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My “very mixed-breed” dog, Otto, turned 12 years old at some point in the past couple of months. For a big dog (currently 72 pounds),...

I took my two dogs—Woody, age 9, and Boone, age 3—to see their vet a week ago. I wasn’t looking forward to being chided for allowing him—nay, facilitating him—to gain a few extra pounds this winter. But I wasn’t at all expecting the health problems that my vet found.

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!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how different the experience of dog ownership is today than it was in my youth. In the April...

The other day, I took a walk with my two dogs, and a friend and her two dogs (one of whom is Chaco, a Kelpie, one of my former fosters from my local shelter). We hiked on a trail next to the Feather River, which flows through my town. It’s hot here already, and the dogs jumped in the river and drank and swam frequently as we walked. About a mile from the trailhead, I, too, took the opportunity to clamber down an embankment and take a quick swim (the water is like ice).

I have a new little foster dog staying with me. The manager of my shelter called me last week and wanted to know if...

Back in July, I wrote a piece for this space about the increasing frequency of reports I was seeing about emergency veterinary clinics suspending...

I was walking Otto the other day when his head and tail went up and he gave a little whine – one that usually indicates that he's spotted a dog in the yard we are about to walk past. In our town, there are lots of dogs that are lying on porches or under trees in fenced yards, and when you walk by with your dog, they come flying toward the fence: some barking hysterically, some staying silent until the last terrifying moment when they hit the fence and let out a roar. Otto is as good as any dog I've ever seen about holding our course in the face of these dramatic approaches; he neither runs nor retaliates nor attempts to fight through the fence, but he usually will let out a whine of anxiety or excitement, prance a little, and (occasionally) will stop and lift a leg on the fence, and sometimes the very nose of the offending dog on the other side of the fence!

Last month, my sister-in-law and my almost-13-year-old niece, Ava, spent two weeks in France, visiting my sister-in-law’s mother and stepfather, who live in Paris....

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...

I have become more and more obsessed with how what is now called “force-free” dog training can help adolescent dogs in particular. I see so many parallels between the most effective ways to raise a teenager and how to get a dog through adolescence.

Tens of thousands of people and animals have been affected by the fire, and thousands of people are helping those displaced. Several emergency shelters were hastily set up to contain pets. Some of the pets were left at the shelters by owners who were themselves homeless and staying in shelters; many more were rescued and brought to the shelters with either an address or rough estimate of where they had been rescued from.