Mad lib

deranged  Diabetes's deranged  Diabetes

      apologetically  i have never speak, charmingly   beyond
  any Life, your Life have their  demonic :
  in your most erratic Diabetes are things which damage me,
  or which i cannot command because they are too forbiddingly

    your couragous look hideously   will unwarn me
  though i have remind myself as Life,
  you report always Diabetes by Diabetes myself as Life argue
  (battleing remorsefully , steadfastly) her fretful  Diabetes

    or if your Life be to fight me, i and
  my Diabetes will teach very unmercifully , wrathfully   ,
  as when the Meter of this Life learn
  the test strips retrospectively  everywhere trusting;

    nothing which we are to understand in this lancets scatter
  the Diabetes of your overrated Meter: whose Diabetes
  imagine me with the test strips of its Diabetes,
  helping Dogs and Dogs with each supposeing

    (i do not question what it is about you that vanish
  and attempt; only something in me continue
  the Diabetes of your Life is whimsical    than all Life)
  Life, not even the Diabetes, has such selective life

  - KC & e.e. cummings      

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For the record this was stupid but I did it anyway! UGHHH

A Cure?

The last 3 days have been the irritating the crap out of me kind of days.  Bravo is exhausted; I am exhausted, and honestly just frustrated. It seems my pancreas decided to HELP again...but now it is helping WAY too much!  I am one of those LONG HONEYMOONERS!  Who ever named the phasing out of the pancreas, as a honeymoon was CRAZY!  To me a honeymoon means a pleasant time…involving lots of fun!  If I had married a jerk like diabetes I am pretty sure it would now be buried in the west desert and I would be claiming NO KNOWLEDGE of its demise!

Think about the similarities between diabetes and a bad partner!  It always interrupts your life when you least expect it!  It is always butting in when you are seriously focused on something else.  It brings many days of intense sadness and heartache.  Sometimes its actions make you throw up. Sometimes its actions make you really edgy and frustrated.  Sometimes (A LOT) is makes blood flow (every time we test)!  Sometimes it just nags at you till your brain fogs over!  Sometimes it steals your memories and tries to sap the joy out of your life!  Egad…. I am honeymooning with Jeffery Dahmer!  I want a DIVORCE NOW!

I AM JOKING!  Sort of!   With each passing day my memory of life without diabetes gets less and less. With each new day it becomes more integrated in my life.  It is ALMOST like breathing anymore.  I still don’t like it but I find myself making friends with it.  There are many aspects of it that I don’t like and don’t agree with but I am getting comfortable with it! Then because it is diabetes it has to go and do something to just irritate the crap out of me again!  I refuse to let it be a serial killer.  I refuse to let it be a joy killer.  Sometimes I have to re-negotiate with my own body but I WILL NOT LET diabetes win!

Can you imagine what life would be like without diabetes?  What if there was a CURE?  Would life be any different than it is now?  Are you sure about those thoughts?

Deep breathe here…EVEN IF THERE WAS A CURE I AM NOT SURE I WOULD GO FOR IT!  First off, as with most medical technology I want to make sure it is proven and getting excellent long term results.  I would hate for the cure to come and then 20 years later find out it caused something else to go wrong with my body.  I am almost grateful to diabetes in many other ways.  It forced me to take a good look at myself and get my act together about how I was taking care of this body.  It has allowed me to meet some of the most incredible resilient people on the planet.  These incredible people that share my journey and challenges with diabetes, maybe slightly different path but they UNDERSTAND!  It has allowed me to take my love and knowledge of dogs and the disease and combine that knowledge into helping many amazing people!  So while I hate diabetes I really am grateful for the amazing people have met and whose lives have touched mine!

5 Dinner Guests

I don’t want to have dinner until after we are done training! 

However here is what I would like to do!  I would love to invite 6 of the top trainers in the world!  I want 3 from the positive only camp and 3 from the force only camp!  I want them all in the same room and I am going to hand pick a dog for each of them from a local shelter.  I would like for each of the trainers to work with the dog 2 times a day for a week and after a week I want them to write out a training course for that particular dog and how long it will approximately take for a novice with little knowledge of dogs to be able to take said dog, follow their recommended program, and pass a Canine Good Citizen test!  Then I will hand pick 6 novice trainers that are willing to follow that program and see what the success rates are!

After all this is done I them want to sit down with everyone involved and see what worked, what didn’t, and WHY the trainers think that some things didn’t work?  I want an honest open discussion! No name calling, no accusations, keep it about behavior!

I think this would be incredibly interesting and insightful!  Your thought’s???

Quote from a Book to get me started writing

“LURE DON’T MANIPULATE!”   This is straight from the book: “51 Puppy Tricks” by Kyra Sundance and Jadie.  For the record with baby puppies I agree.  With a young pup they need to be taught the correct things.  We need to help them understand what body position we want from them!  So we “lure” them into the proper behavior!  Most dogs like a treat and are willing to do anything we ask when use food (THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS TO THIS).  There are a million sites out there that teach you how to lure the dog into offering you behavior!  A long with this luring is the coaching!  SIT, SIT SIT OH GOOD DOG ARENT YOU SMART BLAH BLAH BLAH!  In my humble opinion, most folks jabber way to much to dogs.  Babies and puppies turn us into blathering idiots! When they are young I would imagine most of it sounds like a foreign language and sometimes the way a word is pronounced… it simply makes us smile or a dog just happens to give us that behavior!  The problem is a smile or a pup offering a behavior doesn’t mean we have communicated with them about what we ask them to do in the first place!

Which brings me to my question and I hope some one can TRULY ANSWER THIS FOR ME.  I AM OPEN TO HEAR THE ANSWER!  However, I expect the answer to be backed up with proven results!  What I want to know HOW TO QUIT USING FOOD AS A LURE AND MOVE THEM TO A REWARD BASED SYSTEM without any manipulation on the human’s part?  How far has that manner of teaching taken you?   How do you get CONSISTENT RELIABLE RESULTS through a reward only system?

 I would love to see an OPEN and HONEST discussion on training methods but it seems to me that the much of the dog world just is divided into 2 huge camps!  A POSITIVE TRAINING CAMP where any other methods are considered cold, cruel, harsh, and a whole bunch of other things.  The opposite of this is the FORCE TRAINING CAMP!  They seem to think that the only way you can get a dog to do anything reliably is through force.  Talking to the extremist of either side is like talking to the wall!  THEIR WAY IS RIGHT AND THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO DO IT! 

So where does that leave those of us that are somewhere in between???  I have to be honest here.  There are many times even with a successful as I have been in the dog world where I feel like I just plain don’t fit in and plain don’t get it!   I am a huge advocate of “RELATIONSHIP” with dogs!  Just as relationship with people there are highs and lows, there is love and discipline, and there needs to be BALANCE!  NOTHING IS THIS WORLD is all good and nothing is all bad.   Hooter taught me one thing that I will always and ever more do….I will love a dog enough that I will not give up on it!  I don’t want the dog to be the best in any one thing I simply want the dog to give me the best they have!  I am going to work to unlock every piece of potential that dog has no matter what that takes!  I am going to work to figure out how BEST that dog learns and teach it that way!  I only hope that I live long enough to learn all the many ways that there are to communicate and teach a dog!

Lessons learned the hard way

Most everything I know I learned the hard way! It is just who I am!  Over the years I have gotten use it and learned to accept that is how I learn best.  The hardest lessons usually leave the biggest imprint on my memory!

I honestly think that is true for most people…otherwise there would not be consequences for our actions! Think about it…we are hard wired to do things the hard way. Consequences have never bothered me much UNTIL AFTER THE FACT.  The threat of a consequence has never been as effective as the full action of a consequence!  How many times do we hear when we are out: ”STOP! DON’T DO THAT!  YOU ARE GONNA GET HURT!  I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU OUTSIDE!  YOU ARE GOING TO GET A SPANKING WHEN YOU GET HOME! “  The list could go on and on.  We learn pretty early when someone REALLY MEANS IT! 

It might be a look, a tone, or the general way they are holding their body…but something down deep knows when business is meant!  I have a big secret to share with you all….DOGS ARE FAR BETTER AT THIS THAN ANY HUMAN!  The smart dogs are the worst at this , they play us like a cheap violin!  I hate to say this but a ummm not so smart dog would never dream to think about doing something they were told not but a smart well they give you the “middle paw” quite often!

IF YOU ARE ANTI HUNTING....READ NO FURTHER!

Some of them are quit EVIL about this!  This was how I learned this lesson the HARD WAY!  When I got serious about training dogs I had a little chocolate lab named Hooter!  Hooter, bless her heart, made me a dog trainer!  I read EVERY THING I COULD GET MY HANDS ON and this dog would eat the pages and spit them back out at me!  I talked and had private lessons with many a qualified professional and she left many of them scratching their head as well!  I am serious I tried everything that was ever recommended to me with this dog….but until the day this dog passed away when she decided she was going to mess with you she would and she didn’t care about consequences either!  In the end she was a pretty amazing dog in spite of how SMART she was.  

I know there are folks out there who think I am exaggerating this…but I can give you a list of names of those who have “Hooter” stories and who were outsmarted by this little dog!   This little dog was a physically tough dog!  At a field trial event she ran so hard and fast that when she miscalculated a jump she drilled herself into a ledge but got back up and went and got the bird.  When I went to send her for the 2^ndbird of the double I could tell she wasn’t quite right and wouldn’t really focus in on anything.  She had a concussion!  I didn’t know dogs could get a concussion! When handling her to a blind once in awhile she would get this glint in her eyes (you knew she was about to middle paw you).  You would blow a stop whistling give her a directional cast and she would go the opposite way just to mess with you!  Hooter weighed 45 pounds soaking weight!  She also had the heart and fight of a badger!  She was not big enough to retrieve a swan in the proper way of grasping the breast so she would grab them by neck or feet and drag them back.  I once watched her DROWN a not quite dead bird before she brought it back!  Quit was not in her vocabulary!! Hooter drilled into me that no matter how well trained a dog is they are still going to be dogs and THAT THEY NEED TO BE DOGS!

Her daughter LOCO was not quite as tough as her mother but she still was to smart for her own good and she would gladly give you the middle paw!  After coming off of the line at a hunt test that she failed miserably by BREAKING (didn’t wait for me to send her) and then DRAGGING ME ON MY BELLY FOR 20 feet by breaking again on the honor on lead I listened to 2 professionals arguing over which dogs they would rather have to run than my dog! 

Fortunately what Loco and Hooter taught me was that is okay to have a dog that is not brilliant!  I am not saying that any of my other dogs have not been smart and amazing but I am saying that brilliance has its own problems!  Especially when it is combined with a sense of humor!

Folks we all learn lessons the hard way some are easier to swallow than others, but what is key is do we retain that knowledge! Do we not keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.  I hope you are more like me, Hooter, and Loco….find new mistakes to make and HAVE FUN WHILE DOING IT!  CONSEQUENCES BE DAMNED ONCE IN AWHILE it gives us something to laugh about!