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Thanks to everyone for their comments and concern about Mr. Enthusiasm's poisonous encounter, hereafter to be referred to as 'the toxic poop incident.' He was back to normal the next day and bopping around like the crazy man he is. The folks @ Smartdogs, inspired by Jozsi's toxic poop incident, have a much more thorough set of recommendations for how to plan for canine poisoning.

In other medical news, Shawn Wayment, the blogosphere's bird-dog doc, has a vet's perspective on what he carries in his canine first-aid kit. And Mike @ Living with Bird-dogs has a few suggestions for how to deal with the carnage that comes from the dog:porcupine interaction.

And for those of you considering becoming dog breeders, please consider this advice courtesy of Luisa @ Lassie Get Help!

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I was digging through some packets of photographs and found a couple of envelopes of B&W pictures from late 2004. The first pic is of Choya, my Mexican street dog, the dog that wooed Meg into a life with dogglers, asleep on the carpet in our old house in Maine. She was a feisty love-monster, taken much too soon. We still think fondly of her... and her world record disembowelment of Mr. Lobster. As awesome as Dennis's own track record is, her 17seconds of frenzy remains a truly Olympic feat.

I also found some pictures from our first trip to Mongolia in December, 2004. The two pics here are from our trip out to Olgii and our visit with a Kazakh eagle hunter and his family. Annie's friend, Todd, another Fulbrighter who we met on our last trip, has some great pics from his recent visit to Olgii at the end of May. (For those of you craving more Kazakh eagle hunter pictures, Todd links to Robert McPherson's website which has some genuinely great pictures on it.) I was lucky to come across and read Steve Bodio's Eagle Dreams while we were in Olgii -- which added so much to our visit.

The second pic, if you can believe it, was taken with a 25mm wide-angle lens. I was 6" from a very big, very alert eagle that, because he spoke Kazakh, our friend Jordan had been told to look after while his owner went to retrieve an escaped horse. We were left just looking at each other, wondering what on earth we could do if the bird decided to give us trouble. Happily, while it could smell our fear, the bird decided we weren't worth the effort.

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I did complete my first judging assignment last Sunday, co-judging the Junior Hunter (JH) division for the Nutmeg GSP Club Hunt Test at Flaherty Field. Not surprisingly, there were only 6 braces of JH dogs to judge, including 3 Gordons from Moonstone Setters. More surprisingly, though, there were 6 full braces of dogs trying for Master Hunter (MH), and 5 for Senior Hunter (SH).

We had met Debbie from Moonstone at the previous weekend's hunt test at Sharpe's Farm -- although she had not brought her young boy, Angus, that weekend. He turned out to be the star of the trio -- and gave a solid performance in what were otherwise ugly conditions of high temperatures and little wind.

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We have a few exciting things coming up. First of all, it looks like we will rendezvous with HRH Brisztow Jones on Sunday -- although I'm a little nervous that if we show up with a pick-up truck on her schwanky neighborhood, we might be asked to leave by the rest of the local population. Now that's Fancy Town. I don't think folks put graffiti on trees down there.

Second, it looks as though I will take Jozsi up to Flaherty again for the CVVC's Hunting Dog Stake at the end of the month to see how he does in a remotely competitive environment. In the meantime I am continuing to work on getting Momo steady -- and want his next exposure to birds to be a more controlled one.

FYI: after a great conversation with Bob @ Cliffside Birddogs, his opinion was that however frustrated Momo might be in a hunt test environment, his desire to creep while on point and while honoring was still basically an obedience issue. And so, in order to streamline his and my communication, I have unpacked 'whoa' to simply mean 'stop' and now use his familiar 'stay' to hold him. And so we are doing lots of 'stay' and 'heel' drills to let him know that simply adhering to the spirit of a command is no longer sufficient. He's a good boy with a strong stubborn streak.