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  • Migrating chip

    I took my 14mo pup to the vet and they tried to find his chip, but couldn't. T hey had me try, and I found it where his front leg meets his chest.

    They conferred and just decided I should have him wear a collar with the number on it. But it seems not thorough to me. Has anyone run into this? Did you ask for a replacement chip?

    submitted by /u/Silver-Smith
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  • How do y’all clean your dog’s paws after walks?

    I was wondering if there some creative ways of doing it and will help save my time. Hoping to learn a thing or two here.

    submitted by /u/No-Percentage-1015
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  • Crate training and alone time

    Hello 🤗 my puppy is a EB, she is 13 weeks old today. We've had her a week. Her toilet training is going wellish, she knows we are happy when she goes outside but it hasn't clicked to NOT go inside. I'm confident she'll get there. She's pretty smart and confident, will investigate loud noises and we are exposing her to all sounds, scenarios and textures. The only thing we are stuck on is alone time and crate. We have a crate which we have adjusted to a small size so she isn't overwhelmed by it She will get in at night and sleep, at first she howled for 20 minutes and now only a few mins before she falls asleep. The crate is in our bedroom for now, hoping to move it to the kitchen/living room which is the permanent spot soon. She will NOT nap during the day. If we put her in there in an attempt to force nap, she freaks out. I don't know should we let her cry it out? Should we leave the room for long periods of time? When do we move it out? If she freaks out do we move it back in? This is so overwhelming 🙈 I am scared we made a mistake getting her, that we won't be good parents for her.

    submitted by /u/OldProgrammer7160
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  • Crate training a rescue puppy

    Hi everyone, I just adopted a 7 month old shepherd mix. My understanding is she was an owner surrender at about 4 months and she was on the euthanasia list due to overcrowding + her high stress in the kennel until a rescue stepped in last minute. We JUST brought her home Saturday, so we are going through a decompression period where we are introducing her slowly to new things and even rooms in our house, with no outside people or places. Shes very shy but has opened up so much already! Shes a great listener too, and she’s crate trained. I’ve been putting her in the crate periodically for naps, occasionally for meals to keep it as a positive place, and when we sleep at night. She maybe cries for 1-2 minutes and then settles.

    My work office is upstairs and we haven’t introduced her to that floor yet, she’s scared of how many steps there are, and we are taking it slow. So when I “go” to work she’s been hanging out with my boyfriend because we haven’t had overlapping work hours yet, but we will soon. Today was the first day we attempted to leave her “alone” in the sense that my boyfriend crated her to go to the store and I was upstairs on meetings. She would not settle and was frantically crying for about 30 minutes. I felt terrible because I couldn’t step away to go check on her. She had to of been crying loud for me to hear her all the way upstairs too. After my meeting I came and let her out of her crate, she was thrashing around (but may have only started that when she saw me, I’m unclear) and took her outside just in case it was a potty situation but it wasn’t. She was stressed and jumping on me. I got her settled down by redirecting her energy into playing fetch. Luckily I was able to finish my work day downstairs, so I didn’t have to crate her again.

    I’m struggling with how to handle this. I understand the importance of crate training, and my goal is to keep her crate trained and use the crate when we aren’t home, for sleeping, naps, when we need her to stay safe in a spot, etc, so it’s not like I plan to only put her in there when we aren’t here. But it seems to be when she becomes distressed. Equally I know it’s bad for her to never be left alone. This is going to naturally be difficult because I do work from home, but my hope was crating her could give her some independence from me during the day too. But it really broke my heart to hear her cry like that, I just kept thinking that she must be so scared from her experience in the kennel. I’m so scared of doing this wrong and making her associate the kennel with something negative, her developing anxiety, or worse, reactivity. My previous dog was reactive and although she will always be my soul baby and mean the world to me, I would be lying if I didn’t say it was also equally exhausting and I really am probably overly nervous about going down that path again, so I want to get this right. How can I get her comfortable in the crate alone – is it cruel to do so given her background?

    submitted by /u/planetplague
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  • a very clingy puppy, help

    recently i got a puppy who is 4 months old, hes great but at night everything changes, he starts crying even when he's in the same room as me because he wants to get on the bed. i couldnt allow him to sleep with me on the bed because he's small and my bed is pretty high so a fall or failed attempt to jump off might have caused him an injury.i bought him little stairs and put a thin mattress beside the bed so he can climb up if he wants to and in case of a fall he wont fall on wood but on the mattress.since that he climbes up every night and he falls asleep for an hour and then randomly wakes up and starts playing. the problem is that he starts biting my face, hair or fingers which is really painful and a bite on the face might be dangerous. ive tried getting him toys on the bed so he can play while I sleep but it doesnt work. putting him on the floor while im in bed makes him cry immidietly even if i give him toys to play with. please give me some tips because I really can't sleep like that.

    submitted by /u/Altruistic-Onion9320
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  • Puppy food dilemma trying to switch to kibble from wet

    So I have my little man Quincey that’s an absolute amazing English Cocker Spaniel puppy. So loving. Couldn’t do wrong in his eyes.

    When I first got him he wasn’t eating his purina pro plan at all. The breeder even mentioned it to me that the past week before getting him he didn’t really want it.

    So fast forward 5 weeks and I have a wonderfully healthy puppy that’s just over 4 months old. I’ve been mixing up all kinds of foods here and there to see what he’d like. I’ve gotten the best response on dry kibble of Diamond Naturals puppy. He still wasn’t eating much so I’d put one of those 3.5oz pedigree toppers on it and mix it up. If I did that he’d mow it down. Now I’m at the point I’m giving him Amazon Basics canned puppy food and mixing that with the Diamond Naturals. Sometimes I just give him the full can with no kibble. He also gets other cans of beef chunks in gravy, just depends what’s available. The ingredient lists on the back seem pretty positive.

    The problem is I’d like to get him on pure dry kibble. 1) I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg of canned foods for no reason and 2) don’t want to dry kibble to go bad from sitting around so long while he eats half as much as he normally would. My dilemma is the “he’ll eat when he’s hungry enough”. He can stare at the dry food all day or act completely not hungry but then I’ll toss an open can out and he eats the whole thing. I just ran him a few miles and played fetch a lot and don’t want to starve him trying to be hard headed and getting him to go dry. I know the dry also packs a lot more nutrient wise into it and I want him to get everything he needs as he’s developing.

    Should I just keep doing what I’m doing for a few months till he’s somewhat done with the growth stage? I don’t want him being malnourished during this important phase.

    submitted by /u/MartiniCommander
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  • Flea problem please help

    So we have a 5 month old Shepsky. The first few week we had him were fine, itching here and there but the vet told us that was normal for double coated breeds, and he was on flea medicine so I wasn’t too worried . But the past 2 weeks or so I’ve found a LOT of fleas on him. Like up to 20 at once. He’s on flea medicine recommended by the vet, we’ve treated our front and back yards, sprayed pesticide in the house, given him dawn baths, baths with normal flea shampoo, gone in with a flea comb (when he lets us). I’m at my wits end and I feel so bad for him because he spends more time scratching than anything else. We’ve done everything short of flea bombing the house, which I’ve suggested but there’s too many logistical issues for us to even consider it at the moment. Is there ANYTHING else I can try??

    Edit: I’ve also washed everything he interacts with multiple times

    submitted by /u/TheRealJessieJREAL
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  • Weird behavior w/ 8 month old puppy

    Hi everyone. My parents adopted a standard poodle puppy in May. She's now 8 months old and the city we live in just got a big dump of snow. It's her first time seeing snow and my dad told me that she seemed a little unsure of it, not sure where to do her business.

    I've walked her a bunch of times since I visit my parents often, and I was on dog walking duty for the first 4 months of her life with us because my dad had knee surgery and he is usually the one to walk the dog. She rarely pulls when I walk her, and we train during walks with treats.

    This time, just a few hours though, I take her for a walk and while it's not actively snowing, the snow has stuck to the ground so I notice she's a bit more active with her sniffing than usual. But I also noticed that she's spitting out treats or straight up rejecting them whenever I praised her for walking well, and not as attentive with her "look" command when we passed other dogs. She was also a LOT more skittish on this walk. We live in a big city, and she's been used to loud noises like busses, cars, car horns, etc. and hasn't flinched. On our walk tonight, a car horn beeped and she freaked out. I got her to calm down and when I praised her and went to reward her, she rejected the treat and wasn't interested. When we were almost home, she started going haywire running back and forth on the grass so I thought she had to poop. Her tail wasn't tucked between her legs but her backside was kind of hunched to be in that position. She lunged at a guy walking past, which she has never done while on a walk with me, though my dad said she's done it before on walks with him.

    When I get home from the walk, I let my dad know and I ask if anything bad or scary happened to her on a walk recently that might make her more afraid of walking. He said nothing has happened and that she seems to just be adjusting to the snow/doesn't like it. He did mention that she hasn't been finishing her food. We adjusted her food intake with advice from a vet since she's growing. This just started a morning ago, and my dad's theory is that her growth is slowing down so she's not as hungry. She tends to finish her food later on in the day if there's food left over. Do puppies transition to open feeding/grazing? We had a dog who would graze, only eating when we ate our meals (like during breakfast and dinner).

    I'm not sure if I'm overthinking or overreacting or what. My parents seem pretty nonchalant about it, so maybe I'm just being overbearing. My parents are on the older side so I also worry about her enrichment during the day. They aren't incapable, I just think I worry more than they do.

    TL;DR: took my parents' 8mo old dog for a walk tonight and she was behaving differently than normal, rejecting treats, and not finishing her food for the past day. My dad thinks she's just adjusting to the cold weather and snow, which is a totally new experience for her.

    submitted by /u/gquex
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  • Is having multiple locations for “place” confusing to puppy?

    Basically the title. I want my puppy to have a “place” in at least three rooms in my home. Should I use “place” for all of these? Or different words for each?

    The most solid “place” command is my puppy’s crate but we only use it at bedtime. He has a play pen with a bed in it for during the day when I can’t directly supervise him or when he needs naps. We’ve tried “bed” as another command and he sort of knows it but will only go to it for treats. But it’d be nice to have somewhere to redirect him to in another room or two as well.

    submitted by /u/AbilityKey1485
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