I'm working on a new set of panniers for mine. I knocked up his heaviest winter shell yet for our recent batch of snow and he likes it. Haven't figured how to combine movement whilst preserving the integrity of the water poof layer yet with the panniers. That snow was late though, and we're rapidly heading to spring so I think that set will be back-benched for a bit.
As for dogs drinking from streams etc., mmm. My dog does that most days with no ill effects. He'll take water from ponds, rivers, sumps in tree stumps, and I'm certain he isn't the first to try to draw water from a thunderbox before training. It'd be hard to stop him when we're out. He gets a lot of leeway, always works up some heat, and kinda regards himself as amphibious. Has it ever made him green? Dunno. I've come back from protracted trips a couple of times with him needing antibiotics. Whether that came from water or eating raw rabbit isn't clear. It could have been something else, but we were in an alien environment with water he wasn't accustomed to.
[rant] As for the Evolution / Wolf / Immunity thing, I'd be very careful how I interpreted that. Modern domestic dogs are very much estranged from their evolutionary past, as anyone that works with wolves will attest. I used to donate a considerable amount of voluntary work at The Dog's Trust teaching junior kennel maids fundamental skills and clicker training. I was stunned by how some even quite senior staff didn't get that. On one hand they could understand that little Foo-Foo was so unlike a wolf it was mean that someone dumped it at the roadside to fend for itself [probably how the dog got to be at The Dog's Trust], but then the morons would go home and feed their own dogs raw chicken wings, and that was fine because of some mumble about evolution. Despite their appeals to grandfathers ancient recipe, their citing instances of hounds and
the flesh run, and having known a beagle that smoked 80 a day that lived to be 90, they were wrong. And I was delighted to point that out by means of a presentation delivering amongst other things the best veterinary evidence on the subject of BARF feeding. In sum, look at the scrawny, mangy, miserable life expectancy of a wild wolf or fox, and they are smack back in their environment of evolutionary adapteness. They have apparatus geared to it. To expect a modern domestic dog to fare so well, if not better, is to miss something. My dog gets water I won't drink, gets some bones, and gets some raw meat. I know I take a risk doing that, but I try to calculate that risk so that he still gets all the joy of being a dog without cotton wool asphyxia yet is protected from some of the harms his ancestors had to contend with.[/rant]
