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Wednesday Pet Roundup

by | Oct 5, 2011 | 0 comments

Hi and Welcome to Wednesday Pet Roundup!

*Watch Dana Hilton and Tango the dalmatian teach fire safety on WCIU You & Me This Morning show. Check out Dana’s blog for more information.

* October is Adopt a Shelter Dog Month! Fetch one today!

* According to the Hollywood Reporter, Bret Michaels is designing a line of pet products for PetSmart. What could Michaels have that pets want, you ask?  Bandanas.

* The first National Conference to end Factory Farming will be held  Oct. 27-29 in Washington DC, with 30 world-renowned experts in the fields of environment, animal welfare and public health. This issue is important to animal lovers everywhere.

*When he was born, the cat with two faces was given little chance of survival. But after Marty Stevens saved the kitten from euthanasia, the cat called Frank and Louie,  has now set a Guinness Book World Record for being the longest surviving member of a group known as Janus cats. Fox News.com reports that the cat is now 12 years old, content and healthy.

Now for some k9kamper updates! See more at Kol’s Notes!

All Things Dog Blog: This week’s K9 kamp had me, Tanner and Oliver back in agility training and having some fun with our workout step. I’ll have to admit I had to dust that bad boy off after storing it under my bed sometime ago. 

We also discovered our core ball and wondered if we’ll be getting an intro to Treiball via kamp. Hmmm…..

The good news is the dogs still remember the “Go Jump” command and they seemed totally entertained watching me step up and down. Despite my travel to Barkworld, the boys and I were able to pull off a reasonable hour plus to just make the minimum workout. Whew!

 I expected the challenges to get harder and more complicated but I really felt like you all were setting me up for extreme failure with this one. Last week’s tugging was bad enough, but to attempt to keep up with my dog at jumping? That’s just… Not going to happen.

As a human, I don’t spend a lot of time in the air. I haven’t played jump rope in at least a decade and a half. Before we began, I had to teach myself how to jump all over again. It sounds like a simple concept, I know, and it’s something I ask of my dog all the time. Apparently jumping as an out of shape requires great amounts of coordination I just don’t have. But what a work out! My thighs, my calves, my feet, my butt, everything is still sore! How does my dog do it?

My dog can jump much higher than my two legs can imagine so I searched for a spot that would be more difficult for her, yet still low enough for me. Unsurprisingly, my dog quickly grew bored with the whole up-on-the-step-and-then-down-a

gain routine. Since I was struggling to get a handle on the mechanics of it, Shiva decided to increase the challenge by jumping on me instead. She may have intended for this to be motivating but it wasn’t. At all. Instead of giving up or throttling her, I took advantage of the sprinting section of the challenge in hopes the run would get her head back together. When we tried again, I just got her to perform vertical jumps while I sweated over the curb. We still had half an hour left and I was exhausted. So we headed to the playground and goofed around on the equipment. Was this cheating? Probably. Shiva did a lot more work than I did. Especially with the five hour agility workshop we attended the next day. But hey, I’m the one with the treats. It’s only fair.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go back to sitting on an ice pack. 😛