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The shelter broke up this litter of 10 into two groups, and altered the four largest, healthiest puppies first; this happened two weeks ago. Those four puppies went up for adoption while I was out of town for six days, and every day while I was gone, I checked the shelter website to see who got adopted. Not ONE got adopted!

A few weeks ago, the talk of the dog-related section of the Internet was Trifexis, the oral flea-control medication introduced a year or so ago by Elanco Animal Health. News reports alleged that more than 700 dogs have been killed by adverse reactions to this drug. To verify that number, I looked to the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), the agency responsible for collecting and analyzing reports of adverse effects of veterinary drugs on animals.

ill-mannered dogs brought into stressful public spaces by unscrupulous

I recently wrote an article about canine dental health; it will appear in the April issue of WDJ. I discussed the need to examine your dog’s teeth on a regular basis, and to keep them clean and healthy. Tartar-encrusted teeth lead to gum infections which lead to systemic infections that severely affect the heart, liver, and kidneys. If you are lucky, your dog’s teeth stay white and healthy with absolutely no help from you at all; my previous dog, a Border Collie named Rupert, had perfect teeth throughout his lifetime with zero maintenance.

My dog Otto (now resting in peace) used to get a flare-up of allergies every spring. His body knew before any human in our...

Barbara Dobbins, my friend and frequent contributor to WDJ, once wrote a post for this space that described how her senior Border Collie, Daisy, had earned...

People who feed raw diets to their dogs are generally aware of the risks of pathogenic bacteria that, and handle those products and their serving dishes accordingly. Foods that have been produced via a method that absolutely kills pathogenic bacteria—that is, extruded and baked dry foods—that have tested positive for Salmon are more concerning.

I haven’t spent a day in my local shelter for six weeks or more. I’ve been super busy, and then I fostered a really cute, really unsocialized dog for a while, which took up most of any extra time I had for a few weeks. Saturdays are usually a big adoption day at the shelter, and there is only one other volunteer who helps with adoptions on Saturdays. When I heard that she wasn’t going to be at the shelter, I decided I’d better go, even though I had several invitations for fun events and a ton of work to do. I walked into the shelter at 11:30; it opens at 11 on Saturdays but I was running late -- plus I needed to buy some dog treats on the way. When I walked in, the shelter’s head veterinary technician caught my eye. “Can you go hang out with the lady with the Golden out in the outdoor runs?” she asked. “I’ll be out there in a few minutes.” No clue as to why she wants me out there, but I’m here to help.

Dog trainers like to say that our dogs do what works for them. The thought behind that concept is that dogs are extraordinarily good...

Seen on my local Nextdoor page: “Is this your dog? If so, contact me ASAP. I do not want to take her to the...

Volunteering at my local shelter this past weekend, I was photographing a cute senior Chihuahua (in an effort to better represent him on the shelter website) when I noticed something on his tummy. At first I thought it was discolored for a health reason. But when another volunteer and I rolled him over for a closer look, I could see that he was tattooed. As we stretched him in such a way to reveal the whole tattoo, I was in the process of telling my fellow volunteer that this was once a common practice – that before identification microchips became common, dogs were sometimes tattooed with the owner’s driver’s license number or phone number. But then we decoded the message. It looked like this...

I was at a veterinary clinic recently with a dog I was dog-sitting; he had a foxtail (grass seed awn) in his ear. I overheard someone responding to the vet tech’s questions regarding another patient.