Care

You've no doubt heard the phrase fighting like cats and dogs." The media likes to play up stories about personality differences between "cat lovers" and "dog lovers

Here are some trade secrets to getting your control harness to work better for you and your dog. With several of the simpler styles (SENSE-ation, SENSE-ible, Easy Walk) if you can’t get the harness to fit quite right, try putting it on upside down. (Doesn’t work with any of the “two-points-of-contact” harnesses.) If the front strap still slips down, clip your leash to the front-clip ring and the collar ring. This may diminish the effectiveness of the harness a little, but it will keep the front strap up and in place.

Research on canine-to-human and canine-to-canine transmission of COVID strains is inconclusive and data is frequently conflicting. Dog and other pet owners should be cautious and look for signs of COVID infection in their pets, and limit contact if they themselves test positive.

The severity of red eyes in a dog depends in part on where the dog’s eye is red.

As a trainer and behavior consultant, I am always ready to provide all sorts of helpful information and internet links on the subject of bringing home a new baby to meet the dog. But I can honestly say that I never considered the emotional and hormonal component of the new mom and how it would affect her relationship with her pets.

From a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) perspective, any medical condition is a symptom of an underlying disharmony within the body. This imbalance can be viewed through the yin and yang model, the base of TCM theory. Both exist within the body at all times. Yin represents the concepts of cooling, fluids, quietness, and passive behavior. Yang represents the concepts of heat, inflammation, outward energy, and aggressive behavior.

If you do nothing else about the aggression between your dogs, you must scrupulously manage their movements and activities. Every time your dog successfully engages in a behavior that you don't want her to exhibit, it makes it that much harder to convince her that it's not a useful behavior strategy. Every time your dog aggressively communicates to another canine family member, it increases the potential for unresolvable aggression between the two and serious injury to one or both.

We currently have three dogs. We lost our Scottie a few months ago to cancer, and our Australian Shepherd last year to old age and failing health. This is the fewest number of dogs we've had in our family for as far back as I care to remember, and while I grieve Missy and Dubhy's absence every day, a part of me feels some guilty relief that the canine chaos and caretaking load has lightened somewhat. Still, while I know it won't be for a while yet, another part of me contemplates the next potential pup-addition to the Miller pack . . . which leads me to contemplate the complexities and challenges of bringing home a new dog.

Energy medicine, once so exotic that it was dismissed out of hand by America’s physicians and veterinarians, is now going mainstream. In addition to the canine therapies described last month, energy healing techniques such as flower essences, animal communication, and kinesiology are used by holistic veterinarians in the U.S. and around the world. Understanding what these therapies are and how they work will help you decide which energy therapies might be appropriate for your canine companion.

Two stunning standard poodles, one pure white, the other charcoal gray, were wandering loose on Santa Cruz’s Seacliff Beach in early June, not far from a busy road. Jeff, the concerned citizen who corralled the dogs, was dismayed to find they had no tags, so he was unable to return them to their home. He put a “Dogs Found” ad in the newspaper and kept the dogs for three days, sure that someone would be looking for such wonderful animals, but no one called. With some ambivalence, he loaded them into his car and delivered them to the nearby Santa Cruz SPCA. They are obviously well-loved dogs, he reassured himself. They will be safe; the owner will come for them.

Why is my dog pooping blood? Blood in your dog's poop may be accompanied by diarrhea, vomiting, or no other symptoms at all. The cause may or may not be serious – but you won’t know until you get to a vet for a diagnosis.

Bulging eyes in dogs could be due to disease—sometimes bad enough to cause an eye to pop out.