Benevolent Leaders employ multiple tactics in their campaigns to win converts. Benevolence begins with awareness. You can't be proactive in approach to things if you're not aware that they're there!
Holistic orientation is an important component in the human • dog relationship -- whatever the function of the dog. It is your role as the human who has brought the dog into your life [and presumably into your home].
Often I am asked about various modalities so I thought since I hadn't done so before, I'd write them here. I'll be covering a wide array but today I'll start with homeopathy and flower essences, specifically Bach Flower Essences.
Being diagnosed with Lyme Disease this past August certainly explained the mysterious range of physical and neurological problems that plagued me for months: the unrelenting fatigue, why I kept forgetting my client’s names, why my hands started to become arthritic, and why I started to lose interest in my business and everything else in my life.
My treatment began immediately, with heavy doses of antibiotics. The antibiotics would bring down the bacterial load in my system so that my immune system could do the rest. But as the bacteria die, they release a toxin causing what is called a Herxheimer reaction. This means that before you feel better, you feel a whole lot worse.
It's hard to talk about, work with, or even think about dogs without broaching the topic of barking. Even the absence of barking is frequently noteworthy.
As a matter of fact barking can be a very big issue. The sort of issue can lead to dogs being rehomed or...worse. Coppinger and Feinstein ("Hark! hark! The dogs do bark ... and bark and bark"; Smithsonian 1991 - can't find a link.) once recorded a dog barking for seven hours straight.
Why do dogs bark? From an evolutionary context, that's a good question. While wolves and coyotes are capable of barking, it is very rare. Belyaev's famous foxes famously do, much like dogs. (Silver foxes normally do not bark very often.)
I can think of four main "types" for barks off the top of my head, and since that is exactly where this blog entry is coming from, those are the four I will list.
If there was one factor that I never considered as a dog trainer, it was my chances of contracting Lyme Disease, a bacterial infection spread by ticks. Lyme is transmitted to people and animals while being bitten by an infected tick. Up until a few months ago, I didn’t know much else about Lyme, other than it came from ticks in the Northeast.
Here in North Carolina, ticks are just part of life, particularly during April-October. During these months, I frequently check my dogs for ticks and if I find one crawling on myself, after being creeped out, I carefully remove it without much thought. In the 14 years I’ve lived here, I can’t ever remember finding ticks on my body that were attached for any length of time, or so I thought.
I’ve had a hard time filling my classes lately, so I started doing some investigating. While there were many reasons for people not going to class right now, the H1N1 scare was mentioned more frequently than anything else.
I’m one to generally not get all worried about such things, take some common sense precautions and go on with life. However, I do understand a little better some of the hyper-cautiousness of some of my clients this time around because of my own situation. I have one daughter who is high-risk because she is under 25, and she’s attending a large college full of others her age. My other daughter is just 25 and she’s pregnant. My husband is an insulin dependent diabetic. So, with all these potential risks for a more serious result upon contracting the flu, I am being careful!
