Category Archives: health
Rabies Seemingly More Prevalent
This last weekend while I was walking Stanley I saw a notice on a community board in Reston that a rabid raccoon had been caught recently. Seeing this reinforced all the news items on rabies – the two rabid bats found in Orange County, CA at the end of July; a cat with a confirmed [...]
UK Dogs’ Gaining Weight Problem
Being too heavy isn’t just an American pet problem; one in three UK dogs are overweight according to the veterinary charity People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA). This number is up from 21%, or slightly higher than 1 in 5 dogs, five years ago. At this rate of pudgy progression, by 2013 nearly half of [...]
Helping Pets Deal with the Summer Heat
Along the east coast summer has been settling in and making it feel a lot more like August than mid-June. As the rest of the country heats up I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone that pets, in particular dogs, have a hard time coping with the unusually high temperatures and [...]
Bree is Home!
Just an update on our girl Bree . . . She had surgery today to remove three lumps; one from the back of her rear leg, one from the top of her shoulder blade area and one from her lower back. As you can see from the photo she’s had quite a day! But the [...]
Product Warning: Cocoa Mulch
From time to time people will email a product warning to me. This one came from Jo, one of Tigertail Food’s founders.
Cocoa mulch is a gardening product sold in many home improvement centers, and which smells very strongly of chocolate. It is made from cocoa bean shells that contains caffeine and theobromine, the ingredient in chocolate that is [...]
Pet Insurance – Is It Worth the Cost?
With the human medical insurance debate raging on and my own policy price having just been hiked up again, I wondered how the pet insurance industry was faring. I have to admit that since my one exposure a dozen or so years ago that left me seeing it as being somewhat useless, I’ve been down [...]
USDA Approves New Melanoma Vaccine for Dogs
Cancer research in dogs is beginning to pay off in terms of practical, available resources to help extend the lives of canine cancer patients. Last year the first canine cancer drug was approved, Palladia from Pfizer Animal Health Inc. to treat cutaneous mass cell cancer. Now the USDA has approved a therapeutic vaccine for canine [...]
Animals and Cold Weather
Unless you live in southern parts of the southwestern US, right now where you live is cold. Bone-chillingly cold. Where I am in the DC area the snow that fell a week or so before Christmas hasn’t melted completely. Top off the fact that we haven’t seen temperatures reach the high 30s in waaaay too [...]
Emu Oil to the Rescue Again
In my family it isn’t the holidays until someone, usually me, has an accident, usually in the kitchen, and really gets injured, usually involving blood or blisters, followed by a trip to the ER. Ah, nothing like basking in the glow of the florescent lights of the waiting room with your loved ones gathered around [...]
Chinese Dogs Report Positive H1N1
Two dogs in Beijing have tested positive for the H1N1 virus. The Chinese press reported that the virus found in the dogs was a 99 percent match for the flu currently infecting humans.
In the United States the H1N1 virus has been in cats, ferrets, pigs, birds and humans. There have been no reports of dogs [...]