Part 4: How to make your own healthy, safe laundry stain remover for the health of your dog!

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What is fracking and how may it affect your dog's health!

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Quick fall organic lawn care tips for the health of your dog!

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Part 2: How to make your own health, safe laundry detergent for the health of your dog!

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How to clean your home the safe, healthy, green way for the health of your dog!

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Earth Day: A day to take a step for the environment and the health of your dog!

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Fall lawn care the green, organic way for the health of your dog and you!

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What does California's Proposition 37 mean for the health of your dog?

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What does California's Proposition 37 mean for the health of your dog?

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Fall lawn care the green, organic way for the health of your dog and you!

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Post-Thanksgiving Day Question: Are Dogs Good for Your Health?

Feel like you ate too much yesterday? Looking to live life a little healthier today? Just grab your favorite dog, stroke her fur (it lowers your blood pressure), and take her for a walk (lots of benefits). Here’s a fun infographic showing how pets are good for your health. (I think I’ll try to stay out of the “death cat’s” way, though …)

Do you have personal experience with your dog helping your health in any way? Let us know!

(Infographic courtesy eBay Classifieds)

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The top preventable health problems in ferrets

June 8, 2011

In this week’s syndicated newspaper feature, Pet Connection advisory board member and blogger Dr. Laurie Hess, weighs in on preventive veterinary care for ferrets. Dr. Hess cares for birds and other exotic pets, such as rabbits, ferrets, guinea pigs, smaller rodents and reptiles at the Veterinary Center for Birds & Exotics in Bedford Hills, N.Y., and previously served as head of the Avian & Exotic Pet Service at the renowned Animal Medical Center in New York City.,

“I’ve never had to bring him to the vet before, because he’s never been sick …”

At the animal hospital, I hear this same declaration every day from pet owners about their sick pets, regardless of the species they own. And here’s the catch-22: If these folks had brought in their pets before they were sick, instead of waiting until after they showed signs of illness, their pets might not have become ill in the first place.

This is especially true of ferrets, those masked mischief-makers who make wonderful companions but have become so popular as pets that their domestication and inbreeding have made them susceptible to a handful of common — often preventable — illnesses. Among the top preventable health problems in ferrets are:

Foreign object ingestion: Just as human children put everything in their mouths, so do young ferrets. Shoes, parts of the couch, toys — you name it; they’ll eat it. And then they develop intestinal obstructions, which are marked by diarrhea, bloating and sometimes vomiting. This requires lifesaving intestinal surgery to resolve. So if you ferret-proof your crazy critter’s environment by removing all small objects from the floor and never leaving him out of his cage unsupervised, you can avoid a costly trip to the emergency room.Hairball ingestion: Just as young ferrets eat foreign objects, middle- to older-age ferrets ingest hair, and can develop intestinal obstructions due to hairballs. These furry friends often groom excessively, consuming large amounts of hair that stick together with mucus in their saliva to form cigar-shaped mats that plug up their narrow intestines, leading to diarrhea, lack of appetite, lethargy and occasional vomiting. Sometimes a laxative treatment will help these hairballs pass, but more often, complicated intestinal surgery is required to unplug these tiny creatures. With brushing and a couple of oral doses of a petroleum-based cat hairball laxative each week, you can avoid this situation.

Read more about preventing ferret health problems here.

Who is smarter, the city bird or the country bird? Dr. Marty Becker and Mikkel Becker have this to say:

City-dwelling birds have a larger brain relative to their size than non-city dwelling birds. As the BBC notes, scientists suggest that larger brains in birds such as crows, tits, nuthatches and wrens make them more adaptable to the changeable conditions of city living.

All this and more in the complete feature, here!

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Breed profiling: What does it mean for your dog’s health?

While racial profiling is considered taboo, when it comes to our patients, veterinarians profile breeds like there’s no tomorrow.

Sure, knowing the breed helps us predict the behavior we will encounter when we enter the exam room, but where “breed profiling” is most helpful is as it pertains to predicting disease. Show me a senior Saint Bernard and I’ll show you a dog with arthritis. Show me an English Bulldog with normal upper airway anatomy and dinner’s on me!

Such breed-specific knowledge is gleaned from years of practicing veterinary medicine but, more and more, these impressions are becoming evidence-based. The March/April Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine featured an article titled “Mortality in North American Dogs from 1984 to 2004: An Investigation into Age- Size- and Breed-Related Causes of Death.” The data was collected from information provided by veterinary teaching hospitals and recorded in the national Veterinary Medical Database. The cause of death for more than 70,000 dogs and 82 breeds was scrutinized. The categorization went as follows:

which organ system failed (cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neurological, etc.)pathophysiologic process (trauma, infectious disease, cancer, etc.).

For example, if one were to look at all of the Boston Terriers in the study, 22 percent died with neurological symptoms and cancer was the cause of death in 30 percent.

Here are some other tidbits from this study:

Forty percent of Dachshunds die from traumatic neurological disease   (intervertebral disk disease).

That represents a staggering percentage. To have a Doxie is to expect disk disease, but this is generally considered a treatable condition. My assumption is that financial hardship (treatment often requires expensive diagnostics and surgery) and the decision to euthanize are the sad truths behind this high percentage.

The breeds with the highest proportion of deaths caused by heart disease included Newfoundland, Maltese, Chihuahua, Doberman Pinscher, and Fox Terrier.The top five breeds that died as a result of musculoskeletal diseases included Saint Bernard, Great Pyrenees, Irish Wolfhound, Great Dane, and Greyhound.

This makes sense. When such large dogs have a tough time getting around because of sore bones, joints, or muscles, they become management nightmares and hasten the decision to euthanize.

Cancer was the leading cause of death across all breeds within the study population.

Interestingly, the relative frequency of cancer peaked in the age group that included ten-year-old dogs, then declined within the oldest age group. Is the incidence of cancer increasing, or are we getting better at detecting cancer? Or perhaps both?  The answer is not clear, however we feel certain that cancer is commonly inherited within certain breeds (Bernese Mountain Dog, Golden Retriever, Boxer, Bouvier des Flandres) in which approximately half of the population will succumb to the “big C.”

Cancer occurred less commonly in smaller breeds of dogs (Boston Terriers being an exception).Larger breeds more commonly died due to diseases affecting the musculoskeletal or gastrointestinal systems.Traumatic causes of death were equally prevalent among larger and smaller breeds.

So, beyond the simple curiosity factor, how does all of this data help us?

Perhaps it will influence one’s decision-making when adopting a new dog. My current canine family members are both small mutts. Yes, I have to bend over more, but I’d grown weary of getting burned by the heartache that accompanies the diagnosis of cancer.

On a more global scale, this data is key to directing new and ongoing breed-specific research such as looking for ways to prevent musculoskeletal abnormalities in large breed dogs and tracking down the genetic basis for cancer in particular breeds.

Additionally, the information presented in this article serves as justification for veterinarians to recommend more comprehensive early disease-specific screening tests based on breed.

Last, if you share your home and your heart with a Dachshund, this data should entice you to invest some of your hard-earned money in a good pet health insurance policy (one that does not exclude coverage for disk disease in Dachshunds) or a large doggie-piggy bank reserved for medical matters. This way, when your little Doxie “slips a disk” you’ll be able to treat this treatable disease.

Curious about what this article had to say about your dog’s breed? Feel free to ask and we’ll let you know if it was included in the study.

Photo credit: Dunja Oertel

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Winter health and safety tips for the Green Dog!

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NY Times Piece Says Dogs May Not Help Health or Well Being. What Do You Think?

The mother of the photographer snuggles with Chuck during her weeks of radiation therapy. According to a New York Times article, interacting with a dog during radiation therapy does no more to enhance morale than reading a book. Um, don't tell that to this woman, or millions of others whose dogs have been their godsends during chemo and radiation... (Photo: Flickr photostream of Sophia-O)

An op-ed article in the New York Times this week suggests that pets may not have much, if any, positive effect on health or well being. In his article, psychology professor Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals, goes so far as to say that pets may actually have a negative effect on us.

He acknowledges that past research has shown that pets are healthy for us, with studies showing “that stroking an animal lowers blood pressure, that AIDS patients living with pets are less depressed and that pet owners have lower cholesterol levels, sleep more soundly, exercise more and take fewer sick days than non-pet owners.” But in the same breath, he says he has found stacks of research showing the opposite: “…that pets have either no long-term effects or have even adverse effects on physical and mental health.”

A 2006 survey of Americans by the Pew Research Center, for instance, reported that living with a pet did not make people any happier. Similarly, a 2000 Australian study of mortality rates found no evidence that pet owners lived any longer than anyone else. And last year Dutch researchers concluded that companion animals had no effect on their owners’ physical or mental well-being. Worse, in 2006, epidemiologists in Finland reported that pet owners were more likely than non-pet owners to suffer from sciatica, kidney disease, arthritis, migraines, panic attacks, high blood pressure and depression.

This pattern of mixed results also holds true for the widely heralded notion that animals can cure various physical afflictions. For example, a study of people with chronic fatigue syndrome found that while pet owners believed that interacting with their pets relieved their symptoms, objective analysis revealed that they were just as tired, stressed, worried and unhappy as sufferers in a control group who had no pets. Similarly, a clinical trial of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy found that interacting with therapy dogs did no more to enhance the participants’ morale than reading a book did.

Herzog says pets are central to his life, and that he doesn’t mean to diminish their importance as companions. But he’d like to see better research that separates wishful thinking from the truth. According to Herzog, this kind of research is being done now, via a multimillion-dollar research initiative by the National Institutes of Health, in conjunction with Mars (maker of major pet foods).

It will be interesting to see what this research shows. Meanwhile, let’s do our own Dogster “study” and contribute some anecdotal evidence to the mix. Unfortunately the scientific method won’t work in our situation, with Dogster readers spread out across the globe. But I’ll bet you can give the skeptics some fantastic examples of how your dogs have helped you be happier and/or healthier through the years.

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Accelerated Dog Training Health Grooming

Offering an e-book resource for dog training, dog grooming, house training, and general pet care for all dog breeds.

Check it out!