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Anyone who has been around a dog knows that dogs communicate with their tails. Low wagging tails indicate submission. Relaxed waving tails can indicate relaxation and happiness. A stiff and high, slowly waving tail can indicate alertness or aggression. A friendly, wagging tail makes us smile and improves our bond with our dogs. Communication is an obvious function of your dog’s tail. But dogs may depend on their tails as part of their locomotion as well, just like scientists think … Read more

We love our dogs and want to take the best care of them, but we have to keep in mind that they belong to a different species than we do. Many of their features are very dissimilar from ours. We all remember as kids being warned that we should “wash behind our ears”. How about dogs? How often should their ears be cleaned? A healthy dog that spends most of her time indoors, may not require routine ear cleaning and … Read more

Thump, thump, thump. Jingle, jingle, jingle. These are not the sounds of Santa Claus and his reindeer. These are the familiar sounds of an itchy dog. Itching, also called pruritis, is triggered by nerves in the skin. Anything that makes the itch nerves fire can create itching. Scratching dogs can drive us crazy! We just want to make it stop! The first step to solving the problem is trying to figure out why your dog is itching. Related: 4 Best … Read more

Do you have an older dog? Are you noticing changes in him/her? The most important thing that you can know is that aging is not an illness and there are things we can do to help dogs deal with some of the common age associated disorders. Joint issues are often age-associated troubles. Arthritis is a joint problem so extremely common that it gets overlooked and left untreated. Any living thing with bones and joints can get arthritis. More correctly called … Read more

Sleep is necessary for us all. Sleep allows our bodies to rest and regenerate and dogs are no different. Healing can occur during rest times and our brains and bodies need to reset during the inactive times that we sleep. Studies also show that there is a relationship between sleep and learning. 1 We know that sleep is important for ourselves and our dogs, so we would like to know how to tell if our dog is sleeping well. There are … Read more

Cheese is a favorite of a lot of humans. We love it and many of us keep it in our refrigerators almost all the time. We also love our dogs and like making them happy by sharing whatever we enjoy with them. We care about our dogs enough to know that we are responsible for keeping them safe, too. We humans can read labels and learn about food items to make educated choices while our dogs trust us enough to … Read more

Dogs can be allergic to things in the air, just like people. In people, this is commonly called “hay fever”, but it is not characterized by fever and it is not usually from hay either! Actually, hay fever is more accurately termed atopic dermatitis, which just means that the skin is inflamed in response to an antigen that is inhaled. Makes a little more sense when you call it what it is, huh? It might help to know a little … Read more

Marking behavior in a pet dog is a frustrating, but fairly natural behavior among dogs. There are many reasons for marking behavior, but no matter how natural it is, if your dog is marking inside your home, it is a problem. First, you have to decide if the behavior is actually intended to be a communication for your dog. Since you cannot ask your dog if he peed on something as a signal, you need your vet to help. A … Read more

You can bet that during your dog’s lifetime, he/she will need some type of surgery. Whether is to be spayed or neutered or it is to remove a skin tumor, anesthesia is a part of our world today and as a society, we are fortunate that anesthesia exists. Otherwise, many of us would not even be here to read this. Without surgical intervention, many of my patients would have been lost. The definition of anesthesia is a temporary loss of … Read more

There is some buzz about joint care supplements. People are intrigued by an opportunity to circumvent or augment the usual recommendations and drawn by the lure of alternative (non-traditional) options. In the past, veterinarians have been skeptical of complementary medicine, but joint supplements containing ingredients like glucosamine, chondroitin and others have science backing their effectiveness. Good Things Come to Those Who… Supplement? Studies have indicated that ingredients like glucosamine and chondroitin (and others) can reduce the inflammation in canine patients … Read more

Some dogs seem to love to chew and the object of their chewing destruction can sometimes be our shoes. Let’s face it… we play our part in their shoe fetish because it is so easy to leave shoes lying around where dogs can get them. But why do dogs do this? Chewing is normal behavior for dogs. Since dogs have evolved as scavengers, dogs have learned never to waste resources. This is the reason dogs will eat and chew items … Read more

Every dog lover knows the smell. If you blindfolded us and tested us, we could all pick out the smell of “wet dog”. It is a fairly distinctive scent, even for our noses which are really quite feeble among the noses of the animal world.  So why do dogs stink when they are wet? The answer lies partly in the way noses work. In a nutshell, mammalian olfaction (the ability to smell) is a complex interaction between scent molecules and receptors … Read more

Our dogs’ noses are visible to us (and often in our faces). We can easily note any changes in something that is so apparent to us and vets often get asked about warm and dry noses. In the past, people have said that a dry and warm nose means that a dog is ill. Dogs are not like humans in the way their bodies manage heat and moisture. Your dog cannot sweat in the way that you think of perspiration. … Read more

Many of us love chocolate, and our dogs may seem interested in the tasty treat they see us eating. Our dogs can smell it (even better than we can) and they see us indulge. But they do not know that chocolate can make them very ill, or could even be fatal. There are two ingredients toxic to dogs in chocolate, theobromine and caffeine. Caffeine can cause tremors, increased heart rate, and other cardiovascular side effects. Theobromine is actually the more … Read more