Fairfield Border Collies

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Fairfield Border Collies We have been raising border collies since 2009. We genetically health test to ensure healthy pups against CEA CH I-GS MDR1 NCLS SN TNS DM.
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Pups come with 1st set of Vaccs Deworming Vet health check , Microchiped, spay/neuter contract CBCA reg NBSPCA Liscence number # 0487

Puppy snugs
08/12/2024

Puppy snugs

I can't even ...... Milk drunk look of satiety
05/12/2024

I can't even ...... Milk drunk look of satiety

We have puppies! Message us for specifics đŸ„°
02/12/2024

We have puppies! Message us for specifics đŸ„°

27/11/2024

Great questions !

27/11/2024

Puppies !

4.5 weeks old already for baby girl
14/11/2024

4.5 weeks old already for baby girl

We have a Purebred Black Angus Bull ready to move on to a new pasture. Proven 3 year old from Manitoba. Mid fours. Call ...
13/11/2024

We have a Purebred Black Angus Bull ready to move on to a new pasture. Proven 3 year old from Manitoba. Mid fours. Call 506-232-2752

Puppy's and kitty's
07/11/2024

Puppy's and kitty's

Happy 14th Birthday to my favorite Harry 💝
01/11/2024

Happy 14th Birthday to my favorite Harry 💝

Today we said goodbye to our best girl Cricket. 15 years young and still beautiful and sweet. Run free baby girl❀
29/10/2024

Today we said goodbye to our best girl Cricket. 15 years young and still beautiful and sweet. Run free baby girl❀

Her eyes are opening!
28/10/2024

Her eyes are opening!

26/10/2024

The term "Shepherd's Lantern" is often associated with folklore that suggests the white tip helps guide the dog during herding, acting as a signal to both the sheep and the shepherd. The white tip of the tail would be held high in the air as the collie guided the shepherd home in the dark after a long day's work. This has been romanticized in stories, emphasizing the bond between the shepherd and their dog.
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Message us to be on our list for upcoming litter!
25/10/2024

Message us to be on our list for upcoming litter!

Puppy snuggles
19/10/2024

Puppy snuggles

Spot the real puppy !  Hazel blessed us with  a little red and white Tri đŸ„°(The things we do for a singleton 😉)
17/10/2024

Spot the real puppy ! Hazel blessed us with a little red and white Tri đŸ„°(The things we do for a singleton 😉)

16/10/2024

Today our breed expert Carol Price looks at a very commonly misunderstood form of aggression in the Border collie breed, linked directly to their working instincts.

ATTACK OR DEFENCE?
Understanding the lunge-nip reflex in Border collies

Although aggression is an issue that should always be taken seriously in any dog - and may have so many different triggers or motivations - often owners and, indeed, the wider public, may not always understand the difference between aggressive responses launched more offensively and deliberately in dogs, to attack, and those which the dog launches more instinctively instead, as a more primal kind of defence response. And the latter can be incredibly common in herding dogs like Border collies.

I call this behaviour in Border collies the lunge-nip reflex. It is a totally instinctive behaviour in the breed, frequently by-passing more conscious thought processes, and the reason it is there goes back to their earliest programming as livestock working dogs. For the dog must have the respect of the livestock they work at all times, and if they do not react quickly enough – in terms some immediate defence reaction – when challenged or crowded in by them, then they could find themselves either badly injured or dead.

Further, once livestock learn that a dog, if challenged by them, will challenge them back, they can become that much easier to manage.

ACTIVATING THE REFLEX
Once we understand, too, the direct connection in the collie brain between some deeper sense of mental pressure, or threat, and the lunge-nip reflex being activated, we can also appreciate why this behaviour so commonly gets deflected, in non-working or pet collies, on to alternative ‘threat’ targets. Like a stranger person, or dog or even cyclists and traffic. Anything actually that comes moving more suddenly into their head space, and is more mentally unnerving to their more primal thought processes and defence reactions.

When dogs are in more restricted spaces or situations – like cars - or tied up, or on a lead – such defence behaviour can also become even more likely or intensified, due to the option of escaping any ‘threat’ by running or fleeing being no longer available to them.

MISREADING LUNGE-NIP BEHAVIOUR
So often collies will get condemned as aggressive or more bad natured dogs in general, as a result of displaying this instinctive behaviour. But in truth this defence reflex can act totally independently of the wider nature or character of a dog, which may otherwise be pretty sound or friendly, especially in contexts where the dogs feels inherently safer or more relaxed.

Lunge-nip defence behaviour is also predominantly a ‘warning’ behaviour, and thus will most commonly result in either the dog ‘air snapping’ or inflicting minimal injury on anyone or anything it nips. Whereas a dog with a greater intent to attack will bite far more strongly and do far more harm. The same is true of dogs who lack sufficient natural ‘bite inhibition’, or who have never had the chance to learn it.

THE EFFECTS OF MENTAL PRESSURE
Every collie can be different, in terms of how strong their lunge-nip instinct happens to be, and how readily or not this reflex will be launched by them. But the key at all times will be first, to recognise how prone your dog is to this kind of behaviour and second, to understand the things that are most likely to trigger it. Then organise your handling and training of your dog accordingly.

Given the direct link in the collie brain between building levels of mental pressure, or arousal, and how readily the lunge-nip reflex will be used, then clearly the aim is to try to keep your dog from entering this more ‘dangerous’ mental zone as much as possible.

Be aware that mental pressure can come from many different sources for Border collies. From higher, or more excessive, levels of sensory provocation - particularly sound and movement (like passing traffic) - or emotional states like fear, anxiety, excitement or frustration. Or a sense in the dog of feeling crowded, hemmed in or cornered in some way by others. Or a belief in the dog that some more vital resource in their life – anything from food or their bed, or specific ‘key’ territory to even their owner – is under threat from a rival.

THE MENTAL THERMOMETER
It can also really help to start seeing your dog’s mind more like a thermometer, in that the higher the temperature rises, the more likely it is that lunge nip behaviours will follow. Whereas the cooler and calmer your dog’s mind, the less likely they are to occur. Then do everything you can to both attain and sustain that cooler mental state in your dog at all times.

This may also involve working much harder on your dog’s general ‘focus’ and ‘impulse control’ training (covered previously on this page) as well as a more gradual familiarisation with, or desensitisation to, sensory experiences that may otherwise unnerve your dog.

For ultimately Border collies cannot be blamed or condemned for impulses and reactions that have been more deliberately hardwired into them, genetically, for generations, and for a specific working purpose. But we have the ability to better understand and control them, with better insight and training.

Meanwhile, much more on the origins of lunge-nip and other working behaviours in Border collies appears in BOOK ONE in my BORDER COLLIES: A BREED APART trilogy – SECRETS OF THE WORKING MIND, more on FOCUS and IMPULSE CONTROL training appears in book TWO – ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILLS & LEARNING – and all aggression issues in Border collies appears in BOOK THREE on BEHAVIOUR:
All text © Carol Price 2024
Carol Price collie books: In the UK from: https://performancedog.co.uk/?s=carol+price In the USA from: https://www.dogwise.com/ # and https://www.cleanrun.com/product/border_collies_a_breed_apart_book_1_secrets_of_the_working_mind/index.cfm In Canada from https://4mymerles.com/collections/books In Australia from: https://gameondogs.com.au/ And in the Netherlands and Belgium from: https://mediaboek.nl/border-collies-a-breed-apart-book-1.html

16/10/2024

Today our breed expert Carol Price looks at an important condition to know about in older collies:

VESTIBULAR SYNDROME IN THE OLDER DOG

Yesterday I wrote about Border Collie Collapse, a condition which can first present itself quite early in a dog’s life, and today I wanted to look at Vestibular Syndrome (VS). This condition, by contrast, is nearly always seen in older collies, but can still be quite distressing to witness in your dog if you have never seen it before.

The symptoms of this condition can often have a rapid onset, and typical ones will be the dog suddenly losing their balance, then staggering or circling around, like they are struggling to keep upright, or they may keep collapsing. Dogs may also vomit, or look nauseous, and their eyes may flicker rapidly from side to side (a phenomenon known as nystagmus). Additionally they may have a more noticeable head tilt on one side.

IS IT A ‘STROKE’?
Owners may immediately think their dog is having a 'stroke', when in fact the symptoms are stemming from some malfunction in the dog's vestibular system; a highly complex neurological system governing balance, and the correct positioning of any animal's head, body and eyes, in relation to its surrounding space and immediate horizon.

The vestibular system involves sensors in the inner ear acting much like spirit levels, continually sending messages to the balance control centre in the brain. The brain then instantly makes any corrections required in muscle movement, or body and eye position, to keep an animal upright and moving straight and aligned with its environment. Thus when anything goes wrong in this sensitive relay and response system, an animal's balance and co-ordination can suddenly go haywire.

HOW SERIOUS IS IT?
How serious a VS episode proves to be in your dog depends not just on the severity and perseverance of symptoms, but also whether the problem is more external - e.g. to do with an ear inflammation or infection - or something more serious happening internally, like a brain or nerve tumour. Head trauma of some kind is also thought to cause VS, as well as vitamin deficiencies (notably thiamine) or some medications that a dog is more sensitive to.

Vets can certainly help to establish what, more specifically, might be causing VS symptoms in your dog, in order to better treat them, but a very high number of these episodes in older dogs, especially, will be classed as idiopathic; i.e. as having no identifiable cause. And should the cause of them be less serious, the good news also is that many dogs get over them pretty well. Some may recover in days, or weeks, others may take a bit longer. During this time they will need more drastically reduced exercise and lots of TLC until they are better.

WILL VS KEEP RECURRING IN YOUR DOG?
Sometimes an older collie may have one or two VS episodes within a period of a few months, then never have one again. Others may have more, or another episode that is far more severe. It remains a highly unpredictable condition, in terms of both severity and incidence of occurrence.

WHEN VS IS MORE SERIOUS
In the main, VS tends to get divided into two forms of varying severity – the first is the milder, more peripheral kind, already mentioned, which dogs tend to recover from pretty quickly, but there is also another form – Central Vestibular Syndrome – where the damage done to the dog’s whole nervous system seems to be greater, and from which they may never really recover, or even be able to walk again.

Once again, the onset of this more serious form can appear quite sudden. Having discussed this more serious form of the condition with a number of different vets, it is still hard to establish, more exactly, what it is about the ageing dog that causes it to occur, barring other more obvious things like brain or nerve tumours. There may also be some link to the more natural degeneration of the spine in older dogs, resulting in wider nerve damage or spinal haemorrhages.

But having lost a number of dogs to this in older age, it really can be quite devastating to witness, as they can also be racked with agonising nerve spasms throughout the body, and your only thought is to try to relieve them of such suffering as soon as you can. At the back of your mind, always, though is whether there was something more you could have done to prevent this happening to your beloved older dog, if you knew more about what was really going wrong inside them. And we don’t seem to have the answer yet, but maybe one day we will.
All text © Carol Price 2024/Collieology

Carol Price collie books: In the UK from: https://performancedog.co.uk/?s=carol+price In the USA from: https://www.dogwise.com/ # and https://www.cleanrun.com/product/border_collies_a_breed_apart_book_1_secrets_of_the_working_mind/index.cfm In Canada from https://4mymerles.com/collections/books In Australia from: https://gameondogs.com.au/ And in the Netherlands and Belgium from: https://mediaboek.nl/border-collies-a-breed-apart-book-1.html

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