Dog Daze Ranch

01/01/2025

12/25/2024

Have a very Merry Christmas!

09/12/2024

I’m showing off Oakley’s 7 week old litter. All have homes except the smooth boy. He is the one without the spot on his back.

08/14/2024

Showing off Paisley’s puppies. The red brindle girl has a home. The boys are the shaded red and the cream brindle.

07/30/2024

The next time you’re in your dog’s mouth (you do brush his or her teeth, right?) notice the bump on the roof of his mouth just behind the two front middle teeth? It’s called the ‘incisive papilla,” and near the center of it is a hole that leads to a duct that leads to the “Jacobson’s organ.” The Jacobson’s organ is a very cool thing. Put in “See Spot Run” terms, it allows your dog to literally taste the air by combining taste and smell.

Dogs use their Jacobson’s organ to experience sexual markers (pheromones) left behind by other dogs via urine, or when coming across the scent of a bitch in season. While dogs don’t have a Flehmen response seen in many other animals (throwing back the head, and raising or curling the upper lip which helps open the entry slits into Jacobson’s Organ), dogs will “chatter their teeth” instead. A dog might hold his mouth in a quasi-open position that looks a little like a grin, or he might even lick the air. And you thought he was just happy to see you.

One theory holds that the Jacobson’s Organ could account for a dog’s ability to identify and recognize other animals and people. It’s also believed that it’s this organ that enhances a newborn’s ability to find its mother.

07/16/2024

Showing off Heidi’s boy. He will be all alone soon since his siblings are going home this week.

06/22/2024

Summer’s long hair puppies are 6 weeks old. The chocolate & cream is the only boy. The darkest girl is a cream brindle. They are laid back and as sweet as can be.

06/22/2024

Willow’s puppies are 3 months old. The dapple boy will be alone soon since his siblings are going home today. He has an overbite, but he is a sweetheart and it won’t cause him a problem.

05/09/2024

Summer just had her first litter. All are AKC long hair puppies. She had 1 boy — the chocolate & tan boy, the cream brindle girl, and 2 cream girls. The lighter cream looks like she might be dapple. These puppies will be pet only and are on hold for 2 weeks.

04/23/2024

Ever noticed those slits at the sides of a dog’s nose? Why do dogs have them?

Once again, nature proves her elegance in the design of our dogs. When we humans inhale and exhale, air comes in the same way it goes out. Any smells that come in through our mouths are forced out as we exhale.

When a dog exhales through his nose, however, the exhaled air is released through those slits and off to the side so that nice, smelly air going into the dog’s nostrils doesn’t get diluted with the outgoing air. Put another way, the slits allow the dog to avoid smelling what he just exhaled.

The slits help the dog hold scent particles in the nostrils even as exhaled air passing out the slits creates a swirling air turbulence allowing interesting odors to be inhaled directly into the centre of each nostril. Since dogs breathe faster when trying to sniff a certain smell, they widen their nostrils to pull in more air which makes it possible for a dog searching for smells to have a steady stream of air coming in for up to 40 seconds, maybe even longer.

The slits also allow dogs to wiggle each nostril independently which gives them the ability to know which nostril a smell entered. This is how a dog can pinpoint where a smell is coming from, and why a dog searching for smells on the ground will weave back and forth as he follows a trail.

We all know the superb smelling abilities of dogs, but let’s use an analogy between scent and sight to really put it into perspective: What we as humans can see at a third of a mile, our dog can see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well.

01/02/2024

If anyone has lost a red puppy that came from me, please notify me with details. The microchip hasn’t been registered to the new owner yet. It is in southeast Texas.