If you’ve never experienced a dog fight, consider yourself lucky. For loving owners of two or more pets, a serious row is grounds for a nervous breakdown.

Imagine two dogs you adore tumbling violently over one another as they make horrible sounds you’ve never heard before—from a dog or from anything else, really. Saliva and fur is flying and—in the worst of cases—blood, too.

What’s a parent to...

Altogether too often, the diagnosis of cancer in pets comes complete with death sentence attached: The vet makes the case, presents the histopathology report or the X-rays, then exits stage left. Or the client exit stage right. Either way, the pet (unless immediately euthanized) is left standing in the middle with no hope of anything except the possibility of eventual euthanasia—at some future...

Miami is a funny place to be a service professional. Whether you’re a doc, accountant, bank teller or hotel clerk, you’d best speak some Spanish. While you’re at it, Portuguese and Creole wouldn’t hurt either. On South Beach? French, German and Italian would be a boon for your career, too.

It’s not hard to speak the basics, but to really build a practice by providing stellar customer service,...

Once upon a time (when I worked on South Beach) I might have been able to say that being a veterinarian was somewhat glamorous (as it seems too many people believe).

TV news stations filmed me for occasional segments on tasty topics like skin disease in the summer and gastrointestinal upset at Christmastime. Once, I had Miami’s most famous family in entertainment film me as I delivered ten...

I’ve often thought that when a product I want doesn’t exist it’s because something really important stands between my imagination and reality. I assume this much is true when it comes to implantable GPS trackers in pets.

They must be too big. Or too unpredictable. Or too something. Because they can’t be too expensive. I mean, how many others, like me, fear the physical loss of a pet more than...

In my first job out of vet school I worked nights, alone, at a small regional emergency clinic on the Pennsylvania-Delaware line. But I wasn’t exactly all alone—I had two techs with me at all times. They were far more experienced in the ways of medicine and the world than I, newbie vet that I was.

After the first economic euthanasia (euthanized strictly due to lack of funds) I remember...

I’m afraid that after a long, hard day one of my favorite escapes is among the most mundane known to man: needlework. It’s almost embarrassing to mention, especially now that absolutely everyone has taken up my long-time habit of knitting.

So as a way to expand from the commonplace act of knitting, I’ve ventured into that vast craft universe beyond—a veritable no man’s land of arcane tools...

It seems there’s no middle ground in the debate between believers and non-believers when it comes to natural care for pets. People seem either innately credulous of its merits or downright dour as to its dubious worth.

As with the issue of “raw” versus “no raw,” both camps have historically drawn a deep line in the sand and regarded any crossovers with suspicion. But new research into the...

Sorry for the mild profanity but nothing makes me crazier than clients who can’t figure out whether or not they want their pet to live…to receive treatment…or even to go to the vet in the first place.

I have a beautiful little calico in hospital who used to be a beautiful big calico about three or four weeks ago. 'Round about that time she decided to consume many small pieces of cellophane...

Two weeks from today my favorite veterinary technician will begin her new life—in an oral surgeon’s office as a medical assistant. Her starting salary will be 25% higher than her current pay (after eight years on the job) and her workload and hours will be considerably reduced.

You might think I’d be feeling a little resentful or somehow betrayed, but I have so far limited my negative emotions...

God as my witness, I will never have clients like this again:

Case #1:

She arrived late for her appointment.

She complained about the subsequent wait.

She and her gentleman friend stank to high heaven of foul body odor.

Her carrier stank.

Her cat stank.

Her cat was feverish and thin.

She refused all diagnostics and treatment.

She demanded, instead, that I give her cat “the other doctor’s” special...

You may think me a midge strange for suggesting it, but veterinary medicine’s charms comprise more than cerebral challenges and emotional highs; vet medicine is also beautiful…as in, aesthetically pleasing to a high degree.

From a breathtaking birds-eye view through a microscope’s lens...

...to the snaking rivers of barium in an X-rayed abdomen,

my job is—at times—nothing short of visually...

I have a confession: As a child I surreptitiously consumed the Miss America pageant every year. Although my mother deemed it unfit television viewing material for anyone with a conscience and/or half a brain, I was irresistibly drawn to the spectacle (like moths to a flame…). Somehow I’ve managed to avoid anorexia and bulimia but the damage has been done: I read Vogue.

The Westminster Kennel...

I spay and neuter cats for free. Well, actually, for less than free. We charge an amount that used to cover our supply costs ten or more years ago. Now that it’s 2007, the hospital probably pays out at least $25 in supplies on every spay and maybe $10 on every neuter.

We do this exclusively for an organization called The Cat Network. They trap, neuter, spay and rabies-vaccinate cats in feral...

One of the basic tenets of the small animal veterinary profession as a business is that product sales make for a big slice of its revenue pie. This is not how it was twenty-five years ago when I was coming up in the ranks (as a junior vet assistant). The biggest issue in product sales back then was whether or not to carry Filaribits (remember them?).

The trend towards greater adoption of a...

Tonight after work I’ll be heading off to Ruth’s Chris steakhouse to enjoy some of the finest steaks money can buy. No, it’s not an early Valentine’s dinner; it’s a drug company sponsored teaching seminar on the merits of its fine products.

It’s sort of sad that the only way drug companies (anyone, really) can manage to get a bunch of vets into one room is to offer free food. In Miami it goes...

If anyone “gets” anesthephobia, I do. I don’t like my dog to enter into a controlled form of unconsciousness any more than you do. It’s somehow very stressful at a very raw, animal level: it’s unnatural and bizarre, if you think about it for too long.

But faced with two alternatives: my dog will suffer forty minutes of avoidable pain or my dog will receive fifteen minutes of anesthesia, I’d...

What happens when a perfectly healthy pet shows up for his annual exam and you find something bad…really bad. I’m not talking about the severe periodontal disease eating away at a cat’s skull—I can fix that. And I’m not referring to the dreaded osteoarthritic knee—I can find somebody to fix that, too.

The really bad things I found this week on basic exams include one giant cat kidney, a...

OK so you knew it wasn’t going to take very long for me to start writing about my new puppy. It's been a week now and things are going about as well as can be expected—considering that he’s only five months old.

Sure, he chews on the heels of my shoes (increasingly surreptitiously),

he wakes me up for a three AM pee-pee break every night,

he still occasionally poops on the floor,

his one bout of...

If you’ve ever worked or otherwise spent inordinate amounts of time at a pet shelter, vet hospital, boarding facility or grooming parlor, you may well know what I’m talking about when you read this.

After a full day of just one indefatigable barker and I’m usually ready to crawl under the sheets and enjoy a soundless night’s sleep. It’s no secret I love my dogs for their resounding...

Have you ever wondered who invented the fecal rod? This common implement, though benign in its intentions, is employed by vets the world around in the act of pseudo-sadistic stool collection.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about (we should all be so lucky), the fecal rod is that double-ended instrument of torture designed to efficiently and comfortably (not!) extract manageable...

OK so my healthcare is in the hands of an HMO. All of us at my hospital (save the two owners) are offered this dubious benefit. Actually, I’m thankful; I might not have found affordable insurance for myself otherwise. But this healthcare plan truly adds stress to my life. Furthermore, it gives rise to murderous dreams involving [very stupid] claimspeople sitting in Aetna-blue damasked cubicles...

It’s kind of a weird subject, I know, but death—the actual series of injections and subsequent cremation—can be pretty pricey. You might wonder why that might be considering the low cost of generic injections. And how hard is it, exactly, to burn a body to an ashy vestige of its former self?

You may well wonder what possessed me to write on this morbidly touchy subject.

A: Yesterday one of my...

Do you remember the first day you brought your pet home? Is it etched in your memory along with other intense experiences like your first day of school, your college graduation or the minute you met your soulmate? If you’re like me, each new pet’s first time in my arms swims in memory along with the best moments I’ve ever had.

All this may sound corny but you know exactly what I mean. Even...

Last week I wrote a frustrated, Vet Stress post on Fido-the-dog (When pet therapies go wrong). The entry detailed Fido’s stressful family and the implication that Fido’s Metacam therapy was responsible for his gastrointestinal undoing.

We’ve come a long way since last week’s semi-confrontational moments. Although she’s relaxed a whole lot, his primary owner still manages to stress me out with...

Ah…the anal gland. The vestigial harbinger of allergic ailment, the overly-manipulated emitter of stinkiness. We all dread its disease—pet owners and veterinarians in equal measure. No one likes dealing in their unsightly and malodorous expression.

In case you’ve never had the pleasure of handling an anal gland, let me properly inform you. In this post I will distinguish between the pervasive...

How many times have you heard…”my dog is allergic to [add foodstuff here]” or “I’d never feed my cat anything with [random carbohydrate source]—it’s highly allergenic,” or even, “once I switched to raw the allergies disappeared.”

After detailing the basic steps we take to determine what a pet might be allergic to, I expect you now to have some appreciation for the complexity of the issue in the...

By popular request, the issue of food allergies will be today’s topic. I’ve been putting off posting on the subject because any submission with the word “food” [even incidentally] mentioned predisposes my personal email in-box to reach “full” status prematurely and incites a plethora of unhappy comments below the post. But, for you, dear readers, I will bravely swim the shark infested waters...