Dog

Categories Apollo, Dog

Entertaining a teething puppy

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Apollo is teething.  He’s got adult teeth coming in all over his mouth, so far no baby teeth lost either.  And yes, he chews on all sorts of stuff in the process.  He’s got the oddest sense of what to pick too.  Yesterday he knocked the cat bed off its perch by the window (without a chew mark on it) so he could get at the no-skid mat underneath it.  Twice.  In about 5 minutes.  Sigh.  He’s going through rawhide like its icecream, and since there are limits to how much of that its safe to give a dog I had to go find something else.

The breeder suggested the smoked bones from the big petstores, she’s given them to her dogs for forever and they love them.  Well that worked for a while….till he got bored with them.  Nylabones held his attention briefly.  Same for other rubber chews.  Today I picked up a bone stuffed with cheese flavored stuff, and a generic copy of the Kong Wobbler.  I’ve no problem paying the Kong price, but without a better idea of whether or not he’d go for it I liked the generic’s $8 price tag a bit better.  So far so good.  He’s been alternating between the two.  He chews on the bone for a while, then goes and finds the wobbler, picks it up and shakes it till kibble falls out, eats, then goes back to chewing.  Its a reprieve.  At least a small one!

Oh, and it turns out hes not nearly so blase about going for a walk when the MALE  psycotic German Shepherd is out in the yard.  Sigh.

Categories Cats, Dog, Links, Rants

A warning for all pet owners to please pass along

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I saw this in an article a couple days ago, made sure it wasn’t a med I was using, and went on with my day. I completely missed how the parent company has chosen to handle this.

Short form: the flea and tick medication named Promeris has been determined to cause severe heath issues in a signifigant percentage of cats and dogs. If you are using this medication you should stop and contact your vet for an alternative. Pfizer however has decided to NOT recall the medication already on the market. Instead they’ve simply halted production. They estimate there is enough already on the market to last through September, or basically the entire flea and tick season.

See here for more information including basic information on the symptoms of the afor mentioned health problems.

Thanks to K9 Solutions blog for the link.

Categories Apollo, Cats, Dog, Rants

Don’t mess with my pets’ health.

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Ok, this is going to be a long winded rant as I get something off my chest that has been building for a couple weeks now.  I’m going to touch on (but not get into) a controversial topic in pet health, I’ll get into detail later, because its not the real cause of my upset.  For those of you who don’t want to read further, lets just say that my (now) former vet should be very happy I’m not the sueing type!

For those of you who are willing to read further, its a long story…..

Back on 2/28 we took our new puppy into our vets office for his new puppy checkup.  We knew going in that we were probly not going to meet a happy vet as we have chosen a non-standard vaccination schedule for our dog.  Sure enough the vet walked into the office prepared to administer vaccines (which even under the standard schedule shouldn’t have been the case at 10weeks of age), and then had a fit (I’m a vet, you’re not, I went to school…..), insisted we sign a waiver that we knew we were going against her wishes, then tried to tell us that the blood work we wanted (a vaccine titer, it tests for antibodies for the diseases vaccinated against) wouldn’t tell us anything helpfull, that she didn’t want to do one, and that she had no idea where to send it out to have it tested (which frankly OUGHT to be complete BS, any lab that can test for Lime disease can do a vaccine titer, never mind we’re all of an hour from Cornell).  We stood our ground, and insisted that we would have a vaccine titer done between 11 & 12 weeks of age.  She finally agreed.

Fast forward a week and a half, I bring Apollo in to have blood drawn for his titer, and they inform me that its going to cost $212 to have done.  I took a deep breath and agreed to have it done at that price.  I’d neglected to do my research to find out what the going rate was, and since at that point the puppy wasn’t travelling well at ALL I decided it wasn’t worth hauling him home to do so.

I fixed that lack of information as soon as I got home.  Online research showed that Cornell charges less than $40 for the titer in question.  Calls to several other vets offices resulted in an average rate between $50 to $100 depending on the lab used and their base rate for a vet tech’s time.  I was seriously peeved at that point and made the decision that once his titer results came back I would move all 3 animals to a vet closer to where we live now (the former vet was closer to where we were living).  And I did.

Apollo’s first checkup went fine.  The vet questioned my choice of vaccination schedule, but after determining that I was sure that was what I wanted, and that I knew WHY I wanted it, she agreed that they would work with me to manage what I wanted.  They charge $63 for the titer in question.

The first appointment for Trouble and Janie weren’t quite as smooth, or rather Janie’s wasn’t.  Trouble has always been healthy as a horse inspite of being a pudgy kitty, and so her portion of the visit was fine.  However when we got to Janie we discovered that not only was there no record of what medication the former vet had chosen to treat her thyroid with, they hadn’t recorded her thyroid levels in the records either.  Thankfully I knew the numbers that the vet had told me, and I had brought her pill bottle with me to the appointment.  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I wasn’t going to have to deal with that vet any further.

The new vet suggested a different medication for Janie’s thyroid, one thats in a chewable flavored tablet that might be easier for us to get down her (and it is!), took another blood sample from her to make sure that her thyroid had settled properly, and we went home.

The next day (!) the new vet called me with the results of the bloodwork.  Her thyroid had finally settled at normal, but her kidney and liver numbers were still high, better, but high.  News that I greeted with dead silence.  The previous vet had never said ANYTHING about her kidney and liver numbers being off.  AT ALL, but apparently they had put it in her medical records (but they couldn’t be bothered to record her thyroid levels???).  I said as much to the new vet, who promptly had her own moment of silence.  She explained then that high kidney and liver values weren’t unusual when the thyroid had been off for as long as Janie’s had been, and that although they weren’t back down to where they should have been they WERE dropping.  She wanted to test again in another 6 weeks to check on them, but at the moment Janie didn’t seem to be suffereing from any negetive affects from them so she was willing to leave her be.  I agreed and went on with my week.

Unfortunetly a week and a half ago that changed.  My husband called me at work to inform me that Janie was puking up everything, AND had diahrea that looked like flem.  I told him to call the vet, and I took her in that afternoon.   Two Xrays, and more bloodwork later (some of it very expensive bloodwork), and we have a diagnosis of pancreatitus.  Thankfully it seems to be responding to medication, and there’s a very good chance that has her liver and kidney numbers return to normal it will become less and less of an issue.  Sigh.  Poor kitty!! She is NOT happy with the number of pills she has to take, and I don’t blame her.  I’m just peeved.  Though I’m liking the new vet more and more!

Categories Dog

Possible solution…..

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….to a question asked in the comments here.  Helene commented that they were having trouble keeping their dog Bear close by when working the property, and asked if I’d any ideas.  At the time the answer was no.  Now however I just got home from the latest puppy class with Apollo and I might actually have a possible application to create a solution for her.


The problem is keeping the puppy close by, specifically to walk on a loose leash at heel, but also to stay close in all sorts of situations so that no matter the stimuli they turn to mom instead of lashing out in fear (a protection reaction in appropriate situations is different).

While working on a leash (walking, taking the puppy to go potty, whatever) abruptly step backwards a couple steps from the dog, when he turns to face you offer him a treat BUT (and this is important) you neither toss the treat to him, or offer it at arms length.  Instead you hold the treat up close to your legs so that in order to get it he has to come up close.

Once he proves adept at following your movements (which can take days) and staying close the next step is while doing something (working in the kitchen, talking to someone in the yard, something where your attention is not wholy on the dog but you are not generally in motion) you have him sit next to you or in front of you, as close as possible, and randomly hand him treats as long as he stays close.

The third step is to do this while walking or otherwise moving.

The concept is that “if I stay close to mom good things will come my way”.  Obviously eventually treats are fazed out, and given for only exemplary behavior.

The treats used for all of this should be of “high value” to the dog.  They should be something he WANTS, be it pieces of string cheese (a cheap easy way to get large quantities of small bits of cheese), bits of cooked chicken or turkey.  The instructor suggested using the food rolls sold as specialty food in the preferred flavor.  She cuts them up into little cubes, stashes handfulls into ziplock baggies and freezes them.  Grab a baggie, stash it in a large pocket or fanny pack or apron pocket and you have a handy treat that isn’t going to throw off your dogs diet.

Helene I’m not sure what kinds of work you’re doing when your talking about this, but I can see some possible applications that might make this work for you.  Is it something where you can attach the dog to you (for step 2 and 3 above) either by a clip from leash to belt or one of those jogging leash sets (they’re cheaper on Amazon) and then reinforce with treats regularly (obviously this depends on his overall leash manners, if hes going to pull you around this way then that won’t work)?

Reguardless it’ll take time.  Days or even a couple weeks of regular work on each step, and will probly require regular reinforcement in your situation.

Categories Apollo, Dog

So I took the puppy for a walk this afternoon.

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Which feels like it ought to be the start of a joke, but its not.

His leash manners are finially getting to the point where I can walk him down the road and expect to be able to maintain reasonable control.  Still not walking on a loose leash, or healing properly, or the like, but neither is he dashing off at every interesting smell and sight and attempting to pull me along.  At 15 weeks of age I’m happy with that progress.

So I grabbed the 6ft leash (we use a 30ft leash in the yard, so we don’t have to follow him into snowbanks or mud puddles) and convinced him that the formerly off limits road was safe to walk on today.  We didn’t do to badly.  Made it down and around the corner past the psycotic female German Shepherd who’s only restrained by an efence and training (her mate wasn’t out today thankfully), with minimal stopping and staring.  He figured out pretty quick that she wasn’t going to ACTUALLY come and get him even if she acted like it.  He did have a minor freakout at the balloon tied to their mailbox, kid must be having a birthday party cause there was a bunch of cars in the drive, and with her having a snit I didn’t quite dare bring him over to inspect it closer, but after a minute or two he decided it wasn’t a sign of the apocalypse after all and kept going.  Made it all the way down to the intersection with the next road before something (and I’ve no idea what, I THINK it was a fear reaction, but I’m not positive, and have no idea what caused it) caused him to whip around and head for home with all speed and determination.  I finally managed to get him to stop and turned him around to look behind us, see nothing was chasing us, and we managed the rest of the walk home at a reasonable speed.

He’s currently sleeping it off while “guarding” the kitty door to the bedrooms (he’s sprawled such that they can’t get in or out of the door to get at their food or litter box) which means that one of them will decide he MUST be moved eventually.  I’ll try to keep the video camera handy…..