Cats may get the raw end of the deal when it comes to how much their owners are willing to pay for their medical expenses relative to dogs. And they may have fewer bucks thrown in their direction when it comes to research.

Despite the stats, we still love our cats like mad. Dogs may win out for now in terms of dollars but there’s no reason for that condition to persist. In fact, demographic

For your reading pleasure (and with the hopes of averting catastrophe, I’ve compiled a short list of home remedies best not undertaken. Feel free to contribute your own ideas on what works (and what might be unsafe) in your comments below.

1-Milk and oil for toad intoxication and seizures.

This may be a typically Miami home remedy but it’s not without a national presence. New York, California...

Though blood banks and transfusion medicine for animals seem a wonderful and necessary adjunct to our advances in veterinary care, the back-story behind the products and who gets to use them isn’t always as rosy as the prospect of high end care their presence in the marketplace represents.

Getting blood from dogs? It’s not too tough. But sourcing healthy dogs with the ability to donate...

There’s yet another crisis in the veterinary marketplace and it has nothing to do with the pet food safety issue or the veterinary service shortage I blogged on last month. This one’s more immediate and palpable, impacting perhaps thousands of pets every day in the US.

Have you ever stopped to wonder what would happen should your Fluffy get hit by a car and require a transfusion? No, me...

You heard right. It’s music arranged for dogs and orchestrated to ease their stress. It’s being employed specifically in veterinary settings where barking dogs, discomfort and pain are the rule. Psychoacoustic researchers and holistic veterinary practitioners swear by it.

An interesting collaboration between a sound researcher Joshua Leeds, a veterinary neurologist Susan Wagner DVM (no...

Like a good vet, I spent much of Sunday reading my scientific veterinary journals. True, I love the fluff bits and typically devour these first. If cartoons were included I’d likely read these, too, before moving on to the stiff bits of scientific rigor we’re expected to consume on a regular basis if we’re to be “all that we can be,” as it were.

Though I typically read it first, this past issue...

As in…”Sometimes I feel like a fomite.” OK, so that’s not quite right but it’s how I felt today after my early morning emergency tanked out two hours after his arrival. He’d succumbed presumably as the result of some mysterious infectious disease. “Tanked out”: as in… “Dead.”

A fomite is the F-word  we use to refer to inanimate objects that carry infectious diseases. Our shoes, for example,...

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 not so long ago on the question of flea product resistance.

It’s true that my clients are convinced...

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 fat—surgically.

Vet-Stem Regenerative Cell (VSRC) therapy is the company’s term for a proprietary process in...

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 anything vaguely resembling a mammal.

Now, I’m not a big lover of poison therapies but, unfortunately,...