The trajectory of the mandatory sterilization movement informed us months ago that something like Los Angeles’ drive to limit pet breeding was imminent. Despite vocal opposition from a reported majority of veterinarians unsure as to the enforceability and advisability of such laws, L.A. went ahead with their legislation requiring spay and neuter of owned pets by four months of age.

It’s been a...

Last week’s client came crying (justifiably) over her dog’s bone cancer (the too-common osteosarcoma, in this case). After the requisite diagnostic biopsy, her previous vet had told her there was nothing to do unless she elected in favor of amputation and chemotherapy. Unsatisfied with this ultimatum, she’d come looking for a second opinion.

This owner was miserable over the ordeal but loath to...

There are a lot more cool tools out there for pets and their miscellaneous healthcare needs, but these are the ones I tend to recommend most frequently.(With a new one thrown in at the end because I could not resist!)

1-E-collars, T-shirts, onesies and other avoidance devices: Cats and dogs need these to protect the head, face and ears, after surgery, and when licking/biting damage otherwise...

OK, so it’s live now, not really Beta at all (I’m not even sure what that means, really). Nonetheless, I’m all nervous about Dolittler’s newest incarnation. Will you like it? Will it work?

Just so you know, Dolittler 2.0 will be arriving in stages over the next few weeks (including new visuals), so if you didn’t get everything you asked for don’t worry, it’s probably on its way.

And you’ll...

Ahem. Yes, size matters. Predictably, surgeons who like to make long incisions in the surgical theater think it’s a better measure of their thoroughness. Meanwhile, surgeons preferring short ones believe their way is less painful and less fraught with incision-site complications.

To my, mind, it’s a general question of style, neither one better than the other, both of which have their place in...

Hot on the heels of my malpractice insurance fiasco comes this timely post. Here I detail the top ten mistakes seen in vet practice (yeah, we vets do stupid stuff sometimes):

1-Forgetting to take out the IV catheter when pets go home: This is common (three or four times a year for us), though not so much since we started including CATH OUT! checkboxes on our patient’s cage cards.

For the...

No, I’ve never been considered the most organized human being, a fact which drives most of those close to me a little crazy. Though I’ve improved on this tremendously in recent years, my occasional lapses can be somewhat problematic.

Take today’s mammoth power outage in South Florida. While everyone else in Miami figured something big was amiss, I was home for lunch kicking myself for...

Yeah, it’s true. When we’re faced with truly obnoxious clients we vets do what all professionals do but almost never deign to admit: We sometimes pad the bill (well, sort of).

I’m surely immersing myself in scalding water on this one but honesty’s what you come to Dolittler for, right? So soak it up, because this post’s going to tell you why sugar beats vinegar every time.

Today’s client...

Well, why the heck not? Though vasectomies have long been out of favor in the veterinary community (not that they were ever popular), there’s no reason why I wouldn’t consent to snip a bit of tiny tubing through a small incision over taking out the testicles—as long as the owner understands that testosterone and all its effects will still be on hand to work their mysterious charms.

Sure,...

No, it's not a foray into a bad joke. It's my life at the moment.

I'm on my signifiicant others' tenth-year vet school reuniuon cruise to Belize and Cozumel. It's the first time I've been out of the country in twelve years...and I'm loving every minute--except for the hours I've spent worrying about how I'd ever manage to post my blog entries.

Shortly after embarking, I was informed that...

I must be crazy. I’ve fielded an offer to apply for a [very] part-time position at my local Animal Services shelter. I completed the paperwork for my app just before posting this and I’m now waiting for Miami-Dade County approval on my license and other basic pre-employment necessities.

I’m not completely sure what makes most vets take on the more stressful, lower-paying positions most...

No, it's not a foray into a bad joke. It's my life at the moment.

I'm on my signifiicant others' tenth-year vet school reuniuon cruise to Belize and Cozumel. It's the first time I've been out of the country in twelve years...and I'm loving every minute--except for the hours I've spent worrying about how I'd ever manage to post my blog entries.

Shortly after embarking, I was informed that...

Most of you Class A vet clients already know about all these common OTC pet meds. Nonetheless, I offer ‘em up here because maybe (just maybe) there’s something I can add to your basic understanding of these medications, their indications and contraindications.

So without any further ado, here are my top five, peppered with disclaimers about always asking your vet first before using ANY drug....

Lola went to the vet hospital after refusing food and becoming progressively more lethargic over the course of the previous evening. When her blood was drawn, she barely moved. Within an hour, it was clear her kidneys were shutting down. Lola was euthanized almost immediately. She was a calico domestic shorthair cat. And she was only sixteen months old.

Her vet immediately began wondering about...

OK, so now you’ve got your diagnosis: It’s a cruciate ligament tear or rupture with possible injury to the meniscal cartilage of the knee, too. Ouch! What you really need right about now is an expert opinion on the optimal treatment for this injury given your budget (OK, so maybe you need a tissue, too). To that end, here’s the skinny I promised…

Common cruciate options

1-Surgery (one of the...

I hope none of you ever have to face this question: My cat is dying of kidney disease. I’ve done everything the vets have told me to do but she’s miserable. What else can I do to make her well?

The all-too common answer is the obvious: euthanasia. And while I'll never advocate this option without exploring every possible treatment option, make no mistake, kidney (renal) disease is a killer....

Ah, the dreaded cruciate ligament rupture… It’s often a dog owner’s most expensive nightmare. Commonly referred to as an ACL injury in human sports medicine, we vet types are more likely to call this knee condition an RCCL (rupture of the cranial cruciate ligament) when we’re speaking in sciencese, or a “cruciate” for short.

This post is the second in a series discussing what vet medicine...

What the heck gives with the all-too-common mouthing-off when a surprisingly fit dog enters the puppy park. “Would you just look at that?! You think she’d feed him occasionally!”

No, this dog’s skin isn’t plastered to his ribs, nor is there any other evidence of illness or ill treatment. This is a dog as he’s meant to be: healthy and lean.

As this four year-old makes his way around the canine...

Hallmark/Westland is a large-scale California beef producer. Factory farming at its finest, I’d venture to guess. In case you hadn’t heard, this manufacturer has downed the industry—for now—by provoking a massive beef recall.

143 million pounds! It makes me want to cry. How many creatures were killed after it was shown this operation engaged in the illegal addition of “downer cows” to their...

I know I’ve hit this hot button before. But it never fails to relieve my stress to tell tales of waiting game frustrations in vet medicine—on both sides of the sitting-in-the-waiting-room-waiting-impatiently-to-be-seen dilemma.

Last week’s notable case was a new client. He came in 15 minutes late. He had already been bypassed by an early emergency. Then he was bypassed by a euthanasia (they...

Like most vets, I have more than my share of home remedies at the ready for clients looking to apply readily accessible ingredients to their pets’ minor ailments. Most of these DIY solutions include standard kitchen cabinet and fridge fare, with just a dash of the medicine drawer thrown in for good measure. Below are my top six, listed here for your reading pleasure:

1-Epsom salts: When pet...

Have you heard? Paris is under investigation by the Los Angeles Department of Animal Services for a pet violation. No, it’s not over Tinkerbell’s new skinny jeans and their circulation-constricting potential.

Nope. It’s the result of her seventeen(!) dogs—a no-no in LA where three is the max.

When asked how she’d managed to amass so many, the heiress-cum-starlet replied, “They keep having...

When it rains it pours, they say. In my case, it purrs. The last few days have brought me wild feline cases—and the one I’m about to relate was the wackiest I’ve seen in weeks. Yes, it involves a condom—really.

Now, normally all my condom cases are reserved for canines with poor taste in their comestibles. Dogs are far more likely to consume discarded objects with a distinctly human flavor....

Don’t get me wrong—I love beagles. I grew up with one named “Chicho” who lived at the nearby home of my three spinster aunts. He was typical of his breed in his even-temperedness, his famous wanderlust and his vocal range: Baruuu! Baruuuuuu!

Mouth-wateringly cute as pups, easy-to-please as adults (show ‘em anything edible), it makes sense that Americans consider them their number one breed. And...

Yesterday was a rough one. I euthanized three cats (due to FeLV, FIV and a case of complicated diabetes). That’s more than usual. Though all were tearful, morale-crushing events, the last of these held out a silver lining for us to marvel at long after the end of this depressing day.

Meesy was a beautiful, undemanding, even-tempered Siamese girl only a decade old. She’d been losing weight over...

I have loads of really caring clients who seek to become the best animal parents they can. Unfortunately, too many have recently gone the way of the Internet breeder when sourcing their canine soulmate of the next ten to fifteen years.

Dr. Khuly, can you please recommend a good Puggle breeder?

What am I supposed to say when faced with that kind of question? Oh sure, I have a great one for you...

Rifling through the fridge on Monday morning I found a full pack of gum that I‘m sure I never purchased. It was Trident’s cinnamon flavor—and it boasted brightly-colored letters on the label which read: “With Xylitol!”

How the heck this product got into a household with dogs is pretty obvious: The same household had hosted a birthday party for a pack of wild ten year-old children on the...

Of course it’s the digital age, so why shouldn’t we expect our pets to get high-tech tagged along with their microchips? I like the concept, even if it’s just because it raises the profile of pet tagging.

To me it makes little difference to me what kind of tag you use—just use something to prove your pet is owned and loved should she escape her confines or run amok after a storm. If it takes a...

I don’t know about you but I have a bone to pick with the issue of online dog training. A dog trainer and former vet tech, Julie Bjelland Lokhandwala, is now offering live consults through her website, WebDogtrainer.com.  It seems she’s found her niche for expanding the scope of her business via the Internet in ways most of us never thought possible—perhaps because it’s not.

To me, dog...

Not that you would ever want one (nor could you afford one, most likely), but a research group out of Korea has “built” a glow-in-the-dark cat.

Now, you may think this in the same vein as the allergen-free cats that came out of Texas a few years ago—but you’d be wrong. These cats are not for sale to the fickle US populace looking for new and exciting dinner party conversation. They’re part of...

A couple of months ago, one of our technicians brought her “terrier mix” into work with her. He’d been experiencing a particularly nasty kind of diarrhea for the last 24 hours—and  on this morning she’d awoken to a home full of black, tarry stools.

A fecal exam, as expected,  revealed the presence of a large amount of digested blood. Typically, that means something somewhere high up in the...

There’s a website for everything out there so why not one for the three-legged dogs in our midst? Started by a husband and wife team after their dog’s leg was amputated, Tripawds.com caters to everything the tripod dog owner needs to excel in caring for their special-needs canines.

From forums and product recommendations to medical information and moral support, this site has it all. It has...

I was struck by the comments that attended a recent post on speed-demon feline neutering (I’m going for the gold! Fifty-six cat neuters in ten hours? I can beat that!). While significant umbrage was understandably taken over the concept of surgery as sport, this is one area where the veterinary point of view varies vastly from that of the average animal lover.

Interestingly, all the vets I...

It’s true. Sometimes we vets want to hide when breeders come our way. Altogether too often they infuriate and intimidate us with a reputation for stressful demands and know-it-all ways . I know this because my vet friends bemoan their patronage while grumbling posts on the Veterinary Information Network (the vet-industry-only online watering hole) confirm the seemingly universal sentiment.

In...

Let’s say your pet’s been off her food for a few days. X-rays, labwork and physical examination have been less than completely rewarding. Still, everything points to something amiss with her liver. Ten or twenty years ago we would’ve jumped right into her abdomen to take a look-see. In today’s world? We’d order an ultrasound.

Ultrasound is a means of seeing what lies beneath the surface by...

The tawny pit bull mix was clearly dead, lying in a pool of his own blood. In the run next door, a shepherd mix was laying on his side, panting heavily and staring at the wall with a glazed expression on his face. Omigod, is this what it’s always like at these places?

I made my first visit to Miami-Dade Animal Services (our County-funded animal shelter) last Monday night. In an overabundance of...

“Which philosophy about animals most closely aligns with your own?”

This question was posed by DVM Newsmagazine, a vet industry news publication. The undisclosed number of veterinarians responding offered the following basic breakdown in views:

Animal Welfare: 78.1%

Animal Rights: 2.4%

Other: 12.7%

No response: 1.8%

Though I have no idea how many vets responded and to what degree statistical...

One of my client’s dogs, a shepherd mix named Madison, recently came back from the kennel making horrible gagging sounds. “Oh my God, she’s trying to vomit but can’t! I think she’s bloating!” While well-informed of her large breed dog’s pathological proclivities, this owner had never experienced the dreaded kennel cough (the most likely source of Madison’s current distress).

“But the people at...

Most of you already know about my Sophie Sue and the severe neck pain (due to intervertebral disc disease) that landed her at the specialist’s place last week. So many of you wished her well and sent hugs and smooches in her direction (for which I’m eternally grateful), but since then I’ve been remiss in reporting on her condition.

So here’s an update—with some basic facts on her disease...

The era of environmental correctness is upon us—just in time, we hope. To that end, you should know that pet keeping isn’t always the greenest way to minimize your household’s carbon footprint. After all, pets often consume as much energy as you do—more in some cases. Nonetheless, there are ways to make sure you’re doing the best you can. Here are my top ten suggestions:

1) Eliminate all pet...

As I write this, I’m being treated to the midnight sounds of outdoor kitty interactions—none of them good, you can be sure of that. The crescendo of screeches typically indicates that one of only two things is in process: fighting or mating (two non-mutually exclusive activities in the feline world, I’m afraid).

I got to thinking about my burgeoning neighborhood population of strays earlier in...

Miami is a movie town. It’s not just that we like to watch.  The film industry also likes to produce its stuff down here. The warm weather and South Beach are a big draw for an industry tired of the same old Hollywood hospitality.

Maybe that’s why “Marley and Me” (based on the eponymous book on the life of a dog who dies after bloating—twice) is being filmed down here in sunny Miami—in a...

OK, maybe not without a few days of warm-up at my local humane society (if they’d ever consent to my volunteerism), but I’m pretty fast (if I do say so myself).

I was compelled to dwell on my cat neuter speed after reading about Dr. Randy Eisel of Naples, Florida. This vet is seeking a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records with his nimble fingers and altruistic intent to highlight the...

Imagine you were willing to pay anything to find the best Lab puppy money could buy. Let’s say you’re not inculcated into the proper ways of going about this. Let’s also assume your children are begging you to get one online based on their own Google searches.

Finally you cave and send for the cutest pup in the litter based on a short video showing how vigorous, healthy and well cared for these...

I’ve been surfing the Web a lot lately. I’m just not a sports fan and I don’t have a TV anyway so it’s no surprise that I’ve been antisocially evaluating my online options more industriously as of late.

So while you’re watching the Super Bowl tonight, I’m busy playing WolfQuest, an online game for devotees of basic wolf biology and wildlife concerns in general.

Produced in association with the...

For those of you following the series of posts on Helen, I’m sure you’ll be shocked and dismayed to hear that she was taken from us this week after suffering a morning of uncontrollable seizures. It was a tragic ending for all of us who loved this presumed head trauma survivor—not least because it was so unexpected.

In fact, the day before we euthanized her, Helen was more active than usual....

Here’s a daily vet pet peeve worth chuckling about: What’s up with all those clients who take the opportunity to speak to their vet just as they’ve inserted the stethoscope’s prongs into their ears?

Do they not realize they’re engaging in futile behavior (assuming the vet isn’t actually engaged by anything they might be saying)? Moreover, if these offenders believe their vet is actually...