5 Things to Consider Before Getting Your First Dog

Puppies and adult dogs are ideal pets. You must understand that pet ownership requires a great deal of time and effort to ensure the animals receive proper care and attention. In addition, there are certain facts you should consider before you pick a puppy or adult dog up from the Humane Society or other type of pet-adoption center. We provide you with a list below of these facts so you can select a dog in an intelligent manner.

Selecting a Dog That Is Right for Your Lifestyle

A puppy or adult dog should fit into your existing lifestyle in the proper manner for you to enjoy it fully. For example, if you live an inactive lifestyle, you do not need a dog that requires an excessive amount of exercise to keep its energy to a livable level. On the other hand, if you are highly active, you need a dog that can keep up with you. Consult a dog breed selector to assist you in your search for the ideal breed for your lifestyle. By answering a few pertinent questions, the selector is able to provide you the dogs that best fit your lifestyle, including which ones are ideal for children.

Cost of Dog Food and Treats

You should price the cost of dog food and dog treats for the size of the dog that you wish to adopt. Where small dogs only eat a few dollars worth of food and treats a week, a large dog will place a severe dent in your finances weekly as far as food and treats are concerned. In addition, check with a veterinarian to learn which brands of food are the best today. The recommendation changes occasionally. A veterinarian also will advise you on what are healthy dog treats and the treats that may cause your puppy or dog problems.

Learn How to Prevent Fleas

You should learn how to prevent fleas from infesting your puppy or adult dog before you adopt one. Otherwise, the fleas will be a problem quickly. A number of different options are available for flea control from oral medications to topical applications for your puppy or adult dog. Consult a veterinarian as to which is suitable for your age group of dog. In addition, frequent vacuuming of the house and a safe insecticide on the yard also will be helpful to prevent or control the flea problem.

Inquire About Dog Insurance

Since dog owners throughout the United States spend millions, possibly billions of dollars each year on veterinarian bills, you may wish to inquire about dog insurance. Actually, this insurance will cover additional types of pets besides just dogs and commonly is known as pet insurance. It will help reduce the amount of your out-of-pocket expense for medical attention for injuries and other health issues that can occur with your puppy or adult dog.

Dog Ownership Is a Long-Term Responsibility

Along with the other information here, you must consider that dog ownership is a long-term responsibility since the majority of dogs live 12 or more years. For this reason, you must commit to take care of your puppy or adult dog properly for as long as it is alive to ensure that it is healthy. Proper care includes feeding and exercising the dog daily, and grooming it at least once a week if not more often depending on the length of its hair. On top of all this, you should take the dog to the veterinarian for regular checkups and necessary vaccinations along with emergency attention.

Keep all these considerations in mind as you select the perfect puppy or adult dog to adopt for a pet. Dogs are such social creatures that they will appreciate your companionship as much as you enjoy theirs.

2:12 AM | 0 comments | Read More

WHY WE SAY “SIC ’EM” TO GET DOGS TO ATTACK?

Kiaan D. asks: Why do you say “sic him” to dogs when you want them to attack someone?

People have been telling dogs to “sic ’em,”

with the intent to have the dog attack individual(s), since at least the nineteenth century. While this may seem odd given common modern definitions for “sick” or the variant “sic,” at the time this command popped up, it made perfect sense.

“Sick,” in this context, had nothing to do with the word meaning “ill,” but rather was simply a dialectal variant of “seek,” which used to sometimes carry the connotation of seeking with the intent to attack. (This sense of the word “seek” was used as far back as around AD 1000 in the work, Beowulf.)

The first known instance of someone instructing a dog to attack someone using this “sick” command occurred in Johnson J. Hooper’s 1845 Adventures of Capt. Simon Suggs:

You may well say that: what I tells them to do they do—and if I was to sick them on your old hoss yonder, they’d eat him up afore you could say Jack Roberson. And it’s jist what I shall do, if you try to pry into my consarns…

And later in that same work,

“Here, Bull!” shouted the widow, “sick him, Pomp!” but we cantered off, unwounded, fortunately, by the fangs of Bull and Pomp, who kept up the chase as long as they could hear the cheering voice of their mistress—“Si-c-k, Pomp—sick, sick, si-c-k him, Bull—suboy! suboy! suboy!”

As to how that became such a popular way to tell a dog to attack, rather than to simply say “attack,” or something similar, this isn’t known but makes sense given the types of sounds dogs are able to pick out most easily from normal human speech. (Think when you hear someone speaking a foreign language, it can at times just sound like a jumble of random sounds.)

Thus, when training a new dog (and a young child), most experts recommend “short, sharp commands.”  “Sic” certainly fulfills these requirements, being only one syllable and bookended by distinct sounds.  And while the “s” part of the word may seem to be a soft sound to human hearing, perhaps easily drowned out in some circumstances, dogs hear not only much better in range of frequencies than humans, but thanks to quite a bit of their brains being devoted to sounds, they are also better at discriminating between noises. So something like a “ssssss” sound ends up being relatively easy to pick out from other human language to start a command, at least more so than something like an “ah,” and the hard “k” sound at the end is easily distinguishable to finish it.

11:54 AM | 0 comments | Read More