Turkish Dogs - particularly Anatolian Shepherd Dogs

Meet Molly :D

A few days ago, Lynn Howe of New Hope Animal Foundation sent an email to let me know there was a possible Anatolian in a Placer County Shelter.
James and I went to look at the dog and decided to foster her.

I decided to call her "Molly" the first night we had her for no particular reason but it is pleasant enough and she responds to it. I have another page right here, with other details and photos specific to Molly. Even if you're not looking for a rescue, be sure to check out 2- Feb 15, scroll down the page and see Molly's haircut!

I'm not certain what breed she is. She is around 26-27 inches high. Definitely appears to be purebred LGD and her character and behavior is right on the money.

Her first day or so after arrival, was spent in the Magnum kennel, getting handled and getting to meet my Anatolians. After that, we let her start mingling and free ranging in the yard. She seemed happy to be cagefree after being in the shelter for what I understand was two weeks. She was walking around, eating grass, checkout scents, curling up and snoozing in the grass. She picked out spots where she could watch activities going on around her; places where she would snooze throughout the day. She hasn't done anything hyper yet and I have yet to see her run to check anything out. This could also be due to social respect to the two Anatolians she is with. LGDs don't usually like strange dogs tearing around their property. So maybe in time she will feel comfortable in that respect.

She has however taken quite happily to the evening routine of sleeping in the Magnum kennel. She beds down for the night in the straw of the big doghouse at around dusk.

Here are some pics I got of her on Friday with Anatolians, Ruya and Coco.

Molly - left front.
Headless sisters- Coco, right. Ruya, behind Molly's tail.

Trio responding to noise by suddenly sprouting heads.

Molly watching minihorses come into the corral next to the red slatted fence.

Her first day of freedom was also Molly's first chance to meet the miniature horses through the fencing. They were down in the other field but when the horses heard me talking to Molly, they came into the corral. That's when Molly raised her head - picture above.

The stallion is bold and came up to the fence to peer into the yard. I like that Molly didn't over stimulate upon seeing minihorses (and a chicken that followed them). Another transient dog we had here sometimes went berserko upon seeing horses. :o

Molly watching the mini-stallion at the gate.

Coco and Ruya both dropped what they were doing by the house, and came over to monitor how Molly reacted to meeting the stallion through the gate. Coco, above pic, is closer to Molly. Molly seems to be more comfortable with Coco at close range, than she is with Ruya. Not sure why, although Ruya is quite a bit bigger. Ruya is the alpha of my pack as well, but she rules with the benevolent firmness that her great granddam always had, never throwing her weight around.

The Anatolians are a couple inches taller at the shoulders.
Molly is full grown.
Here, Ruya and Coco watch carefully.

Closeup - Almost nose-to-nose with Mr. Stud Muffin.

This stallion, btw, has a perverse sense of humor sometimes. He occasionally tries to get a rise out of the dogs by jiggling the gate with his nose, scratching his butt on the fence, or by laying down with his back against the fencing, just inches from the dogs and facing the other way. If you ask me... that is truly evil behavior from a warped and capable mind! If dogs react, he tends to stand just the other side of the fence and stoically studies the dogs as if he were watching TV. You've probably seen it! It's the same way some cats will sit just inches from a fence and watch dogs go ballistic. ;)

Since my crew have gotten a lecture or two about indulging and entertaining this evil horse in this manner over the past year, Ruya and Coco are wise to this now and usually ignore him. (once in a while, they just can't stand it any more, I can hardly blame them)

So it was interesting to watch Molly try to figure him out. I think Molly got her cues from the Anatolians.

Other pics.....
Rear to front- Ruya, Coco & Molly.
You can kinda see it, but Molly's coat has a really bad haircut along the topline and on this side of her body.

Trio

Molly

Coco- 16 months.

Coco - she went through another collar. This one is chewed up but still serviceable.

Ruya - 5 years old. She's wearing Sabah's collar. Sabah was her great granddam.

I need to get another batch of martingale collars eventually!


Anyway, if you have contacts that might be interested in Molly. Let me know. Be sure to read all of Molly's pages before inquiring.

Labels: Coco, Molly, Rehome, Rescue, Ruya

Turk, aka Roadblock's Turkish Silver, in a cute picture sent by Tiffany of Roadblock Anatolians. He is now working and training as a livestock dog.

Seeing the eyes above, it reminded me of how expressive our doggies can be.

Above is a favorite of mine. The two pups are Coco and Helmut, giving Dave Koerner their rapt attention. I still wonder what he did to get that expression!


At fourteen months, Coco and Helmut above, giving my camera a quick look when I tried to get their attention by making odd noises -- and they do appear to be somewhat concerned. ;)

Now this is cool...
Here's a chance to add your doggie pics to a huge mosaic by Pedigree. I added Ruya and got an email response. Supposedly "RUYA1" will show up in the mosaic in another day or two. Pedigree says it will make a $1 donation* to The PEDIGREE® Adoption Drive for every dog photo that's uploaded to the mosaic. (up to $10,000)

Labels: ASD_Pics, Coco, Helmut, humor

Coco. Her chocolate color looks deeper in this light.

Pics below compare the siblings with each other.

Helmut, looking ever sooooo handsome!

He's a pet quality boy, but we're hoping he will fill out and eventually become nice and solid. Slow growth is typical and this particular boy needs the muscling and bone that naturally comes to a male that isn't neutered. He's much too leggy to neuter now.

Helmut, all gangly and awkward! Angle of me to him is a bit weird in this one, makes him look oddly proportioned.


All gangly Helmut. This shows his length of body better.

Checking the view away from the corral.

Helmut with his sister Coco. His coat is longer, silkier.

Despite the same birthdate... they seem to be growing undercoat at different times. She had little undercoat for a few months -- and that only lasted for only a few months. Helmut had more fuzzy texture to his coat while Coco's coat was rather thin. Now Coco's undercoat is getting dense, while his is silky thin. Coco's coat quality, length and texture compares to her older sister, Ruya. If not for Coco's feathered ears and her silky tail, you might not be able to tell she is longer in coat genetically when she is standing next to Ruya. She and Helmut are homozygous for the recessive rough coat. Both parents and half their littermates were standard coated so each parent donated a rough coat gene to both Coco and Helmut. See littermate Marlowe for his 5 month photos. He has the rough coat as well.

R-L: Coco and Helmut. Right now, the tails are both silky. They have undercoat on the tails, but it is not dense. Nice light diffusers! :)

Sisters. Coco and Ruya. Same mom, different dads. Body hair on both coats have similar feel and texture although Coco's coat is slightly longer. This angle also distorts Ruya as it did Helmut.

Coco is 11 months above. Compare Coco to Ruya when Ruya was about a year old.
Ruya at about a year.

Coco's enchantingly lovely face.

Her grandmother on dad's side (Boone is Dad) was also chocolate. Chocolate is just a 'shade' of black, which just didn't have "all the parts" to make a black as dark as true black. Way over simplifying but the idea is that chocolate is another shade of black. Think of some black breeds you know that have black and also come in chocolate. Labs, Newfoundlands, Springer Spaniels, Flatcoats, American Pit Bull Terriers. Sometimes chocolate is called liver and in some breeds chocolate is also called 'red' (red, red nose pit bull). Some breeds are are entirely made up of chocolate dogs, Chesapeake, Viszla, German Shorthair Pointers and more.

Those eyes! Since the eyes (and nose-skin and hair) of chocolate dogs, also don't have all the genetic parts "to build" true black, the color of the eyes stay a light amber although they are a crazy blue while the puppy is very young. So monochromatic. It is enchanting!

A bit excited in this pic, Coco.

Coco moving around...
Moving. The lighting in this one has more contrast. This enhances perception of the length of her hair.

Coco at 5 months. Dense undercoat. WAVY texture to her topcoat. It had a harsh feel to it.

Top view of Coco's coat at 5 months. Looks like she had a body wave.

Here's a similar topview of Helmut's coat at 5 months. It was very plushy soft.

Helmut at 5 months. Always gangly! Note that the texture from the side, is comparable to Coco's coat at the same age. It's just the top view where there are a lot of differences. Helmut's coat was softer and plushy, while Coco's coat had waves and harsh texture.

Labels: 2006Litter, Coco, Helmut

Inmates!

Long faces above... we had some work done on the property today so all the dogs had to go into the big kennel (the one that is strong enough to be Anatolian-proof!) while the gates were left open for lots of to and fro-ing for a few hours. The orange twine is for holding the kennel door open which it is most all the time.

Work done for the day, front gate closed. I go out to let them out, giving them a cheerful greeting. First, they give me happy, hopeful looks, because I'm about to let them out of the jail -- then I realized I should get the camera! -- Whee! snap snap...

After I got the camera, however, upon seeing the camera, instead of looking excitedly at me, they look resigned as I snap away... poor pups! All you peeps clamoring for pictures after my doggie picture hiatus. Look what you've done! LOL.

Close-ups of the Inmates--

This is taken from another pic, where they look to the front door, maybe accusingly at James who is just standing there watching. They are pointedly refusing to look at me. (lol) :D

Coco

Boone

Ruya

I had to move to another angle to get a better picture of Helmut. He looks happier than Ruya who is still glowering (it seems) at James in the doorway. :)

Helmut

Project isn't going to be done in one day, so they'll all have some more jail time, a few hours each day, in the next few days. sigh... Yeah, I'm not happy either but it'll be nice when the projects are finished. James laughed when he saw the photos of all the accusatory looking glances. The dogs are so expressive. After I let them out of jail, they all clustered around me for attention then each dog curled up nearby.

Boone snuggles against me as Helmut, his son, relaxes.

Labels: ASD_Pics, Boone, Coco, Helmut, Ruya

This is Helmut, after having a good time in the corral when I took some video.

Well, finally some homemade video! It's not Steven Spielberg or Pixar for sure but we had fun. :)

The two vids below are actually the same four minute composition in different resolutions featuring "Three Anatolians in a Corral". The Youtube one will be better for those with slower connections but it's harder to read my text additions. The larger one below it is huge .... well, normally I format blog posting widths to fit on small resolution screens but am making an exception for the high resolution version of this vid -- until this posting ages enough and I move with a link to it to its own page so it won't cause problems with viewing other archives with which that post is connected. IE users may or may not be able to play it online, so try the link to download.

I converted the MOV file from my still Kodak Z650 Zoom camera to AVI, after which I was able to explore Windows Movie Maker with the video. Okay the actually footage is not very good since my fancy digital Kodak camera cannot do Zoom while in video mode like a real camcorder can. But it's still footage that some may find entertaining, and I enjoyed it because it allowed me to learn some more tricks with my resident programs. Certainly any footage taken with less than a 1/4 acre will not suffer as much from lack of detail on the subject dogs, but I wanted this footage because I wanted to get video of the dogs romping around the corral. Boone is not in the video because Coco smells so interesting to him now (she's not in heat yet) and I just wanted focus on the current project.

The original video is taken in a large screen mode on my camera, so converting to the half size YouTube resolution causes some loss of detail in the text I added. I think the solution to that is to shrink the movie first, then add the 'captions' (grin). If you do have broadband speeds, then see the second version. You can also use your right mouse button to view the larger one in full screen because it is not a flash file.

Youtube version-



Windows Media Player version (High Resolution)-
you can right click for options like slow motion

Launch in external player - Watch full size for best detail

That's all for now, I think! Will edit this later, as needed. It was fun doing the videos. Hope you enjoy!

Labels: Coco, Helmut, Ruya, Video

Above is a picture from January. Shows how monochromatic Coco looks now. Eyes, nose, eyerims, mask, ears... :)

She's a very cerebral girl in the way she figures things out sometimes.

On a daily basis, sometimes I hand out small rawhide twistie sticks. She'll come get one and then disappear. Everyone else gets their handout and then suddenly she reappears. She'll have dirt smudged on her nose, like above. I sometimes hand her another rawhide twisty then follow her or watch where she goes.

She'll go to another area of the property and carefully put her prize down and nose some grass over it, straw, weeds and dirt -- to hide it from the others. Then she'll come back to me with her dirt smudged nose and give me another inquisitive look. :) If no more treats are forthcoming, she'll head back to one she just 'hid', grab it and chew it up.

Labels: 2006Litter, Coco

Here's a picture from March 2, 2007 of our rough coated, liver colored Anatolian female, Coco. She is nearly 5 months old in the picture.

Labels: 2006Litter, Coco

We've been busy catching up other things that fell behind during previous months, and preparing for James' impending knee surgery (one of several on the horizon). I didn't find time to blog or put more puppy pics up for the past weeks, but I've quite a collection so will get around to it in smaller batches as time permits.

Good news for now, the surgery that was scheduled to be this week has been postponed til soon after the New Year. Knowing that it looms ahead is still a yuck, but for now the situation will make for a nicer Christmas and New Year's holiday. Hurrah! :)


Here are a few pics in a short series, showing the male pup nicknamed 'Batman' and our girl, Coco. Camera batteries were dead (CRV3 lithium lasted one month and hundreds of pics). Alkaline isn't recommended, but all I had at the time. It really does a sucky job with focus and lighting, not enough juice, speed and power -- batteries died after only a dozen somewhat fuzzy pics!

Here, Batman's completely absorbed with chewing on a small strip of rawhide -- something that's so good, he doesn't seem to notice when he has company. :D


Batman munching...


Coco gets curious about what he's munching.
He's not telling and neither does he seem to notice her!


I LOVE this pic!!
She zooms in for a much closer look, watching and watching. . .
And still, he munches away, ignoring her.


Okay, Coco obviously finds this situation irresistable.
After she crawled on her tummy, closer and closer with no reaction from him -- she puts her paws over his front legs. She sniffs between his paws and beyond. She seems to be hoping to find any bits he may have dropped.
No luck!


Coco :)

Labels: 2006Litter, Coco

I took a lot of photos of the pups today.
Too tired now to put them online, but here's a quick selection.

A little update on Coco's eye color!


Crunching Milkbone on a blue background. Dec 5, 2006


Eye detail from the same shot, above picture.
What color is that?

The amber 'flames' at the edges of the iris are larger this week than last, giving the eye an increasingly amber hue overall.


Eye color in sunlight (racing around in the grass with littermates)
Eyes generally look greenish from the distance. Greyish, if the light is low.

Labels: 2006Litter, Coco

Pretty eyes!

Coco's eyes seem to be changing color so fast. In concentric layers from the outside in, a dark grayish outside ring, then moving inward there are pale flecks, like flames of amber, then inward still, a sort of lighter gray and and then blue surrounding the pupil. It's kind of fun watching how her eye colors change!

Labels: 2006Litter, Coco

When the pups were five weeks old, we kept trying to get some pics showing how Spot and J, similar sized medium coat fawn pups, looked when standing next to Coco, who is a liver girl, turning rough coat.

Simple idea! But turn it over to two human klutzes and this is what you get. . .

I tried getting some unposed shots, showing Coco with one or both her sisters playing together. but the effect wasn't quite what I was looking for. . .


WATCH OUT, it's Coco-Zilla!
Coco munching on Spot's back.

They kept moving around and extra puppies kept getting into the shot. Sometimes their mom would stick her head into the shot and give a pup a kiss, which would usually result in various odd photos that didn't accomplish the objective.

So I thought, why not have James line them up on a chair and I'll just take a buncha pics. What could be easier than that?!

Well, here's how that turned out!


This is 'J' and Coco - almost 6 weeks old
Coco's taking up most of the chair and is trying to get her rear leg back onto the chair seat.
She is big compared to Spot and 'J' but because she is closer to the camera, it's a bit distorted.
James is trying to arrange the puppies to sit straight and front, so that I can get a picture of them sitting neatly to show their differences in height and bone.
In this picture, Coco is about 15.5 pounds. 'J' in the picture was 10.5 pounds.
Spot, the smallest girl in the first picture was 10 pounds -- all weighed the same day.



A bit distorted! Too distorted to be realistic in comparing their sizes! :)


A little better since they are both almost the same distance to the camera, but this is out of focus. The autofocus went for the shirt sleeves.


Okay, this one didn't work out either. Coco wanted to get comfy. "Hey, I'm a big puppy, I need the whole chair to myself!"
'J' was getting annoyed at all the repositioning and wanted to play with Coco, so she's attempting to chomp her sister.


So here's how it ended.
Coco jumped down and went off to get a nap.

I have a lot of photos that turned out funny like this.

Great thing about digital cameras is that you can keep snapping away.
With the old 35mm SLR cameras I had, developing and printing of experimental shots I couldn't see til after finishing and developing the roll of film usually resulted in fewer useable pictures when taking candid shots. :)

Labels: 2006Litter, Coco