I, as you might expect, follow several dog-blogs as well as even more dog and dog related pages on Facebook and I absolutely love looking at everyone's pictures. The great poses that the humans capture as well as the clever captions are a true source of enjoyment for me. I know I am not by any means very talented behind the camera. I'm more of a point, shoot, cross your fingers and delete kind of gal, so I seem to have a long running internal debate. Should I buy a better camera? As you can tell from the low quality of the majority of my pictures, I rely heavily on my crappy Droid for capturing moments and the few times I get a better quality it is because I'm borrowing my daughter's Kodak. Should I invest in a camera? How high of a quality should I choose? At what point would my limited knowledge of photography make a new camera....wait. I'm not wording this well. What I mean is I don't want to get too much camera for my limited skills because that would just be a waste of money.
Well. That paragraph went in a direction that I wasn't planning. My original point was that I'm always curious as to the acutal size of the dogs I'm seeing online. How is that for the stream of consiousness to take a wild turn! My first experience with a Pit Bull type dog in person was my sister's dog who was gigantic. Tai Chi weighed nearly 100 pounds and he was tall, so for the longest time, I thought that is what Pit Bull looked like.
Then I started reading about how much variation there is and about the whole lumping of several breeds into the general term "Pit Bull" and I'm fascinated by all of the differences I see. I love it.
I'm wondering though, about Ray of course. I wonder how long he will continue in his physical growth. Because he has excellent manners out in public, people forget or just don't realize that he is still a puppy. I take him with me each month to the Veterinarian's office to get his heartworm "cookie" so that I can weigh him and give him more exposure to people and that office in general. Not surprisingly he keeps growing at exponential rates and every time they read a new weight from the machine I have to remind them he is a baby. "He weighs 73.5 pounds today but a month ago he was 66 pounds?" Yes, but don't forget he is not quite ten months old. Oh. Yeah.
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| Big baby with his binky |
So here is what I believe I remember:
Miss M. is 85 pounds,
Wallace was under 55 pounds,
Audie is 45 pounds and of course baby Ray is 73 pounds at 10 months. The point? None, I guess. All of the above are "Pit Bull-type" dogs though none of them look at all alike. True, they all have blocky heads and muscular chests and short hair but even that varies. Miss M has a very different kind of head that Audie's whose is very different from Ray's whose is very different from Wallace's. So while they are so different-looking from each other, why do so many people want to attribute blanket generalizations to them?
*Excuse the
rambly-ness today, although I have no excuse...oh wait, let's just call it Friday-itis.
From the mom -your picture-taking sounds kind of like mine – even tho I have a Kodak, it is a few years old has been dropped a couple of times and probably could being around a few less Beagle hairs. When I take pics of the Beaglebratz it is just taking one after the other, usually as quick as I can then end up deleting most of them. What kind of a new camera I get eventually will be mostly based on what I can afford.
ReplyDeleteIt has probably been within the last 5 years, if that long, that I have become more familiar with the “pit bull” type or the ”bully” breeds. I am becoming more fascinated with them and if it weren’t for all the stupid restrictions placed on them as well as my own limitations from my disabilities, owning one would be fun. But it would be unfair to the dog for me to own one since I can’t give one all the activity and exercise one should have. Even Shiloh’n Shasta should be able to get more exercise then what I can give them but they do enjoy my fenced backyard. Your Ray is such a good looking pupper and I love how he plays
Kim
That baby picture is hilarious! I must confess, I just use my iphone to take all my pictures, but I take so many that some come out terrible, some come out photoshop-able, and some are just plain terrible.
ReplyDeleteMy dogs come in at 53 and 58 pounds and are full grown. I am surprised when people think they are big though, they really don't seem like large dogs to me. I call them med-large. Your puppy is gonna be big though!
The "pit bull type" dogs I've fostered have varied in weight from 40 lbs-nearly 70 lbs. The standard for an American Pit Bull Terrier is like 35-40 pounds. That's why it drives me nuts when a dog is labeled as a "pit bull" based on a blocky head or barrel chest. Those aren't the only standards for a dog being a pit. Oh well... enough of my ranting!
ReplyDeleteAs far as a camera (in your tangent), if you want to get a new camera, I would suggest getting a lower end DSLR camera with both automatic and manual functions. That way you can get great photos on the "auto" setting, and if you decide you want to learn more about photography, you can practice on the manual settings too. We bought our Nikon D3100 (which is a few years old now) for around $500 with an extra long-range lens. You can definitely get a good one for less than that though. :)