97 : Available Giants 2757 : Adopted GiantsSearch for your favorite dog. You can now search for your favorite dogs or breeds on the site. Click here to start your search! Kerrie Orozco Memorial Walk/Run/Ride! 50/50 Big Dogs Huge Paws Pet Portrait Fundraiser! Colorado: Land of the Biggies!! Nebraska: A Gentle Giant Greeting Millie the Saint Bernard - 8/27/16 Bee & Blake the English Mastiffs - 8/27/16 Twinkles the Newfoundland - 8/27/16 Bobby the Dogue de Bordeaux - 8/27/16 Hoss the Neapolitan Mastiff - 8/26/16 Everest the English Mastiff/Bouvier Mix - 8/26/16 on September 03, 2014 at 12:12 PM, updated Yeah, it sounds like an urban legend, but when you see the evidence -- a photo and series of X-rays -- you not only know it's true, but, in a funny way, you have to admire the damn dog. Imagine eating, say, five large pizzas in one sitting and you get some idea of what the Great Dane must of have been experiencing when his owners hauled him into Northwest Portland's the DoveLewis Emergency Animal Hospital.

So they checked him in, filled out all the paperwork and Dr. Ashley Magee took the dog to a back room for X-rays. She found what was described as "a lot of foreign material in his stomach," said Shawna Harch, the hospital's communications specialist. Whatever was in the dog's stomach couldn't be digested, and that meant surgery. So then Magee put the dog under the knife. During the nearly two-hour surgery, she must have thought she was working in a department store as she pulled out sock after sock after sock. In the end, Magee removed 43 1/2 socks. That 1/2 sock remains a mystery. Look at that photo again -- and is it only me, or do those socks look like something laid out on a barbeque grill? You have to ponder what that mutt -- he was only 3 -- was up to that day last February. The guys in the hotdog eating contests have nothing on this dog -- yes, the pun was intentional. By the time the dog was stitched up and sent home, details of the case were making the rounds at the hospital.

Harch said it's perhaps the strangest case in hospital history, and certainly the record set for the most socks eaten. The owners, she said, were unavailable for comment, and she couldn't release their names. But I can imagine the conversation in their home the day they realized something was going on. "Say, where are all the socks?"Did you check the washing machine?" They look at the dog. Dog lies on the floor, but that gaze is really contemplation of a dress sock in the corner. M&M Moving Services Virginia BeachIt will be a nice after-dinner treat.300 Aac Blackout T Shirt Earlier this year, DoveLewis officials learned of a contest sponsored by Veterinary Practice News, a magazine for vets. Teacup Maltipoo Puppies For Sale Georgia

The publication announced a contest -- ongoing for nearly a decade -- "They Ate WHAT?" Vets were asked to submit an X-ray along with case details. And, of course, DoveLewis knew what to submit. They learned they came in third  place and won $500. The money will be placed in a fund to help low-income people pay for vet bills. As for the Great Dane? Apparently still kicking, Harch said. Hey, Gold Toe socks, I got your next spokesman for you. The story was updated to reflect that DoveLewis received a third place award, not second place.Heart of Ohio Great Dane Club – Friday, June 24, 2016 Best in Specialty Show: GCh. Gracyn Lost Creek The Descendant of Elan Owner: Jon & Sue Finck, John & Jessie Gerszewski, Lourdes Carvajal, Janet Quick & Priyanka Deshmukh Breeder: Marshall Stoner & Karen McCance on Jun 24 2016. Filed under Specialty & Group Show Results. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.Explore Mix Breed, Breed Dogs, and more!

RottweilersGreat DanesDane MixNew JerseyJerseyDogs For AdoptionAdoptionPetsDogsIt used to be that pigs would roam the fields, nose to the ground, sniffing for the musk of a buried truffle. Once hot on the trail, the hog would rout down and down for the crest of the hidden truffle. At Seattle-based Truffle Dog Company, it’s dogs, not hogs, that do the legwork. Between them, owners Alana McGee and Kristin Rosenbach have seven dogs of various ages and breeds all trained to hunt. The company offers guided foraging expeditions as well as a training program for aspiring canine hunters and their handlers. The Italians are known to rely on the Lagotto Romagnolo breed to hunt for truffles, but you can teach any dog — even an old dog — the tricks of the trade, says McGee. “It’s all personality-based, for the most part,” McGee says, adding she’s successfully trained Chihuahuas, Great Danes and even flat-nosed pugs. “And you can teach them at any age. There’s no rule that says you have to get the dog when it’s a puppy and start it.

You can have a 13-year-old dog start doing it.” McGee herself likes to work with hunting dogs who tend to have a “certain work ethic.” “It’s easier and sometimes faster to teach food-motivated dogs, because it’s a really strong drive. But you just have to find out what your dog likes and what makes them tick, and apply that to truffle hunting,” McGee says. The thing that makes Callie tick is her squeaky tennis ball. Each time the border collie alerts her owner to a hidden truffle, she earns a brief reunion with her treasured toy before the hunt resumes. Then the energetic pooch races down the field before suddenly stopping and homing in on a dirt spot. Using her paw, she digs down a bit, smells, then digs again until she hits gold. Owner Rosenbach Callie with praise, carefully digs up the found truffle and hands over the prize. Callie’s ability to zigzag down the soil with amazing precision makes her exceptional, says Rosenbach. “Teaching a dog to find an odor really isn’t the hard part.

A lot of dogs can learn to detect an odor in one session,” Rosenbach says. “But once they go underground, the scent moves differently through the soil. So that’s a difficult transition for the dogs to learn.” Rosenbach and Callie repeat this ritual numerous times throughout the truffle season, which peaks in the winter and early spring in the Northwest. “The general rule is: The more miserable it is outside, the better the truffles,” McGee says, adding it’s not unusual to find pounds of truffles in just an hour during peak season. The truffles we eat are the fruiting bodies of the truffle fungus, which thrives on the roots of a host tree, maybe a Douglas fir or an oak. The fungus gets sugar and water from the tree. The tree, in turn, gets micronutrients that help it outperform its neighbors. Truffles are mostly accidental fruits, though some people do try to cultivate them in orchards. To do so, they inoculate their tree roots in truffle spores before planting.

But inoculation offers no guarantee; after five to 12 years of high-maintenance soil care, the tree might yield edible truffles. Local excursions unearth two native varieties of truffles: the Oregon black truffle and the Oregon white truffle. Though both named “Oregon,” the varieties can be found all over the Northwest, says McGee. The white truffle has an earthy, “umami” smell more typical of truffles, says McGee. The black truffle, on the other hand, has an unusual, fragrant scent that borders on fruity. The natives sell for about $40 to $60 per ounce — not as expensive as the Italian varieties that run as high as $150 per ounce, but not cheap, either. The black truffles, which tend to be bigger, can be as large as 2 ounces per piece. For years, the native varieties were harvested by raking the soil, without the help of sharp-nosed critters. But the practice can not only damage the delicate tuber, but also yield unripe truffles that aren’t quite at their pungent prime.

“Truffles are only valuable at their peak ripeness,” McGee says. “And after you pick it, they don’t really ripen. You can’t really artificially create the same aromas.” McGee and Rosenbach offer a training program for dog owners who want to teach their dogs to hunt for truffles. Their online course attracts students as far away as Tanzania and Australia. Some dogs are ready to hit the forest for a trial run in about 20 weeks, says McGee, though highly precise hunters like Callie take about a year to train. And there is no cookie-cutter curriculum. The dogs are always taught to signal on a reward-based system, but how they signal and how they’re rewarded depends on the dog. You can train any dog to do anything, says McGee, but it’s a good idea to build on their natural tendencies. One of McGee’s dogs taps its paw on the soil above the truffle instead of digging down. Rosenbach’s sheltie, Cash, will first bark, then lie down and nose the target. Then, if his owner asks him to, he’ll dig down a bit.

“Herding dogs generally have a lot of eye, so they won’t interact much with the truffle, but they’ll stare at it for like five minutes until you get them,” McGee says. “I have one dog who gets bacon only when he truffle-hunts, because that’s like his favorite thing in the entire world. It doesn’t have to be that way, but for some dogs, it’s a good idea.” Another rule: It should always be fun, which means a dog should never be overworked — never more than a couple hours, and less on tough terrain — and a hunt should always end on a good note. “Just ‘cause a dog can do something doesn’t mean you should ask that of’em,” McGee says. “It should never be like actual work. It should always be a game.” McGee and Rosenbach use real truffles to train dogs, never mind the price. They say it’s the only way to train them to hunt for all available truffles. Even truffle oil won’t do, says McGee, as most are synthetically produced and contain just one chemical compound.

“One truffle can have 20 to 30 volatile organic compounds, and if you train them on just the one from the truffle oil, a bunch of truffles may not have that compound in enough concentration. So they won’t necessarily alert on them, and we want the dogs to find everything,” she says, Part of training involves the occasional truffle lost down a dog’s gullet, though not often and usually because the dog’s excitement brims over. “We’ve built such amazing value into having them go out and do this that when they find one, they’re really pumped up and excited, and it just goes down the hatch,” McGee says. There’s only one thing to do when that happens, says McGee: “Don’t freak out.” “You never want to create a scenario that’s a negative association, basically. So if they eat one, OK. You move on,” she says. But perhaps the most difficult parts of truffle hunting has to deal with the handler, not the dog, say the trainers. “There’s a working dynamic involved in truffle hunting, and it’s often really hard for us to teach it and explain it.

Most people end up getting it, but you can’t just lecture about it,” Rosenbach says. The human involvement goes beyond asking for a behavior, rewarding and repeating mechanically. For one, the handler must be calm and totally in the moment; any distraction or tension will prove unproductive. The required focus is a big reason why most handlers hunt with just one dog at a time.If you’re not connected with your dog when you’re out there, it doesn’t necessarily go well,” McGee says. “I take a lot of deep breaths. I try and be very conscious of what’s going on. And if I’m really stressed out, then I don’t go hunting.” If the handler becomes even a slight bit stressed, says Rosenbach, the dog immediately absorbs the tension and mirrors it. “You can then all of a sudden see the dog come up and start zipping around. And they start pinging off of each other,” she says. “And it takes something as simple as reminding her [the handler] to ground herself, and all of a sudden, you see both of’em shift.