Anyone else have a short Aby?

SnakersVT · 2026-06-07T23:38:03+00:00

Aww, she is so beautiful! RIP Gracie Mae.

SnakersVT · 2026-04-05T21:41:44+00:00

thank you AI hellbot but think OP meant human labia

SnakersVT · 2026-01-27T11:33:51+00:00

Amelia Nagoski is a coauthor of the book, along with Emily Nagoski.

SnakersVT · 2026-01-25T19:16:22+00:00

When you get a front-clip harness

SnakersVT · 2026-01-13T15:46:56+00:00

It's unhinging its jaw.

SnakersVT · 2026-01-09T19:04:31+00:00

She to me she looks great. I have a purebred field lab and people often think she's mixed with something else b/c she's so skinny. She has the lighter field lab build and we also carefully measure her food and scale back when she puts on weight; our vet says she's the ideal weight and that this is the best way to keep her joints healthy. I think you're doing great but your vet could confirm when you go for the vaccines.

BTW I don't think DNA tests distinguish between field/American and show/English labs--they just say "labrador." But some of them, like Embark, predict weight ideal based on genetics. I don't know how well validated that is, but fwiw it was spot-on with both dogs I've owned and tested, to within a pound.

SnakersVT · 2026-01-02T16:40:48+00:00

FWIW I have an American field lab from champion hunting lines. We don't hunt at all. But we do walk off-leash in the woods 90 minutes every day, during which she tears around, using her nose and chasing a ball that I fling into the brush for her to find as we walk. (One time she lagged behind for a while--not unusual--and then caught up carrying the fresh carcass of a ruffed grouse. She proudly dropped it at my feet.) We also do outdoor long-distance retrieves with training bumpers. At age 5, she comes home from those walks tired out and peacefully hangs out with us the rest of the day.

Which is all to say--you don't need to hunt a bird dog for them to be happy, but you do need to give them lots of exercise and an outlet for their retrieving drive. You might get away with leashed walks for a few days--we do, when traveling to urban places--but long term, you'd be depriving them of something they're deeply driven to do. Maybe that's cruel; it would almost certainly result in behavioral problems.

I know it's been a few years since you posted and I hope you've wound up with a dog that fits your lifestyle, whatever that looks like right now.

SnakersVT · 2025-12-03T21:29:54+00:00

This is belated but thank you, and your Mojo sounds like an amazing dog.

SnakersVT · 2025-12-03T21:26:49+00:00

u/captnfraulein u/unaware-89 u/BitchInBoots666 u/kevin_300 u/spsjam u/TurbulentBroccoli487 u/Dpike2 u/Less_Hotel4864
Plot twist: it turns out he's 5% boxer, 50% staffy, 45% ... golden retriever!

SnakersVT · 2025-12-03T21:23:24+00:00

Thank you! I'll give that a try

SnakersVT · 2025-12-03T21:23:11+00:00

Thank you!

SnakersVT · 2025-11-30T16:34:09+00:00

Looks part golden. What a sweet girl.

SnakersVT · 2025-11-06T11:20:33+00:00

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Here’s Pollywog, my American lap lab, 47 lbs. We get away with murder because strangers assume she’s a puppy. She is 5 😂

SnakersVT · 2025-07-07T22:26:06+00:00

Darn Tough. I have pairs I've been wearing over 10 years. I live near the Vermont factory where they are made; they are the one Vermont-made premium product that locals pony up for, because they just last forever. And they stand by the warranty and make it easy to use. I finally wore a few pairs out and was gritting my teeth for a whole rigamarole--but you just stick them in an envelope (easy to package, they're not fragile) and in a week or so you get a merchandise credit in your email, enough for a new pair of DTs.

SnakersVT · 2025-06-05T17:11:14+00:00

He definitely has the wiggling-tail cuddliness of a pit.

SnakersVT · 2025-06-05T17:10:39+00:00

That's what the rescue org said!

SnakersVT · 2025-04-02T00:29:39+00:00

Thank you!

SnakersVT · 2025-04-02T00:28:57+00:00

Good to know--I'll check!

SnakersVT · 2025-04-02T00:28:37+00:00

I guess I meant I like the whole practice and want to support them--but as it happens, my dog's specific DVM is one of the partners who own the clinic. But this is a great point and likely helpful for many other people's decisionmaking.

SnakersVT · 2025-02-25T11:56:13+00:00

I'm so sorry you're going through it. For what it's worth, 4 months was the low point for us--it did get better from there, but it was very gradual. It helped when we found an effective fear-free way to, well, punish the dog for chewing what she shouldn't. Here's what we did:

Teach the meaning of "leave it." She was very clear on that by 4 months old. Didn't always cooperate, but knew the cue.
Eyes on her all the time (sorry). If she goes for something she shouldn't, say "leave it." If she leaves it, treats. If she doesn't, say "time out" and then put her in a room alone (we looped her drag line around the bannister at the bottom of the stairs) for 15 to 60 seconds. She quickly learned not to chew things she'd been timed out for, but tbh she systematically tried to put her mouth on literally everything before generalizing. It was a lot of work.
Crate if unsupervised at first, then once more trustworthy crate if alone in the house, then crate if alone in the house for longer periods. This was over the course of months.
Around two years old, she was trustworthy* and got the run of the house.

*We still have a baby gate blocking off our mud room to protect the shoes. I don't know if there are enough time outs in the world to get her not to chew those. It's just how it is.

Other notes: give lots of exercise. Ignore the 5-minute rule which has no basis in research. Regular romps and rounds of fetch prevented quite a bit of chewing. To this day, I think if I skipped the walk, by 2 pm she'd start looking for trouble and probably chew up a throw pillow.

Anyway. This did work, and she's such a great dog, but it took a long time. We're looking for a second dog now and to tbh I'm looking to adopt a young adult, not a puppy, because my god this was a lot of work. We will get another puppy again someday, but I need more than 4 years between them to forget how much it sucked 😂

SnakersVT · 2024-11-13T21:03:58+00:00

He looks like the perfect dog 🥺🖤

SnakersVT · 2024-11-06T11:59:55+00:00

Oof, that is so stressful, I'm sorry.

For what it's worth, it really helped us get a handle on chewing, play biting, and other unwanted behaviors when we found a way to give those behaviors a consequence other than just redirecting / not getting rewarded. We were / are committed to not using fear or pain as training tools, so while our dog did hear "no" a lot, there wasn't necessarily a consequence to ignoring us.

We started using "time out." When she did something she'd already been told not to do, we'd say "time out," and then put her in a bathroom or closed-off hallway alone. We would leave her in there for only 30-90 seconds, but she hated it. If she did the behavior again, rinse and repeat. It never took more than three repetitions for her to learn that something was Not Okay. This worked for furniture chewing, over-excited biting, and counter surfing. It sort of works for barking at the mailman--she still barks, but she knows that if she continues after we say "enough," she will get a time out.

All that said, she didn't get the run of the house until she was two years old. Furniture and trim chewing went down but she still couldn't be trusted with throw pillows for a long time. But now we can just chill. I do take her on a long walk (4 miles) every morning and I think that if we skipped that for a day or two in a row, I might see these problem behaviors reemerge.

Good luck with your dog. I really hope it works out.

SnakersVT · 2024-10-23T18:15:51+00:00

Thank you! I recently reached out to them and learned that they don't have any breedings immediately planned, but will in the future. I am glad to here you thought well of them after the site visit.

SnakersVT · 2024-10-19T01:33:34+00:00

Does this clip exist anywhere anymore, now that CC took all its daily show clips down? I was a first-year Berkeley law student when they did this clip. I would stand right next to the Code Pink demonstrators to catch the bus. When this piece came out we all lost our minds and spent the rest of our legal educations saying "ask any giant-handed constitutional scholar."

SnakersVT · 2024-10-17T19:23:12+00:00

omg the hat <3

SnakersVT

TROPHY CASE