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I imagine that everyone who works or volunteers in animal rescue, or human social services, gets overwhelmed at times with what seems to be a relentless tide of innocents in need of help. Intellectually, I know that there are FAR fewer unwanted pets being brought to animal shelters and fewer animals being in euthanized in shelters than when I was a young person, and yet at times the sheer volume of dogs I'm aware of who are in need of rescue, fostering, transportation, and medical help is just crushing.

I'm fostering a mama dog and her nine puppies. They were surrendered to my local shelter when the pups were about a week old.

which he has a lot of experience with!üIt's easier to take a blood sample from the big vein in a dog's neck than it is from a smaller vein in the leg – as long as the dog is behaving as well as Otto is. He didn't mind the restraint and didn't even blink at the insertion of the needle.üThe veterinarian examined Otto while he was on the floor

There are countless things that could go wrong at the fair: a stressed-out dog lashing out and biting a passing dog or child, a dog getting loose and running away in a panic, a dog getting heat stroke, someone stepping on a little dog (I saw it almost happen a number of times!), a dog developing a noise phobia after being forced to stay in a loud and stressful environment, some drunk person tripping on and hurting or scaring a dog. I just wouldn't ever risk it!

If Otto is on one end of a seven-foot sofa, and I (or anyone) sits on the other far end, he will give that person a sort of dirty look and leave the sofa. If I am sitting on a couch and pat the cushion next to me, and encourage Otto to come on up, he will come and stand close, and wag his tail and blink his eyes … Nance

The June issue contains an article from one of our new veterinarian contributors about how to assess and clean a wound, and also discusses tetanus. I specifically asked this author to write something for me after my young, exuberant dog Woody cut his face on rusty old barbed wire. Suddenly, I had a million questions. Do dogs get tetanus? Is tetanus one of the shots that we ever give dogs? Why do I associate rusty metal with tetanus? WHY DON'T WE GIVE DOGS TETANUS SHOTS?

One of the funniest things is watching similarly devoted dog owners miss their dogs. Everyone today has photos and videos of their dogs on their phones, and we all try to behave well and say nice things about our friends' dogs, so they will give us equal time and admire OUR dog photos. And of course when a spouse at home sends a new photo or video of the left-behind dogs, it's acceptable to tap the person sitting next to you (even though you are in the middle of a session, and listening to a riveting speaker) and angle your phone so as to show off the cute photo. Your neighbor smiles, or mimes Cute!" and you make a little sad face

As I said in last week's blog post, Otto was vaccinated a lot when he was brought to the shelter from which I later adopted him. He was brought into the shelter as a stray pup on May 7, 2008. He was estimated to be from four to six months old, and, like all shelter dogs, was vaccinated upon admission. He was given a five-way vaccination (distemper, adenovirus-type 2, coronavirus, parainfluenza, and parvovirus) and a separate three-way vaccination (adenovirus-type 2, parainfluenza, and bordetella) made by a different company.

Otto was vaccinated several more times with the five-way vaccines before I adopted him, but I'm not going to talk about those vaccines right now; I want to focus on the rabies vaccine – the only vaccine that dog owners are legally required to give their dogs in most states. Rabies vaccination earned this special" legal status due to the historical threat that rabies poses to humans; as recently as my childhood in the 1960s

In the April issue of WDJ, I wrote an editorial about an exchange I had with a trainer friend regarding the word "biddable," which a breeder had used in conversation with her about dogs from the breeder's kennel. Both my trainer friend and I were not used to hearing that word used to describe dogs, but apparently, we are in the minority.

I received a number of very thoughtful responses to the editorial, and have learned something from each. Because they would take up a lot of space in the magazine itself if I ran them as "letters to the editor," I'm going to post a few of them here, with the writers' permission.

It took only a minute to trace the blood to its source: the backs of Woody's hind legs. In horses, we'd call this area his pasterns: between his paws and the knobby hock joints – the place where he skids when he's sliding to a halt from a run. On one of those three throws into the field, he obviously skidded into something sharp in the ground. He had two ugly, deep cuts, one on each pastern, with mud packed into each wound. I took him outside, hosed off all of the mud, brought him back inside, and started cleaning the wounds. It took only a few minutes to conclude they were deep enough that they should be stitched or stapled closed (not to mention cleaned more deeply than I felt comfortable doing). So off to the emergency clinic we went.

The other day a photo of a beautiful young German Shepherd Dog caught my eye. The photo had been shared by a number of my local dog-loving friends on Facebook. The caption explained that the young dog, obviously a purebred and about six months old, had been found on a rural road in my area, and that the rescuer was trying to find the owner. The rescuer asked everyone locally if they could please share the photo, because she couldn't keep the dog for long at her own house, and didn't want to take the dog to the shelter.

Puppies and young adolescent dogs certainly benefit from the opportunity to run, socialize, and play with other playful dogs. But taking an inexperienced adolescent to a dog park is something else I would never recommend. There are too many playground bullies at dog parks – dogs who get a little charge out of creaming new kids" at the park."