Care

The level of your children’s participation in your dog’s training program will vary based on the age and abilities of the children.

I put my hands on my dogs at least a few dozen times a day. It might be to attach or untangle a leash, look into ears, check teeth, brush or trim fur in various places, put on a Thundershirt, apply flea and tick preventative, or just to feel the soft silky warmth of dog under my hand. We humans are a tactile species, and with our handy opposable thumbs, we're always doing something to manipulate our canine companions and their body parts.

Your dog’s body temperature is an early indication she is going into labor.

While you can’t control what your town or neighbors use to treat icy roads and walkways, you can control what you put down on your driveway, steps, and walks to look after your dogs and your neighborhood pets.

While it’s true that some herbs recommended for use with canine arthritis have drug-like actions, including contraindications and potentially adverse side effects, the plants mentioned here are easily acquired from reputable sources, widely used, and safe for most dogs. The descriptions that follow include safety notes as applicable.

Fish oil benefits for dogs with arthritis are well researched, but this natural supplement can also help with your dog’s itchy skin, cognition, and more.

With more than 25 years of working with animals professionally under my belt, I don’t find many new product concepts that come as a total and pleasant surprise to me. What a delight, then, to test hands-free leashes for Whole Dog Journal and discover that the best of these products, which started making their appearance in the pet supply retail market in recent years, offer far more than just a convenient way to free up your hands while walking your dog on leash. Few things irritate me more than having a dog constantly tugging on the leash. Thanks to my new doggie daycare center, I now find myself in the position of walking untrained dogs far more frequently than before.

Herbalist Greg Tilford shares his recipes for building a dog's defenses against fleas. Although they prefer a warm, humid climate, fleas can thrive virtually anywhere, even places where they seemingly have nothing to eat. When food (like your dog) is not available, fleas will feed upon the bodies of each other as they lay in wait for a larger meal, nestled within the ground covers, carpets, and cracks they call home.

In the late 1700s, a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann discovered that China, a precursor for the quinine that was being used to treat malaria, actually caused symptoms of malaria when administered to a healthy person. Hahnemann made this discovery while translating a medical text on various drugs. He suspected that the source of China’s curative power had been misunderstood and he decided to give himself small doses of the substance to test his theory. Hahnemann discovered that small doses of China produced in his healthy body malaria-like symptoms that abated after two or three hours. In thus observing that a drug will cause in a healthy person the same symptoms it cures in a sick one, Hahnemann gained the key insight that drugs cure diseases to which they bear marked similarities.

I was trying to be a responsible dog owner. We lived in a rural area of Northern California, in a house with no fenced yard. My boyfriend's Irish Setter had recently been shot and killed while chasing a neighbor's goats. A hard lesson to learn, and one I wasn't about to repeat. So when we were leaving the ranch for a day I insisted we tie up our recently acquired St. Bernard, Bear. We tied him to a tree, made sure he had access to plenty of water and shade and was nowhere near a fence that he could climb over. Confident that we had done the right thing, we drove off.

Even the best “indestructible” dog toys will one day succumb to the efforts of our fluffy destroyers.

Water is wonderful, but not if it's toxic. When conditions promote the growth or bloom" of toxic blue-green algae in lakes and ponds