dogs and revegetation in Darebin Parklands

Recently I posted about the use of weed killers in our local park and my concerns about the use of glyphosate.

Further to that post on glyphosate, I received the newsletter of Organic Gardener Magazine and it mentioned

the recently-released, astonishing report from the US President's Cancer Panel which noted that only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have had safety tests, and that pesticide exposed farmers, crop duster pilots and even manufacturers have been found to have elevated rates of prostate cancer melanoma and other skin cancers. The report also recommended that people consume food grown without pesticides, chemical fertilisers and growth hormones. It's not astonishing for its findings, which OG has been highlighting for years, but because such a high level panel has finally come out and said these things in black and white. This is, I believe, the first of many reports and research that is going to completely turn the tables on the acceptance of chemical use on food.

And no doubt we will have to look at our use of weedkillers

However...
How will we revegetate our indigenous plantings without using herbicides? They do a wonderful job of giving the 'good plants' a chance to survive.

Here's a photo I posted a couple of weeks ago of weedy growth sprayed with herbicide.



And here's a photo of the same spot today:

walking - and falling - at Warrandyte

Cindy, Penny's trainer, organised a get-together of all her groups at Warrandyte today.

We walked along an off-lead path that skirts the river, with lots of opportunities to swim and paddle.

And, as this all-too-short video clip, shows, plenty of opportunities for humans to slide down the bank on their bottoms.



Amazingly, I got up in one piece. (Thank god for those exercise classes where the teacher makes us do so many balancing activities!) But I had my badge of honor on my buttocks.



Penny was very interested when the humans stopped for morning tea at a cafe, but she didn't get any of their food.



However, she did get a home-baked dog-treat from Cindy.

Penny kills a rat

Warning - photos of rat killed by Penny - might be disturbing to some.

We have rats in our garden and I hope they don't come inside as the weather gets colder. One of them, at least, won't be venturing into the house, because Penny killed it today. I'm feeling quite conflicted about this, because I deliberately sicced her onto the rat.

A few times previously we've come across rats in the daytime and I've called Penny out to scare them off, not wanting her to actually kill them. But today, the poor little rat got trapped by her and I had a choice - would I stand by and see her kill another creature, or would I call her away? While I was wrestling with this ethical problem (and shouting through the open front door for someone to bring a camera), Penny preempted my decision and grabbed the rat. There was one heart-rending squeal and there it lay at our feet. Hopefully instantly dead - but I couldn't in all honesty say painlessly, which disturbs me.

I know we don't want rats around, but they are also living creatures who feel pain and fear, and I hated to see this one die.

It was quite disturbing to see how efficiently and quickly Penny dispatched it.

And then she was left with the problem of what to do with it. She sniffed. She looked around. She sniffed. She looked around. I wondered if she was asking herself why this toy wasn't entertaining any more. Who knows what a dog thinks?





So we called her in and I took the even more disturbing step of chopping it with a shovel to make sure it wasn't still alive and suffering. It will take me a while to foget the horrible feel of the shovel chopping into that furry little body.

Would I do it again? I'm not sure. Maybe. In one way, I think it's better than condemning the rat to dying of thirst, which rat bait does, or possibly injuring it in a rat trap but not killing it outright.

And I also wonder if rats perhaps get bad press, and whether we can just live and let live as we do with other creatures.

Eating marrow bones

Stanislaw posted a picture recently of him eating a marrow bone and I asked about it. The reply was so interesting that I'm copying it here from the comments section of my blog, where he explained about his human's feeding of these bones. You might like to pop over to his post to see the pictures. Here's what he told me:

My marrow bone was a 2.5-inch tube (about) filled with marrow and with meat attached. Mom picks bones that are too large for us to swallow, too thick for us to break bits from, small enough for us to paw and play with, and bones that have a moderate amount of marrow inside (some of HUGE amounts).

We've never seen bones sliced lengthwise. I'd imagine that would make it too easy to eat the marrow and would take away the challenge. Marrow is so rich that too much too fast, and too much in general, can really upset your tummy. Normally we get a marrow bone and are allowed 1/2 of it. Then it goes into a baggy in the fridge and is saved for the next day.

Yes, we're wearing our snoods to keep our ears out of our food. Our ears are so long with such thick, curly fur that they can get really gross really fast when we're eating our meals!

Hope that answers your questions! Let me know if you ever get to enjoy a juicy marrow bone!

bitser dogs acknowledged in the American Kennel Club

I'm pleased to read in the Denver Post that the American Kennel Club allows mixed-breed dogs to compete in skill-based contests this year.

If some people want to focus their attention on breeding lines of dogs for specific talents, fine. But I believe it's a form of eugenics or racism to regard mixed -breed dogs as lesser creatures.

Accompanying the Denver Post article there was a photo of a dog who was 'the result of an illicit tryst between a purebred Husky and a rakish Lab/Chow neighbor dog'. I smiled when I read those words, because Penny is supposedly the result of a pure-bred princess meeting a lowly stranger in the McDonalds carpark somewhere on the other side of Melbourne.

She's a bitser (or bitzer) and as good as any aristocrat!

is roundup - glyphosate - safe to use around dogs?

A recent article in Organic Gardener magazine, about glyphosate (Roundup), has me wondering about this herbicide in terms of its danger to dogs.

I have two concerns (apart from my general concern about the environment). First, I believe this is the herbicide that is used in Darebin Parklands, where we walk frequently.

Secondly, we have a back lane behind our house, one that is great for a short off-lead walk and also provides a private place to chase tennis balls. I asked our local council why a spray is used there and was told it's too expensive to mow it more than four times each year, so herbicides are used to keep the weeds down.

I've noticed that some weeds spring up immediately after the spraying in the lane and asked whether they might be Roundup-resistant, but the council official was non-committal about that.

However... now that I've read this article in Organic Gardener I see that there are now 16 weeds with confirmed resistance to this herbicide.

By the way, to clear up any confusion about what herbicide I'm talking about, here's a quote from the article:

Glyphosate is sometimes referred to by the original trade name Roundup, which was first marketed by Monsanto in 1974, and the two names are often used interchangeably.

I don't like to use this product in my own garden, so it bothers me that Penny is likely to be exposed to it when we're out walking. There's a lot of work being done to regenerate indigenous plants in Darebin Parklands, and glyphosate is considered to be an essential tool in fighting introduced weeds.

The article says,

While bush regenerators maintain they couldn't do their work without it, emerging research may yet see glyphosate join the long list of pesticides that were once thought to be safe, but turn out to be harmful.

The author says we tend to trust the story that glyphosate is relatively safe, but last year France's Supreme Court ruled that Monsanto had not told the truth about the safety of Roundup, and many Canadian municipalities restrict the use of any [pesticides] herbicides for cosmetic purposes such as lawns and driveways, because of health concerns.

Humans can wear gloves and face masks when they use it, and cover all exposed skin. But if my dog walks through a recently sprayed area, she will place her bare paws on it, she will roll in it, she might chew a few blades of grass, she might drink from a puddle that is polluted with runoff.

And not just recently sprayed areas, either - here are a couple more quotes:

While regulators agree glyphosate has a relatively low acute (short-term) toxicity compared with other herbicides, recent research indicating possible long-term health effect is causing controversy...

Glyphosate is relatively persistent in soil, especially in cold climates, where residues have been found up to three years after use. In warmer climates it stays in the soil for between four and 180 days.

Penny likes to dig, sometimes.

when dogs seem to be sick but we're not sure

Penny was lying on her mat asleep this afternoon when suddenly she seemed to be unable to catch her breath. Because she had been sneezing yesterday, I decided to go to a vet and check whether the kennel cough was back. The vet, who seemed to be aged about twelve - I'm definitely getting old - checked her thoroughly and said she seemed fine. I particularly wanted to be sure her lungs sounded good, and they did.

The vet suggested I might have seen Penny reverse sneezing, or that perhaps her sneezing relates to allergies, both of which suggestions sound sensible to me.

I have seen Penny reverse sneeze, and PetPlace has a couple of video clips of dogs reverse sneezing. I'll keep an eye on her and check whether that is the issue. If it is, I won'tworry, as reverse sneezing doesn't seem to be a big problem.

One symptom was that when she barked, she would start sneezing and coughing, but seeing she's at the front door right now, barking up a storm to tell us there are cats in the front yard, I guess that's not a problem now.

As soon as we arrived at the vet's this afternoon, Penny looked the picture of health - as usual. I guess vets get used to owners saying, 'But she looked sick when we were at home!'

On the way home, we called in at Bundoora Park.




There's a little hill - called Mount Cooper, because our continent is so flat that we call every anthill a mountain - and we had a great view from there. It's an old volcanic vent, but seeing it hasn't erupted for 9.2 million years, I felt safe.