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ill-mannered dogs brought into stressful public spaces by unscrupulous

I know it’s low-hanging fruit to criticize people for misuse of retractable leashes – but there are an awful lot of first-time dog owners...

A good friend recently gave notice that he wanted to retire from a job he’s had since he was just a tiny puppy. My dog Woody’s best friend Samson, who has never weighed as much as five pounds, has been going to work with my friend Leonora since he was a 3-week-old foster puppy—and recently, he started telling Leonora that he doesn’t want to go to work any more.

Just over a year ago, the first article I ever had to write that mentioned COVID-19 was published in this space. It seems like...

The fact remains, that bad things can happen even to good dog owners. And my family members are some of the best dog owners I know: generous, kind, educated, and deeply devoted to their own dogs and to their breed rescue.

It’s at this time of the year that my dog Otto’s health insurance company sends out a renewal letter. And, of course, the older...

I walk with my dogs in a number of locations in my local “wildlife area,” which consists of thousands of acres of land surrounding...

If you’ve ever been going through the final illness, or the final, rough year of a beloved dog’s life, you know how easy it is to neglect the other, young, healthy dogs’ needs.

When, back in March, I scheduled a week-long vacation for early July, I of course had no way of knowing a huge, dog-related story was going...

In my neck of the woods, we still have a huge ongoing mess to sort out with trying to reunite animals with their people following the devastating Camp Fire. Currently, there are three temporary emergency shelters that are caring for hundreds of dogs and cats (and other animals). It's hard to get exact figures, but more than half of the animals have not yet been identified by any owners, for many reasons.

Many of us feel sorry for the animals" when we visit a shelter's adoption row and look upon the faces of the dogs who desperately need homes. But those are the lucky ones – the ones who have been assessed and deemed "adoptable." There are many other dogs in shelters who may not be so fortunate."

We recommend that dog owners switch foods frequently. Many food makers suggest switching foods slowly, by replacing a small amount of the dog's old food with a new food and slowly increasing the percentage of new food over a week or two. If you feed more than one type of food per day to your dog, and switch frequently, you will likely find that these slow switch" schedules are completely unnecessary. Why? Because dogs who eat a varied diet are already accustomed to a variety of foods; their bodies are already making a nice mélange of digestive enzymes that support the sort of mixed population of microbes needed to break down all sorts of foods. It's only when you have been feeding only one type of food for a long time that you need to be so slow in introducing a new type of food."