I guess if the Slentrol isn’t an option and the diets haven’t yet worked  there’s always an animal cruelty charge someone can levy to light a fire under you butt. That’s what the owners of Rusty-the-morbidly-obese-British-wonder-dog came to know when his owners found their dog confiscated for...

OK so I didn’t expect my first appearance on TV as a vet to be a national one. International, even, if you consider the broad audience of mixed nationality US Hispanics.

Nope. I expected something sleepy and local where I wouldn’t be up against all that cleavage! (If you’ve ever watched...

There’s been some stress at my place lately, most of it taking place in the waiting room or on the telephone when clients let our receptionists know exactly how they feel about our prescription policy.

No, our policy has not changed. We still require bloodwork yearly to renew heartworm...

Thursday, BFF Gina Spadafori over at PetConnection blessed me with one of her rare transcontinental phone calls to discuss the state of the pet world and our respective writing careers (hers in full bloom, mine barely budding).

At the outset Gina confided that she’d received a very legal letter...

Living in Miami as I do I’ve been seeing serious flea cases over the past few months. Though it’s been cool and we’ve been suffering drought conditions for the third straight year, the fleas seem to be attacking with a renewed vengeance.

Maybe I say that every year. Indeed, I offered you a post...

Here’s an interview with the folks at Vet-Stem and what they have to say on the issue of their new therapy for joint pain in pets:

Q: According to your literature, above all do no harm is Vet-Stem’s mantra in medicine. With that in mind, could you detail the major risks involved in VSRC?

A: In...

Last night was the variously dreaded and heralded meeting of Miami veterinary minds on the topic of Comfortis, one of the newest flea killers on the market.

As we snuggled into the dimly lit room’s conference-esque interior, wine glasses in hand, thirty or so of us were treated to a...

Vet-Stem is a San Diego-based biotech company that prides itself on thinking outside the box. In this case it’s looking “outside the joint” for solutions to the crippling arthritic pain our pets often face. Unsavory as it sounds, they’re doing this by getting a sample of your pet’s...

We love Vincent. He's spectacularly cute and a seriously skilled cuddler. But Vincent's not without his issues. In recognition of his anniversary with us and just because I thought it would be fun, here’s the skinny on how much Vincent’s cost me in his first year with me.

Are you ready?

Food

Since...

You might have heard of her. She’s the ten year-old fourth-grader who so longs for vetdom she’s conquered the online coursework required to be certified as a "veterinary assistant." It’s clear Courtney Oliver has ambitions. But the news of her success hasn’t been as well-received in veterinary...

It’s not just the economy that’s withering. It’s the hay in the fields in the parched Southeast and the fat on the backs of horses who would consume it. It’s also the skyrocketing price of grain and the fuel required to move it. An NPR report this morning treated me to another sad story of...

I love love love kitties but my son is highly allergic and predisposed to asthma. The last time I brought a cat home (Helen, for the weekend) his face puffed up and the congestion lasted three days beyond her departure.

But I can’t justify keeping cats out of doors. Not when I know most of my...

You’ve wanted to be a vet forever. That’s why you spent every last summer in memory working with animals. You made the grade in college by turning down party after party. You suffered the nailbitingly stressful application and acceptance process. You survived anatomy and physiology in year one...

The physical demands of my day job are finally beginning to make themselves known. …in my muscles, my feet, my spine and my head.

No, it’s not the teeth and the claws this time. It’s the height of the surgery table (not adjustable where I work), the standing all day (our small hospital offers me...

Hot on the heels of a post on what my neck suffers when I work is another physical issue I’ve been grappling with recently: To Lasik or not.

I’m a 400 girl in each eye (as of my last visit 6 months ago). Astigmatism, too. Prematurely ready for bifocals, even. With a prescription that changes...

“Sunshine, they say, is the best disinfectant. Disclosure may be more like a lightbulb, but it’s better than making what can often be life and death decisions in the dark.”

Why is it that I find myself quoting Christie Keith more than any other single pet health writer out there? Hmmm…

This...

My household has become embarrassingly exemplary of why snake-keeping is fraught with perils. In my acceptance of a reptilian pet (an "I-can’t-keep-her-can-you?" giveaway I took on 18 months ago), I thought I knew what I was in for.

Namely, frequent mice feedings (mostly live because my local...

One of my newest clients arrived at the office with reams of printouts in tow extolling the horrors of administering monthly poisons to protect our pets from heartworms. She also happened to live in the soggiest, boggiest part of Miami where mosquitoes are rumored to suck the life out of...

Wednesday’s case was a bad one from the get-go. A 4:30 call from the specialty hospital across the street asked if we would take on a client with $32 to spend and a pup on its last legs.

Bring it on. Why not?

In part, I confess, I did so because we have an excellent relationship with the...

I belong to the Florida Bar’s Animal Law Committee, a group I naively joined because I thought it actually had something to do with advancing the legal interests of animals. Come to find out they are so afraid of being perceived as an animal right’s group (gasp!) that the...

Can you believe some people still tether their dogs? If you're like me you don't have to suspend disbelief. The evidence is incontrovertible--you can see it as you pass through neighbrhoods with small yards and incomplete fencing.

Dogs there are tied to trees or staked to a makeshift doghouse....

It’s too late after your Cavalier King Spaniel’s chewed through the power cord behind the fridge in your garage. She’s gone. And all those miscellaneous pills, baby toys and cat stool consumed?—not to mention the woodworking gnawed off your favorite chair. You could have avoided that, too.

Sure,...

“Conspecifics” they call them; members of the same species. Though goats will easily accept company from humans and horses, for example, they do best with those of their own kind.

After all, goats are herd animals. They’re social. They have a pecking order to some extent and seem to follow the...

Betsy the Border Collie knows more than 300 words. Sure, she’s no Alex-the-African Grey. She won’t be speaking them anytime soon. But she knows them. She can act on them. And she understands them in different contexts, displaying a knack for abstract thinking we’d never before thought possible...

Part of the fun of being aboard a huge ship with a crew of your colleagues (as I was last week) is the inevitability of meeting someone whose interests and ambitions intersect with your own.

Among my new cohorts was a dual-boarded veterinary specialist in internal medicine and veterinary critical...

No, you’ll probably never notice there aren’t enough vets in town ready and able to attend to Fluffy’s healthcare needs. But you can be sure the average livestock owner has to wait an increasingly long while for the vet to come care for his or her population of critters.

Imagine owning a...

Fistulated cows serve both as supremely useful research/learning tool in veterinary medicine and PETA magnet. These are cows whose rumens (the largest of the four chambers in the bovine stomach) have been surgically attached to the body wall and made accessible to those curious about what lies...

OK, so here’s the obligatory year-end review post on the largest pet food recall in history and what its angry public aftermath ultimately means for you and your pets.

In a couple of words?…not much.

Naughty, nasty companies. Let’s punish ‘em good. Never buy their food again. Make sure they...

A Florida State Representative from Plantation, Perry Thurston, is sponsoring a new bill to amend our existing “Damage by Dogs” statute. Currently, this Florida law limits municipal breed bans and instead holds owners of dangerous dogs liable for their pets’ damage. Representative Thurston would...

Just made it through customs as of 10 AM EST. It's a good thing they didn't ask about all the baby goats I sidled up to in Cozumel with all the blisters around their mouths. In that case I'd still be in lockdown getting decontaminated and quarantined on some pier in Fort Lauderdale instead of...

After last week’s post on cats and cars, one of your comments reminded me of a great solution for cats who need some stimulating sunshiny living: outdoor enclosures.

Excited by the prospect of pushing this point, I Googled “outdoor cat enclosure: and was rewarded with a bounty of web pages...

In the past month, three different publications have called me to get my take on the theoretically impending recession and how that’s affecting my income. It’s kind of a personal subject but I’ve never been known to be shy on the topic of my own finances.

In this case I’m happy to report that...

Yeah, it’s true. Most people have a built-in fear of bugs. For some unlucky souls, however, the fear is far greater than what most of us would consider rational. A significant percentage of the population is afflicted with this problem. Indeed, it’s common enough for the psychiatric community to...

Every year, fleas and ticks headline the pet news. In the vet news, it typically begins in April with stories on what to expect from this year’s parasite season. Which diseases to look out for, what kind of new bugs might be in our midst, where they might be headed. It reminds me of the...

Alex Krooglik is the co-ounder of Embrace Pet Insurance. His company is one of the newest entrants into the pet health insurance marketplace. As part of my pet health insurance series, here I get to ask him anything I’d ever want to know about his company, his business and why he does what he...

Here’s a long post on the HSVMA (the new vet organization started by HSUS) written for last month’s Veterinary Practice News. It's a cautionary article for vets but it works for Dolittler readers, too:

If you graduated from vet school after 1981, you’ll have heard of the AVAR. The Association of...

Last month I wrote an article for the March issue of Veterinary Practice News on the HSUS and its resemblance to PeTA (reference my previous post). In it, I urged that vets who would look to the HSUS’s HSVMA as an alternative to the AVMA might do well to consider otherwise. In response, I...

It’s been a hit-by-car kind of week for kitties…

It started on Monday when I went for a lunchtime run and came across a neighbor’s cat who had sustained a gruesome and fatal traffic injury. Suffice it to say he’d succumbed instantly—this was no head trauma anyone recovers from under any...

So I guess it’s time to finally cough up the goods on the subject of pet health insurance. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to table your patience. The subject had gotten so big, broad and unwieldy that I’ll not have time to cover it in one single post. Over the next week, however, I’ll...

Like most vets, I recommend supplements; everything from multivitamins to therapeutic probiotics for optimal GI tract health. But not all vets expect your compliance on peripheral optimization of your pet’s health. In fact, many vets (albeit a dwindling number) still don’t actively recommend...

“When our pets are sick, they can't describe their symptoms, so we depend on veterinarians to tell us what's wrong. But are some vets are going too far, and taking advantage of helpless pets and their owners?”

Such is investigative reporter Ana Garcia’s intro for the “Vet Investigation” series...

A new article in last week’s Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) reported on the epidemiology of dog bites in Multnomah County, Oregon as tallied by its Animal Services department. The paper pinpointed those most at risk (5 to 9 year-old boys) and the profiles of the...

As if cancer isn’t bad enough, chemotherapy decisions are grueling in pet medicine. I guess that’s inevitable. After clobbering the client with the C-bomb, it makes sense they’d shut down all rational faculties and hear the buzzing in their heads overwhelm my well-rehearsed  discussion of...

I offer you this open letter to the lawmakers of Massachusetts now that this state has been recently targeted by the pet rental service FlexPetz. FlexPetz is a now-national chain providing pet rental services to those who would enjoy a pet but are unable or unwilling to make a firm commitment to...

“She’s a beaut! But is the cargo space big enough for a dead Mastiff? Alright-y then. Wrap her up, she’s mine!”

Coarse though it sounds, that’s the reality of selecting a car for some veterinarians. Gas mileage, crash test results and comfort? Like everyone else, that’s where we start. But just...

OK, so I’m not a total newbie. I’ve had Poppy for a full year now and this goat is doing great—but she’s a Nubian-cross, not a full-blooded Nubian. This new girl’s all Nubie and ready to breed once she tops the ninety-pound mark.

Though goats are truly pets for me (in fact, I’ll probably never...