driven by purely human conceptions of what an animal needs to look like; either to project a desired image, or to be in “proper” conformance with “breed standards”. This begs the question of just how surgically altering the appearance of a living organism, so that it no longer looks, or  is able to function, the way Nature intended, is in any way an improvement for the animal. Read the rest of this entry »

Daisy and Misha have found a way home! Volunteers are driving them from Nova Scotia to Philadelphia.
Thank you to everyone who offered to help! Read the rest of this entry »

There have been some new developments in Robbie’s case that have eliminated the urgent need we had for a short term foster home. His present owners are now able to keep him for a few extra weeks, buying us the time we need to bring him here. This is excellent beyond description, and lifts a huge weight from our minds.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the information we’ve posted so far on our Adoptable Dogs page will attest, Robbie is a fantastic dog, but he still needs a forever home. We recognize that a lot of excellent candidates haven’t even gotten in contact with us because they know they simply can’t offer a long term commitment, but at this point we are interested in a suitable foster home for two to three months if a permanent adopter can’t be found in the short term.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday we hosted our nearly 5 month old niece Alyssa as a guest member of our Pack, something that is a fair bit beyond simply “baby sitting”, and that is the inspiration for this article.

The picture at left captures a moment in which Milo and Minnie are sniffing Alyssa while she calmly watches them. Alyssa has been exposed to dogs almost from birth and in our house never reacts in any other way to their presence. We’ve never even witnessed anything more than a look of concern on her face after she’s just been startled by a dog suddenly barking nearby. Babies function on a more primal level than older humans who tend to overthink experiences and formulate responses based on what they think is going on rather than what is. Like dogs, babies respond to the world through smell, sound, sight, touch, and taste; and like dogs they can learn to react in unbalanced ways when unstable energy, either from an unbalanced human or dog, is permitted to enter the experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Let it be known throughout these lands that Minnie is no longer being fostered with us here. She’s STAYING!

Minnie borrowing Gunner’s bed.

Now well on the way to shedding the excess weight she carried when she first arrived, it has been an absolute joy to watch her blossom as she experiences healthily fulfilling nutrition, the joy of “running with the wolves” in daily activities and on Pack outings, and the engaging challenges of the world at large. In short, Minnie has become the type of balanced dog that is, quite frankly, too good to lose.

The therapeutic power a balanced dog pack brings to the process of returning dogs and people to a naturally healthy way of being cannot be overstated. Minnie embraced this to perfection, and to the point where she has become an active participant in our work with other dogs. In truth, she’s not only staying, she’s hired! Read the rest of this entry »