Health

You can learn a lot about your dogs’ health from their poop. Its color, consistency, contents, odor, amount, and frequency can give you valuable, up-to-date information about their health. For example, it can provide early warning that your dog’s diet may be unsuitable, or that she may be grappling with parasites, viruses, unfriendly bacteria, bad water, emotional upset, food allergies, or serious illness.

Your dog has a weeping, oozing wound on her leg or a yucky red blob on the top of her head, and at first you wonder how she injured herself. But if you've been around the dog-care block, you realize that it isn't a cut or scrape. That gooey mess might be diagnosed as pyotraumatic dermatitis, wet eczema, or a Staphylococcus intermedius infection, but it's what everyone calls a hot spot.

Pain may be the most enigmatic of all the disease symptoms of man or beast. It is a sensation we all have experienced at one time or another and in varying degrees. But, few of us can explain adequately how a particular pain feels, fewer still can give a reasonable explanation for why pain occurs; and despite all the recent scientific research that has gone into pain, we still have a minimal understanding for how it occurs – or truthfully, for how to consistently prevent or alleviate it.

When my dog Popcorn woke up one morning many years ago in a puddle of urine, I panicked, certain that only a deadly illness could cause this perfectly housetrained dog to wet her bed. I rushed her to the vet, where he did a thorough physical exam and urinalysis. I can still remember the relief I felt when my vet told me it appeared to be a simple case of incontinence. As it turns out, incontinence, which is defined as involuntary urination, is quite common in dogs, especially spayed females, where about one in five dogs (20 percent) is affected.

Who hasn't heard of friendly" or "beneficial" bacteria? Even acidophilus

Your dog just had surgery, stepped on broken glass, caught her tail in a door, has a puncture wound, got bit or scratched, tangled with barbed wire, or has an abrasion that came from who knows where. You want the wound to heal quickly without bleeding, pain, or infection. The following strategies help achieve that result.

After consulting with three veterinary surgeons, it was decided that the best course of action for my dysplastic dog was a triple pelvic osteotomy (TPO), where the hip is reformed to create a socket. This procedure was considered experimental 10 years ago when Oak was much in need of it. Today, it is a common surgery for hip dysplasia.

This has become a nation of fat people – and fat dogs. Once again our dogs are mirroring us, no matter how bad that picture looks. It has been estimated that (depending on the survey and the way “obese” and “overweight” are defined) from about 25 percent to more than half of dogs seen by veterinarians are overweight or obese, and many practitioners feel that even these numbers grossly underestimate the true extent of the problem.

For some time, biologists have been aware of and studied an organism called Wolbachia that lives symbiotically inside heartworms. But recently, study of this microscopic creature has given researchers new ideas about how to combat its host (the heartworm) to benefit its host, the dog. Wolbachia is a genus of rickettsial organisms, a microorganism positioned somewhere between viruses and true bacteria. Like viruses, they grow only in living cells, but like bacteria, they…

American BioSciences
Blauvelt

Ten years ago, my dog Piglet woke me in the middle of the night, trembling violently and utterly terrified. It took me hours to track the source of her panic to a barely audible high-pitched beep that sounded once every two minutes, coming from a smoke alarm’s low battery indicator. Behavior-altering drugs can help dogs with phobias or anxiety disorders but you have to learn which ones work best in each case.

The adrenals are small glands located just forward of the kidneys. They are so small, in fact, they were virtually ignored by early anatomists for centuries. Although small in size, they are extremely important in the overall hormonal balance of the body and its ability to maintain homeostasis.