Here’s a training video by Zak George, from Animal Planet, the simply explains the steps you need to teach your dog to ring a bell to let you know they need to go outside.

And, thankfully, they are fairly cheap on Amazon to purchase. Here’s a set by Poochie Bells that’s less than $20.

Good luck on training your dog to use a ‘doorbell’ to let you know when they have to go potty. Let us know how it works for you and your dog!

Can you:

1. Transport a cat/dog?
2. Donate a dog/cat bed or towels or other *bedding* type items?
3. Donate MONEY?
4. Donate a Kong? A Nylabone? A hercules? cat toys?
5. Donate a crate?
6. Donate an x-pen or baby gates?
7. Donate a food dish or a stainless bucket for a crate?
8. Donate a leash?
9. Donate a collar?
10. Donate some treats or a bag of food?
11. Donate a halti or promise collar or a gentle leader?
12. Walk a dog?
13. Groom a dog?
14. Donate some grooming supplies (shampoos, combs, brushes, etc.)?
15. Go to the local shelter and see if that dog is the breed the shelter says it is or go with rescue to be a second opinion on the dog?
16. Make a few phone calls?
17. Mail out applications to people who’ve requested them?
18. Provide local vet clinics with contact information for educational materials on responsible pet ownership?
19. Drive a dog to and from vet appointments?
20. Donate long distance calling cards?
21. Donate the use of your scanner or digital camera?
22. Donate the use of a photocopier?
23. Attend public education days and try to educate people on responsible pet ownership?
24. Donate a gift certificate to a pet store?
25. Donate a raffle item if your club is holding a fund raiser?
26. Donate flea stuff(Advantage, etc.)?
27. Donate Heartworn pills?
28. Donate a canine/feline first aid kit?
29. Provide a shoulder to cry on when the rescue person is overwhelmed?
30. Pay the boarding fees to board a dog for a week? Two weeks?
31. Be a Santi-paws foster to give the foster a break for a few hours or days?
32. Clip coupons for dog/cat food or treats?
33. Bake some homemade doggie biscuits?
34 .Make book purchases through Amazon via a web site that contributes commissions earned to a rescue group?
35. Host rescue photos with an infornation link on your website. ?
36. Donate time to take good photos of foster dogs for adoption flyers, etc.?
37. Conduct a home visit or accompany a rescue person on the home visit?
38. Go with rescue person to the vet to help if there is more than one dog?
39. Have a yard sale and donate the money to rescue?
40. Be volunteer to do rescue in your area?
41. Take advantage of a promotion on the web or store offering a free ID tag and instead of getting it for your own dog, have the tag inscribed with your Club’s name and phone # to contact?
42. Talk to all your friends about adopting and fostering rescue dogs?
43. Donate vet services or can you help by donating a spay or neuter each year or some vaccinations?
44. Interview vets to encourage them to offer discounts to rescues?
45. Write a column for your local newspaper or club newsletter on dogs on dogs currently looking for homes or ways to help rescue?
46. Take photos of dogs available for adoption for use by the Club?
47. Maintain web sites listing/showing dogs available?
48. Help organize and run fundraising events?
49. Help maintain the paperwork files associated with each dog or enter the infonnation into a database?
50. Tattoo a rescued dog?
51. Microchip a rescued dog?
52. Loan your carpet steam cleaner to someone who has fostered a dog that was sick or marked in the house?
53. Donate a bottle of bleach or other cleaning products?
54. Donate or loan a portable dog run to someone who doesn’t have a quarantine area for quarantining a dog that has an unknown vaccination history and has been in a shelter?
55. Drive the fosters’ children to an activity so that the foster can take the dog to obedience class?
56. Use your video camera to film a rescue dog in action?
57. Pay the cost of taking a dog to obedience class?
58. Be the one to take the dog to its obedience class?
59. Go to the foster home once a week with your children and dogs to help socialize the dog?
60. Help the foster clean up the yard (yes, we also have to scoop what those foster dogs poop)
61. Offer to test the foster dog with cats?
62. Pay for the dog to be groomed or take the dog to a *Do It Yourself* Grooming Place?
63. Bring the foster take out so the foster doesn’t have to cook dinner?
64. Pay a house-cleaning service to do the spring cleaning for someone who fosters dogs all the time?
65. Lend your artistic talents to your club’s newsletter, fundraising ideas, t-shirt designs?
66. Donate printer paper, envelopes and stamps to your club?
67. Go with a rescue person to the vet if a foster dog needs to be euthanized ?
68. Go to local shelters and meet with shelter staff about how to identify your breed or provide photos and breed infonnation showing the different types of that breed may come in and the different colour combinations?
69. Go to local businesses and solicit donations for a club’s fundraising event?
70. Offer to try and help owners be better pet owners by holding a grooming seminar?
71. Help pet owners be better pet owners by being available to answer training questions?
72. Loan a crate if a dog needs to travel by air?
73. Put together an *Owner’s Manual* for those who adopt rescued dogs of your breed?
74. Provide post-adoption follow up or support?
75 .Donate a coupon for a free car wash or gas or inside cleaning of a vehicle?
76. Pay for an ad in your local/metropolitan paper to help place rescue dogs?
77. Volunteer to screen calls for that ad?
78. Get some friends together to build/repair pens for a foster home?
79. Microchip your own pups if you are a breeder, and register the chips, so if your dogs ever come into rescue, you can be contacted to take responsibility for your pup?
80. Donate a small percentage of the sale of each pup to rescue if you are a breeder?
81. Buy two of those really neat dog-items you “have to have” and donate one to Rescue?
82. Make financial arrangements in your will to cover the cost of caring for your dogs after you are gone -so Rescue won’t have to?
83. Make a bequest in your will to your local or national Rescue?
84. Donate your professional services as an accountant or lawyer?
85. Donate other services if you run your own business?
86. Donate the use of a vehicle if you own a car dealership?
87. Loan your cell phone (and cover costs for any calls) to s/one driving a rescued dog?
88. Donate your *used* dog dryer when you get a new one?
89. Let rescue know when you’ll be flying and that you’d be willing to be a rescued dog’s escort?
90. Do something not listed above to help rescue?
91. Donate a doggy seatbelt?
92. Donate a grid for a van or other vehicle?
93. Organize a rescued dog picnic or other event to reunite the rescued dogs that have been placed?
94. Donate other types of doggy/kitty toys that might be safe for rescued animals?
95. Donate a roll-a-treat or Buster cube?
96. Donate clickers or a video on clicker training?
97. Donate materials for a quarantine area at a foster’s home?
98. Donate sheets of linoleum or other flooring materials to put under crates to protect the foster’s floor?
99. Donate an engraving tool to make ID tags for each of the rescued dogs?
lOO. Remember that rescuing a dog involves the effort and time of many people and make yourself available on an emergency basis to do *whatever* is needed?

Cosmo, my African Grey Parrot, makes grammatical errors. Sometimes, as English teachers would say, she butchers the English language. But at least it’s English that she speaks, so we communicate with no problem.

One afternoon when watching me cook, Cosmo asked, “Company we’re gonna have?”
People unfamiliar with these marvelous birds tend to consider parrots’ speech simple mimicry. But Cosmo’s speech is obviously meaningful. Her grammatical mistakes prove it. I had never said, “Company we’re gonna have.” So she must know what the word “company” and the phrase “we’re gonna have” mean, regardless of their word order.
I do say “gonna.” My apologies.

Not all African Greys speak as well as Cosmo. Perhaps Cosmo is an exceptionally smart individual. Or perhaps she knows that I am always listening to her, responding to her, and expecting her to speak to me in English. I treat her like a feathery little person worthy of respect. She feels important. She is.

Cosmo invents new words on the basis of words she already knows. Here is a conversation we had one morning:

Cosmo: “Cosmo is a good bird. Cosmo is a birdy.”

Betty Jean: “Yes, Cosmo is a good birdy.

Cosmo: “Mary is a doggy.”

Betty Jean: “Look! Squirrel.”

Cosmo: “That’s squirrelly.”

In all my born days I had never used the word “squirrelly.”

When she began talking at the age of 12 months, Cosmo heard me refer to my American Eskimo Dogs Mary and Kaylee as both “dogs” and “doggies.” She called herself a “bird” for a good while before she suddenly started saying “Cosmo is a birdy.” I had never called her a birdy. Nor had any guest in my house, to my knowledge.

So when she invented the word “squirrelly,” Cosmo was generalizing from her knowledge that “dog” and “doggy” were the same and that “bird” and “birdy” were the same.
That’s pretty impressive intellectual work for a bird! If I had done as well at age 2, I would have been very proud of myself.

The day I took her to the pet store to get her feathers clipped, Cosmo heard the dozens of chirping parakeets for sale and said to me, “That’s birdies!” She must have figured out the plural of “birdy” from the word “doggies.”

I realized that Cosmo understood her need to communicate with me in my language when she translated the sound she was making into English to help me out. She had been saying, “Whooooosh whoooooosh.” Puzzled, I asked her, “What’s that?” “That’s water,” she answered. Sure enough: she was mimicking the sound of the water coming out of the faucet near her roost cage.

Cosmo not only uses my language, English, to talk with me, but she uses my language to talk to herself. She says, “Cosmo poop,” when that’s what she’s just done. She murmurs, “That’s doggy bark,” when Mary is barking at passersby. She climbs onto the dogs’ big water dish muttering, “Cosmo wanna shower,” when I’m in the other part of the house.

Cosmo knows that “shower” has several meanings: the minimal mist bath I give her with a spray bottle, the big shower I give myself in the bathroom, and the bird bath she gives herself in the laundry room. So she must have deduced that “shower” means getting water all over one’s body, no matter whose body it may be.

She knows that “paper” has more than one meaning as well: “paper for cage,” meaning the newspaper; “paper for Cosmo poop,” also meaning a newspaper; “and “paper for Cosmo poop,” meaning a paper towel. In my household we use lots of paper.

I know that English has become Cosmo’s primary language because she amuses herself in English. I’m hearing her pretend to have a conversation on the telephone. She is in the bedroom with my dogs, whom she loves almost as much as me. In a voice barely distinguishable from mine, she has just said softly: “Hi, Joan. How are you? Fine, thank you. Wanna go for a walk? Okay. Good-bye. Beep.” Joan is my dog-walking neighbor. Now she is calling out “That’s Cosmo!” and laughing raucously.

Language students know that they are not really fluent in a foreign language until they actually think in the foreign language, when they stop consciously translating. I would say that Cosmo is fluent in English.

• Betty Jean Craige is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot” (2010). Her email address is bettyjean@cosmotalks.com. Cosmo’s website is www.cosmotalks.com.

Thank you to Cosmo and Betty Jean for dropping by and sharing with us today. This was originally published on Jan. 15, 2012, in the Athens Banner Herald and was reprinted with permission of the author.

This raccoon was recently rescued by Animal Advocates after he was discovered living in a filthy cage in the underbelly of a boat – hence his name, Harbor.

The work of animal rescuers is usually done in secret – but I’d like to send KUDOS to this team that built him a wonderful playground. Don’t you love his delight at discovering water?

Read about his rescue here: http://www.care2.com/causes/raccoon-in-watery-prison-watch-his-rescued-bliss.html

FOX MEDICAL TEAM: Healing Hound: MyFoxATLANTA.com

Boys
1 Aiden
2 Jackson
3 Mason
4 Liam
5 Jacob
6 Jayden
7 Ethan
8 Noah
9 Lucas
10 Logan