The main and practical reason we groom dogs is to improve there coat and health.

- Grooming takes away loose hair and dead skin, improving air circulation within the fur and allowing it to breath.

- With regular grooming you can keep an eye on any skin conditions your dog may experience before they get out of hand.

- You will notice any bite marks from fleas or see ticks on your dog. This means you can get proper, effective flea and tick treatment before it gets out of hand.

- Grooming stimulates the lymphatic system, which works similar to a massage in humans.

- Grooming increases the blood flow to hair follicles. This means a healthy shinny coat.

- You can also get a chance to check your dog’s paws and pads out. This can be a common place for grass seeds, cuts and knots.

- Grooming is a great way to bond with your dog.

In today’s world it can be very hard to find time to groom your dog. Lucky for us we have Professional Groomers.

Thanks
Nicola
Hallmark Kennels
Website

The next is to discipline your dog. Often it’s here that we fail our dog and we can loose our temper or apply poor discipline technique. Disciplining your dog cannot be abusive, violent or stressful – these will lead to punishing your dog and ineffective training and possibly lead to behaviour issues.
Good discipline is:
- Consistent
- non-emotive
- non-violent
- Giving the dog rules / boundaries / limitations

Lastly, give your dog affection. You should only give your dog affection when it is in a calm state and only after you have used the first two steps to get it there. Often we are guilty of skipping the first two steps and jumping straight to affection, rewarding our dog when it’s not in a calm state. This leads to behavioural issues.

This can help to improve your dog’s state of mind and fix a lot of the behaviour issues we commonly see in dogs. Often these issues are a direct result of how we relate to our dog. So start implementing exercise, discipline and affection in your behaviour training now.

Buy Cesar’s Latest Book from Fish Pond:

Unka Unka

It was a fairly hot day and we decided to bring the dogs with us. Lucky for them we were able to get the car fairly close to where we were fishing – otherwise I think they would have died of heat exhaustion! We set up our lines and it was a hoot to see Keran attempt to cast, 3 or 4 attempts later he got it out a reasonable distance. The dogs jumped into the water to cool off which was a welcome relief to the temperature – only made worse since the beach is all rocks. I decided to put on a a standard dropper rig with some floats – the crabs up that way are just a killer on your bait! The bait I used was a pillie wrapped around the hook using bait elastic. I decided to put squid on Keran’s hook to see how he would go with that. After about 15mins and some erratic rod tip movement Keran pulled in what can only be described as a small annoying Shark …. Curious Teddy the spoodle was quite interested in checking out what the shark was… I think it was his first encounter with one haha … After another 15mins I decided to check my line only to find it no longer had bait. Dam crabs had stripped it. I decided to add another large float – I must admit my rig now looked like a chunky mess of floats. I got to the bait area only to have found that teddy had eaten a whole lot of the squid…. huuuuh another reason to put the bait out of reach of the dogs – spoodles love FOOD!

Undeterred I decided to try a combo of squid and pillie. We also started to add some berley just off the shore to attempt to attract fish in close. We also had some left over mussels from the previous te horo mission, so we started to throw these in aswell. Around this time a friendly labrador wonder away from some other fisherman just down the beach from us…. well Teddy made friends with it straight away, however my brothers Jack Russell had other thoughts and got all angry… lucky she was tied up! Anyway the fisherman down the beach yelled there dog back and ofcourse teddy being teddy he followed so I had to leave my fishing rod and get him ….

It wasn’t long till Keran hooked up on a good size Kahawai. But as excited we all got, it soon turned into #@$@# and @#$@# as it got off in the shallows. You see you need to walk a fish backwards onto the shore, not reel and drag it up – haha. Anyway lesions learnt another few hours past and all we managed were more small sharks and the odd mullet. The bird activity was great just nothing interested in what we had on. With the heat reflecting off the rocky beach of Te Horo and it getting later in the day we decided to pack up and head for home. By this time I think the dogs had had enough of the heat, they were in the car so it was ok (doors boot open of course) but that low sun really increases the temperature.

It wasn’t a bad trip, nice to change the routine during the weekend and Keran and the dogs had a lot of fun, we showed him a few pointers on casting and also where to find fish, ironically he caught everything reasonable but that seems to always happen. haha… The dogs encountered there first shark and small fish… teddy had fun!

Thanks Korin and Teddy

www.spoodle.co.nz