Walk Fido

AKC/Eukanuba National Championship

The AKC/Eukanuba National Championship, otherwise known as the top dog show, is this weekend! December 1st and 2nd will be filled with lovely dogs preening and prancing and particiating in all sorts of agility competitions to win the coveted prizes on offer this weekend.

While we don't love everything about dog shows (the primping and preening part is entirely unnatural!), we do love to see dogs perform agility and show how smart they really are. We're always amazed at the particularly close bond the dogs have with their handlers - truly an inspiration for dog trainers everywhere!

See Cesar Millan - Tonight!

Cesar Millan will be at Borders in Pasadena tonight at 7pm to sign his new book, Be the Pack Leader.  We are almost finished with the book and have learned some excellent new tools to add to what we learned in Cesar's first book. Just the other day we we had a breakthrough with a dog who barks fearfully everytime they are startled (which is a LOT in downtown!) by using techniques Cesar explains in his new book. It works!

Cesar's readings are always a good time and we love it when he brings "Daddy" the big, beautiful, red pit bull on the front cover of his latest book. Daddy is a big sweetheart and it is wonderful to see a pit pull completely defy the stereotypes.  We wonder who he'll bring with him this time...

If you do make it out tonight, we hope to see you there!

Nicole Richie Dog Urinals - Really

Nicole Richie is promoting a dog urinal product created by Lennart Järlerbro. She would like the lampposts in and around our fair city of L.A. to last longer and she is sure that preventing dogs from peeing on them is the answer. Talk about an odd product for her to push. We find it - and her - bizarre. We even find the way this topic has caught like wildfire a little odd. But, any new dog product introduced in Los Angeles is worthy of our fair attention, celebrity attachment or not. So - we thought we'd do a little investigating.

What we can say, for sure, is that Nicole Richie has a fabulous PR team, as we notice that while this invention is quite the hot topic in the blog & dogosphere, every blog quotes the exact same press release and there are no pictures of the urinals that were supposedly unveiled last month. None. Isn't that odd? They've all just taken the press release and run with it. Word for word. Sentence for sentence.

The only patent we can find for a dog urinal of any kind was filed by J.D. Thomas in 1964. The illustrations above are attached to that patent.  We've found no patents by Swedish designer Lennart Jarlerbro for a dog urinal, but we did find his patent for a "training sulky for a trotting horse."  We won't even touch that one.

Walk Fido is investigating and will bring you more information as soon as we've got it.

Turkey Dog on Turkey Day

Walk Fido wishes all of our clients - and dog-lovers everywhere - a wonderful, safe, delicious holiday.

It will be a busy weekend for us, as holidays mean lots of extra dog walks while doggie moms & dads are away! 

We'll have lots of stories to tell when it's all over!

Fido Findings

News from the dogosphere:

• The protests for Congo, a 2 1/2 year old German shepherd who was sentenced to death for mauling a gardener, are getting heated. Many supporters of the German shepherd hold that it is the gardener's fault, not the dog's. The gardener confronted the dog with a rake, then ran to the dog's owner and pulled her to the ground in fear...something that would provoke many dogs to believe their owner is in danger and protect them accordingly. While Congo has escaped euthanasia for the moment, the judge in the case is receiving death threats.
• Bad Rap describes a pit bull comment we hear every day when we walk our own and it frustrates us to no end.  After getting angry about it, they've decided to make a kids and pit bulls calendar.
• Michael Vick surrenders in dog fighting case...it's about time.
• Fresh from the L.A. Auto show, dogcars.com highlights the latest cars that have dogs very much in mind and in design.
• Pet Connection offers a look back at the nightmare year of pet food recalls, and offers the final results of a study on what actually went so wrong.
• The Bark highlights a very disconcerting "lemon law" for dogs that are deemed not up to snuff by their new owners. Why oh why oh why isn't there a lemon law for dogs so they can complain to the appropriate authorities and return their owners for better ones?

Modern Mutts Have it Made

While ultra-sleek, modern design for dog gear (beds, toys, bowls, you name it) isn't anything new, we've seen a few items this week that caught our eye. We love modern design as well - our own home is a testament to that. In theory, since we live and work in downtown Los Angeles where loft spaces abound, these pieces would be perfect for the modern downtown dog or dog owner. But we wonder, seriously, about the practicality of these items...dogs are rough and tumble for a reason. Will fancy "things" make them less so? We doubt it.

• Charly Box, $60, DWR - The perfect canteen for urban picnics...at ...say...Pershing  Square?  The gravel spot at the Nate Starkman building?
• Hepper Pod Bed, $155, Hepper - What lofty dog doesn't need a Jetsons-esque pod bed?  We can't imagine a world in which our English Bulldog Oscar would make his way up and into that opening without knocking the whole thing over, but that's just us.
• Hepper Podium Bed, $115, Hepper - Could Oscar somehow get into this one instead? Mabye. M. A. Y. B. E.
• Vurv Raised Pet Feeder, $110, Muttropolis - Stunning. Really. But when we think of all the Walk Fido dogs that need water after a long walk in the city...and all the slobber they leave behind...this seems far too pretty for real dogs, no?
• Vurv Dog Pod, $499, Muttropolis - We don't know what to say about this. Ahem, for the right kind of dog in the right kind of house...it could work. But again, we wonder, how much fun can a dog have if they can't get anything dirty?

While we don't advocate ugly beds, we'd love to find excellent modern design that is...practical and up to the every day wear for dogs on the go.  Downtown streets are very dirty and we can't imagine any dog paws on this furniture without a thorough post-walk cleaning. Who has time for that?

Calendars for a Cause

Several excellent, uber-important causes have created calendars to support their work - and the dogs they rescue. Two have caught our eye this week and we encourage you to support them as you decide which 2008 calendar you'll buy in the next few weeks:

• Bad Rap -- Bad Rap's Exposed calendar highlights (perfectly!) what we believe to be true of pit bulls - "Celebrate the spirit of bold innocence with our BAD RAP Exposed 2008 Calendar, photographed on some of California’s most beautiful beaches. We’re proud to say that, freckles and all, pit bull owners have nothing to hide!"
• Downtown Dog Rescue -- Downtown Dog Rescue is close to your hearts...and our offices!  Purchase of their 2008 calendar will help them rescue  more dogs in downtown Los Angeles...where there are many strays and many dogs that deserve a second chance at the good life.

All this calendar talk has us thinking we might need to develop at Walk Fido calendar...for 2009?

Fido Findings

Doggie news from around the dogosphere:

• Pet Connection offers some sound advice on what dog beds not to buy
• PetSugar continues their series on pet-proofing your home
• Dogster uncovers English Bulldog "auctions" in Missouri - horrifying and terribly close to our hearts, as our English Bulldog Oscar would be furious
• Itchmo offers up two scary stories - the dog that disappeared from day care & the Nutro pet food plant giving off a foul stench to the surrounding neighborhood
• Animal House tells us about a man who married a dog - that's right - a man who married a dog

Tough Toys for Tough Dogs

We just got our latest shipment of toys from Dog.com, our go-to resource for the many dog toys we need on a regular basis for Walk Fido and the Walk Fido crew. Their prices are well below standard retail stores - and when you order tons of toys on a regular basis, you need all the help you can get!

We always order some of the usual favorites and a few toys to test out. This shipment was no different. We're big fans of Nylabone, as you can see. Their toys are uber-tough and they last the longest for dogs with strong teeth...especially those lifetime chewers that always need a bone to whittle so they work off excess energy.

Some of our favorites:

• Kong Tug Toy, $8.79 - Great for a well-monitored game of tug with dogs who know how to play properly.
• Nylabone Galileo Bone, $4.99 - Our pit bull, Stella, loves these and whittles the ends down to such fine little points (ah, the precision of terriers!) that we've got to be careful when we pick them up so we don't get cut! These last a good few months before we need to replace them.
• Nylabone Double Action Chew Bone, $11.99 - These are all-time favorites with most dogs, big and small; these tend to be the bones that sneaky dogs take out of other dogs crates when they're not looking so they can stash them away for themselves!
• Rubber Tyre, $4.99 - By far the toughest toy and the one we have to replace least often!  We still have the very first one we bought years ago.  We're trying out a smaller version to see how the smaller dogs with tough teeth like it.

A few we're trying out:

• Tuffies Pteradactyl, $23.99 - A pricey try-out, but we have so many dogs that love the soft toys...the only problem is that most are gutted in under 3 minutes!  Tuffies bills their toys as the most durable "soft" toys out there...we'll see.  Our English Bulldog, who is kindest to soft toys (more on his star obsession later this month), has been playing around with it and there's nary a thread out of place so far. 
• Multipet Nobbly Wobbly, $5.49 - We've tried the Nobbly Wobbly star with pointed edges. Yeah, the pointed edges were promptly chewed off.  Once the edges were chewed off, the star itself came apart. In all, that toy lasted approx. 2 hrs. We'll see how this one does.

Check back later this week for our column on how to train your dogs to let go of their toys - even mid-play! - with one simple command.

What it Takes to Rescue A Dog - Questions & Answers

It's fair to say that Ellen-gate pissed us off. Her public mishandling of Iggy's adoption angered us because she painted rescue organizations in a bad light. On the flip side though, it seems many potential dog adoptees were scared off by the incident, not realizing how stringent some adoption procedures have become. Follow the logic further, and you find that some are concerned dog adoption policies go too far. How far is too far and are dogs being prevented from finding good homes because potential adoptees are afraid of red-tape? Or should the red-tape be there to protect the dogs?

All good questions and all will be answered later today. RescueNetwork.org & PetHobbyist.com are sponsoring an online panel discussion to explore these very issues and to help shed light on why rescue organizations have contracts and who they're meant to protect. Check it out, log in and sign on at 6pm PST.

If Ellen-gate upset you, confused you, or raised questions about the pet adoption process that you want answers to, don't miss this chance to ask and learn. In Los Angeles alone, there are thousands of dogs that need homes and it would be uber-crummy if all this media attention resulted in less dogs being adopted, instead of more.