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Natural History 
Just found your blog and am so thankful! We have just rescued an 8 month old Golden from a Golden rescue organization.
“Max” is overall a very cheery, “wants to be near us” animal. He is however showing aggression at times over food, toys , foreign objects from his mouth. He growls at me, pulls away clamping down and tugs in spite of my gentle approach. I do not engage him at the point where he does this and refuse to tug – but he presses his head into my arm and paws my arm to continue. His foster family played tug of war – or so we observed when we picked him up. He was fostered in several homes – each had other dogs. We have only cats – but our cats were used to our elder three dogs for years. When they passed, our cats were depressed. When Max came home with us – the cats tried to sit with him and be near him, Max is a bit too playful at this point. But has not attacked them, so that is one good thing. Max also barks and will try to fight with other aggressive dogs in our neighborhood. We have neighbors that are proud of their Alpha temperament dogs – so we are avoiding them while Max is seemingly so impressionable.
I am beginning to see he is relating at both extremes. Granted – we have had him for only four days – but we have had dogs all our lives. Labs and mixed breeds. I recognize that dogs of this age need to be trained well to mature out of the mouthing/chewing/dominant behaviors we are seeing in max. But it seems that this is more than I would have hoped for, having thought of Goldens in the more traditional way. her refuses to fetch for rewards. Max is pure bread – or so we were told. He has not yet been fixed.
Your thoughts?
I am concerned that I will not be able to train this reactive personality out of an otherwise sweet dog.
Thanks. Love your blog and helpful info.
Hi, you found my blog! Im so happy you did! Im very intrested in your site and I need help! My blog is in need of a make over!
I will be in toucn and thanks for the blog!
Birddogdiva
Yeah, I can help you.
This is my e-mail (retrieverman1(at)yahoo(dot)com.)
I’ve sent info and posts about my golden retriever Abby (With the white markings) in the past and was wondering if golden retrievers have only black eye rims or can they have brown. Abbys are brown and we ( myself and a littermates owner) have a suspicion that they are mixed with a TollerXGolden. I know tollers usually have brown or flesh toned eye rims and noses but am not sure if goldens have brown as well. Thanks for your input and your dog is beautiful but then again all goldens are arent they!!
Yes. They can have brown eye rims and lips. The whole skin is actually brown, not black.
Most goldens are genetically black dogs with gene that stops the black pigment from appearing on the coat. Those with brown skin have a gene that causes them to have the same coloration, just the liver/chocolate pigment isn’t expressed on the coat.
In goldens, it’s fairly rare to have brown skin– and have genetic liver/chocolates.
Yes…very cool place you have here labpack…yup…being nosey now and having a little Wolfie snout around to see what else is here! My 1st love is the German Shepherd Dog but Golden Retrievers are beautiful dogs too :)
Good to tripped over you! As a refugee from Windows Live Spaces the strange world of WordPress is a very wierd and wonderful one indeed…so if you’re willing to have your expert brain picked on the subject I’m sure it would be beneficial to a Europan Ice Wolf!
Errm…now I’m confused? Are you “labpack” or “Retrieverman”?!! Have I made a seriously embarrasing cock-up referring to you as “labpack?”!! Pls accept my apologies if I have confused ID’s…it is 00:20 UK time and I have a touch of “Wolf-flu!!” ;)
Hi. Have just come across your brilliantly informative blog, but how do I subscribe?
On left hand side, scroll down below my flickr, past the search function, and click where it says “Subscribe to this blog.”
Hi. I came upon your blog today and I am fascinated by your postings. I am a painter and I am starting a series of paintings about dogs in the woods in my native Virginia. I wa s googling “white dogs” to find a dog that looked like a stray white dog that we called the ghost dog. I came to your post about the white bull dog. I currently have a bull type dog- maybe mastiff, maybe pit plus some lab. He is not white but his body is very much like the picture of the Farm Bull Dog. I would love to send you a picture of him and see what you think. The video of the Farm Bull Dog is so much like him too in that he is very gentle with all animals and has a relationship with a cat that is very similar to how that dog in the video relates to the chicken! Anyway, I am very excited to know about your blog and I look forward to reading more posts. Did you read “The Wolf in the Parlor” by John Franklin?
Yes. Please send me the photos.
I reviewed Franklin’s book in The Bark.
[…] Next time on “Deadliest Catch,” the Scots figured they would not be one-upped by Alaskan fishermen, so they revived the industry of seal-hunting off the northern coast. Serious business: combating seals in the swells off the coast of Shetland is not for those easily daunted and the task requires dogs with superior cognitive ability to figure out how to utilize tools as bulk, teeth and claws are not sufficient and are woefully inadequate. A collie cur found himself a big log to defend himself against the giant aquatic bears of the North Sea. Coming this fall. Hosted and narrated by Scottie Westfall. […]
I love golden retrievers so much. What is your favorite dog?
how do you change pictures?
I am starting to really read your blog and just wanted to tell you I think your posts are beautifully written. You conjure up my own childhood memories of “goldies” and I very much appreciate your comments on conservation and rescue.
I’m your newest fan!
Thank you! I’m glad you’re enjoying them.
Splendid work.
nice pictures on Flickr with your dog
Just noticed your warnings in read under “About” saying you don’t tolerate Creationist commentary and Victorian toilet science. I can’t tell you how much that warms my heart. I think I am shedding a tear. SNIF! Many thanks for bringing reality into the fold and helping people realize it is a help, not a hindrance.
come check out my blogs too as they are about ecology, nature and wildlife and i also am a golden retriever fanatic and will post pictures of the antics me and my golden retriever get into =)
People do have to become more aware of the importance of the relationship between him and nature (animals and plants), so I am pleased that you are not going to concentrate on “Western history,international political economy; politics, international politics and political economy; and campaign strategy and current political intrigue”, but will spend time to interweave those matters concerning humans best friend, the dog.
I love the Retriever, but I am to narrowly spaced, so I am happy now with my Shetland Collie, and my contacts with the many dogs I meet on my walks.
I am a dog lover and an amateur naturalist/birder/entomologist. Very amateur, but I enjoy studying and photographing nature. I love goldens (owned 3, all grown old and died) and now have a Brittany, a lab/cane corso mix, and some other big ass mix looks like a giant black and tan shar pei. I enjoy your blog. I’ve stumbled across it several times googling this and that. Cheers!
argh!!! First I find you as I am googling for info about an assignment I have to write, and then I notice how much there is just in your blog. So little time! But to top it off, how can I continue to be a productive member of society when you have things I can’t resist looking at such as…….”Crappy Taxidermy”? A rhetorical question of course. But FANTASTIC!!!!!! I have to go to work and don’t want to leave my desk!!! I will suggest a blog for you which I think you will enjoy……”Hyperbole and a half”
Cheers to you
PS: May I use a quote from you, which is, “if you don’t like me, I already don’t like you”?
Sure!
Great blog! I think it is hilarious that you find it necessary to specifically ban creationist comments… on a dog blog:-) I take it that it that is an exotic American thing ~ expecting creationist propaganda to infiltrate all sorts of topics.
Hi, I found your notes on the history of the Golden Retriever interesting. I’m currently envolved in a genetics course through ICB and one of the assignments was to do a history on the GR. I wasn’t the one writing it, but I have been friends with Eileen Caisley in the UK for years and she is an extremely good GR historian given her 20 years of the creation and maintenance of the Standfastdata database with all the UK GRs back to 1900 and earlier. In one of her emails to me she wrote that William Le Poer Trench, who had the Yellow Russian Retrievers, requested upon his death in 1920 that his dogs be put down and not bred with the true Goldens. His foundation dogs appeared to have been St Hubert’s Rock and St Hubert’s May and they were thought to have had two litters. It could be possible that the stories of the Russian circus dogs may have sprung from these Yellow Russian Retrievers. But as they were put down and not bred with the likes of Mrs Charlesworth’s dogs or other English kennels of the time, they obviously are not in the blood lines of today’s Golden Retrievers.
Kind regards,
Sy Guth
Lorgair Golden Retrievers
New Zealand
If you want to make it more complicated, there are these retrievers owned by the fellow who began breeding yellow Labradors in earnest:
http://retrieverman.net/2011/04/12/the-white-wavy-coated-retrievers-and-yellow-labradors-of-hyde/ I don’t know if these dogs were crossed into golden retrievers, but there is no evidence that they had anything to do with the Guisachan-Ilchester strain, which is the main source for the golden retriever.
Col. Trench was prone to flights of fancy, but having seen photos of the Russian yellows, they are different from the sporting wavy-coats/flat-coats of the time.
Each retriever breeder at the time had his or her own recipe for making a good retriever. The registry was entirely open, and I would not be surprised if Trench’s dogs had some weird blood in them. Trench got the Russian story from a keeper at Guisachan, and I highly suspect that the ghillie was trying to pull a fast one over Col. Trench– probably just for good fun.
I rescued what appeared to be a black lab as a puppy. However, now that he is 4 years old I am not sure. He is a black short hair with a patch of white on his chest, but a longer snout than a usual black lab. I found a picture of a black mouth cur, and the face and ears folded back is exactly the way he looks. He has the body of a greyhound and runs like them too. When I play with him he gets easily worked up and has to run very hard to get rid of this energy. You couldn’t ask for a sweeter dog and he gets along with all dogs, however I’ve had to train him to stop when I say “hey” from going after our cats. He killed one of them by crushing her in his mouth before we could get her out. He has a nose that can track a mole in the ground and follow it through the yard, he also tries to catch it by digging where the hole is and following it. So I’m wondering if this sounds like a black lab/black mouth cur breed to you?
I was doing a little research on what I was told was the breed of my dog (a mix of Corgi and King Charles Spaniel) and eventually saw the photos of the extinct Toy Trawler Spaniel — amazingly it looks just like my dog. I purchased my dog from a private seller in Long Beach, California, who told me that originally he was found wandering in a park somewhere in Los Angeles County and taken to the pound. I purchased him around 2002, so he’s at least 13 years old. I’m still amazed at how much he resembles the dog in the photo from the British Museum.
I totally get closing your comments, and am very sorry to see you’re not writing about dogs. Depression can be a very tough thing to deal with and triggering high anxiety is not in your best interest.
I’ve been away writing my own blog about how life can be. Since losing Shuttle I’ve managed to qualify by big red boy, Arson for 3 Master Nationals. And I have a beautiful little red 4 year old, Xeon that became my heart dog over the course of the last few years.
Will watch for future posts but, wish you the best in finding a sound direction that you’re comfortable with. ~D
Retrieverman. Perhaps you, or someone here …or “M.R.S”. who wrote about CH Pele’s Flarewin Cavalier, owned by Nancy Lanigan Gold Quest, Ohio. My family had one of her dogs in the mid 1950s! Much later happily we got back in touch. Nancy lived into 80s. If anyone knows her *GOLD QUEST AUCTIONEER or his relatives, love to hear more. Esp. photos. I can post pics to the k9database… so few photos of Goldens from back then….my current Golden looks nothing them (no surprise).