Maggie’s Man's Best Friend Thread

He's grown into a wonderful 105lb boy.

It took a lot longer to describe than it did for everything to happen. From start to finish was barely 2 seconds, so no time for a photo.
But if you're curious about my Akita, then here.

She's just over 4 years old and weighs in at around 130#. She's totally bonded to me, but she's learning that other people can be okay too.

Beautiful girl. Thanks. I know the bonding thing. My boy tolerates my wife. She broke her arm 5 weeks ago and he has become VERY protective of her. To the point she was going to leave for a birthday lunch last weekend with friends. He became very vocal when she changed clothes to leave and I didn't (weekend shorts and tee shirt). She tried to get her purse to leave and he came up behind her and blocked her against a chair "talking". He did not like that she was leaving without "all" of us. He has never done that before when she has left alone.

Sounds like a lot of love

Beautiful pup

He’s huge

Yeah, the bond is complete
That didn't take long

Not really. He is 78 pounds and 11'ish YO. We aren't 100% on age, he is a rescue. He has very long legs for a GSD. His heaviest was about 85, vet want's to keep him in the 77-78 range due to his age. And he is very hard headed!!

Yes, I should have said tall. His legs look like they don't end. Looks great for 11!

What upper is that?

An FN piston upper without a buffer tube?

These are right after we got him. I think he was younger than we were told He hadn't even filled out yet.

It’s an ARIC conversion on a Berkeley County LE FN M4 Carbine upper on an FN M4 lower modded with BG Defense parts.
Runs like a scalded dog and has a ton of haters….haha

Trust me something is out there

Well, it’s only been two months since we lost LuLu, and today we just lost our other border collie Bonnie. She had a stroke last year, and hasn’t really been the same since, but she stopped eating last week, not even steak or cheese, and wouldn’t really drink anything either.

It was time.



She went everywhere with me…I’m missing her pretty badly right now…



Everyone, and all pets were her friend… Hell on squirrels and water hoses though!





Kitties knew something was up yesterday…



Goodbye old girl….you lived a good life once we got you out of that hell hole of a puppy mill where we found you. And you enriched our lives beyond measure.

So sorry for your loss. She looked like a great pup. Glad you have a lot of good memories. Hang in there.

Those are some wonderful pictures of an exceptional friend and companion.
I hope you can find comfort in the fact that you gave her a great life.
My sincerest condolences

Clearly a great dog.

Cash ready to take a calf back to the cows after being let up from being worked and branded. At 14, he doesn't take em back too fast

Been there, it's the toughest thing I've ever done; but I knew it was the right call even though it's very little consolation.

So sorry - man it hurts so bad. I'm literally trying to find a new vet from my girl today - she had one of those days last week that freaked me out.

So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It's taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror. It started off simple enough - something that's probably happened to most of you.
Sometime between midnight and 1:30am, our puppy Evie pooped on our rug in the living room. This is the only time she's done this, so it's probably just because we forgot to let her out before we went to bed that night. Now, if you have a detective's mind, you may be wondering how we know the poop occurred between midnight and 1:30am. We were asleep, so how do I know that time frame?
Why, friends, that's because our Roomba runs at 1:30am every night, while we sleep. And it found the poop. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.
If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I'm about to tell you.
Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.
It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids' toy boxes. If it's near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding - like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.
Then, when your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you'll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you'll walk into the living room. And you'll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you'll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything's okay. Like it's proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly.
And then the horror. Oh the horror.
So, first you clean the child. You scrub the poop off his feet and put him back in bed. But you don't bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what's coming. It's inevitable, and it's coming at you like a freight train. Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you're not one of those people - you can't go to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room.
So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn't just on your hands - it's smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that "whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss" noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet.
Oh, and you're not just using profanity - you're inventing new types of profanity. You're saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there's no way he's not ending up in prison.
Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug - the rug that started it all - the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she'll ask if you tried to clean it first.
Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails.
And then, because it's 6am, you go to bed. Let's finish this tomorrow, right?
The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn't work. Because you heard the "whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss" noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you.
But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending a week researching how to fix this damn $350 Roomba without spending $350 again - including refurb units, new motherboards, and new batteries - you finally decide to call the place where you bought it. That place is called Target. They have an awesome warranty. They claim it's for life, and it's for any reason.
So I called them and told the truth. My Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III.
And you know what they did? They offered to replace it. Yes, folks. They are replacing the Roomba that ran over dog poop and then died a poopy, watery death in the bathtub - by no fault of their own, of course.
So, mad props to Target . If you're buying anything expensive, and they sell it, I recommend buying it from them. And remember - don't let your Roomba run over dog poop...

Let me help...

Brilliant

It’s been a couple weeks since we lost our other Border Collie, Bonnie, and we’re baby sitting our grand-puppy.

Livin’ her best life watching UT put a beatdown on OU…



…it’s a rough life! LoL

Fluff 1

Fluff 1 and 2

Bird season just opened, and the pups did great. Limits of chukar and blue grouse on back to back days.

The puppy is growing
Chance was gone day workin'
The missus was gone work workin'
So grandpa got to puppy sit today
Forgot how much energy they have.
Wish I would have napped when she did

Woke up to this the other morning. Daisy, the left one, generally doesn't like Hoggen, her son, touching her but they quite often sleep close to each other for some reason.

On the way to cake cows.

One, full of a lifetime of memories working cattle.

The other, a clean slate with a lifetime of memories ahead



The gray cat was not impressed with a puppy in the house and a full on Calvin and Hobbes frizzed up tail showed her displeasure.

Tink didn't know what it was but knew that gray thing needed chased.

Made for a humorous stand off.

They both agreed on a truce for a much needed nap before round two of introductions resumed however

We got a rough coat border Collie a little over 1 yr ago.
His birthday is 2 days before mine.
Ottis is 14 months old, He has alittle bit of agressive tendency’s when I’m out walking him, it’s concerning.
I don’t have the land like you have to work him.
But he is active we don’t let him sit around all day.
Any suggestions?
Or is this the nature of a non working cattle dog ?
I sure do love this guy, I hope he get more confident and mellows out a bit.
He is 40lbs of get after it !

Office dog.
Can also be seen as hunting dog, but not today.
He has his own chair - it keeps the hair in one place.

Otis is a fine looking pup!
I don't know much but I do know Border Collie puppies don't come with a throttle, just an on / off switch.
Throttle comes later
I just now took these pics, less than 30 secs apart


Very smart and need to be kept busy.
Amazing vids out there of what people have trained them to do.
I am no dog trainer, I just work with what God and genetics gave em.
Cash was very cowy and after getting him to come and mind, I kind of let instinct kick in.
If he could hear me, he did what I asked and picked up on hand signals very quickly
He wasn't overly agressive and we got along great.
He was actually very sensitive and I couldn't yell at him or he would cower.

You say you're concerned about a little bit of aggressive tendancies, they need to have a little to do what they do but should not show towards people.
Maybe explain a bit more and someone with more abilities than me can help with some suggestions

Tink is in her puppy playing biting stage and with puppy teeth, can draw blood. I am working on her having a softer mouth with people and she is responding slowly and will grow out of this stage.

Border Collie owners will range from those that use them strictly for working where they are tied up when not working to me who mainly have them as companion dogs that also work cattle when the need arises.

I really like the breed and I am sure Otis will make you a fine dog in time also!

So was it a rescue? I only ask is if there's an unknown history of a pup - all bets are off. Did she have adequate socialization when she was young? Other dogs and people? It's not a border collie thing. If anything border collies and other herding breeds tend to nip at ankles.

I got mine from a large urban shelter at a relatively young age; the first time she ever barked was when we were at a gas station and she saw a black guy. I spent a couple thousand dollars for two weeks with supposedly reputable inhouse training facility specifically with a black trainer - didn't make anything better at all. She had a second bad experience and she just won't have it at all. I have to schedule vet visits and grooming around that. She's fine with Latino guys, black women, but she will straight up go after any black male she sees. And she can be intimidating AF.

It's all about avoidance now.

The only thing I can suggest would be walk your pup with a muzzle so it can get its exercise, preferably a Baskerville muzzle for air flow, just to protect you legally until you can sort out training. Personalities definitely change after the puppy stage; but of course Cesar Milan would say something like maybe the dog is trying to protect you yada yada, very few dogs are innately aggressive etc.

There's a couple vets on this site here but they never chime in!

Ruger, our 21 month old English Cream Golden is a big puppy that fell asleep with his favorite toy ball.

Monday we pick up our newest addition. I hope she's a little firecracker, and brings my male Ridgeback out of his shell. He hasn't been the same since we had to say goodbye to Sydney. She was the best dog I've ever had.


Sydney


Riley at 6 weeks.

dogs (and cats) just know stuff and what is going on that there is no way for them to know. but they know.

I totally agree. In about 1997 we picked up a Mini Schnauzer off the street after a christmas party. People at the party said he had been hanging around the neighborhood for sevral days. No one tried to catch or feed him. It was 30-40 degrees that week and he had a fresh groom. Long story short, no chip, no response to signs. Our last dog had passed about 4-5 month back and we had no dog food in the house. On the was home I hit a "stop and rob" for some food. As I was going in the door a man was coming up from behind. The Mini went berserk barking in the truck. He adopted us that fast.
My mother was developing early dementia. He could tell when she was getting upset/agitated and would jump up on her lap like he was holding her down. He would literally lay across her lap. She would start petting him and you could see her calm down.
He was a very special boy. We had him about 16 years. I love my GSD's, but that Mini was something.

A year later...

Great story

I recently lost my best friend and sidekick of 16 years. Best damn cow dog and peanut butter thief I ever had. I saw it coming and got another English shepherd and its trained up, so no worries there, but he was truly a once in a lifetime dog.

Now that I am getting over him being gone, I am looking to replace him with another European Doberman. Does anyone have info on a good breeder? It would be good to know the bloodlines as well.