Your Pet's Best Friend

Is this blog neglected? Well, Yes... and No.

I just haven't had the time at night to play on the blog much lately.  I've got several cases that I intend to post, but they are still sitting on the back burner.  If you look at the date of the last post, it looks like I've just been ignoring the blog.

The thing is, there is hardly a day that goes by without my devoting at least twenty or thirty minutes to the blog.  "Oh,yeah?" [sez you] "Then where are all the posts?  Did your dog eat your homework?"

What I'm doing in those thirty minutes is doing my best to answer questions from readers who have found the blog while researching their pet's particular problem.  Even though I certainly cannot prescribe for a pet that I have not examined, sometimes I can clarify a situation, or make suggestions.  Sometimes they just have questions that weren't addressed in the original post, but are related to the topic.

I receive questions from around the country, and even Europe and (today) Tanzania. 

There are some topics that either really concern a lot of pet-owners, or are simply the most poorly explained on a regular basis.  I have not counted the questions [comments] that I have received, but take a look at the number on these posts, and you'll see where the blog time goes.

Heat Cycle Basics,Anal Sac Problems, Aural Hematoma, Heart Attacks in Dogs

Give me the ball... ALL of it!

This is Shockey.  He's a highly trained member of local law enforcement.  Need a canine officer to search for drugs or detain a suspect?  He's your man... dog, I mean.

Even a highly trained dog sometimes is not perfect.  In his training, his handler was accustomed to using a tennis ball to reward him in play.  Apparently the tennis ball was providing a lot more motivation than the trainer and handler had counted upon.

One day, Shockey refused to relinquish the ball.  Training had given the handler a procedure to follow under these circumstances, and eventually he recovered the tennis ball... sort of.

In the process of arguing with his handler about who would retain custody of the ball, Shockey gave the ball a pretty savage chewing.  A dog's big back teeth are designed to shear off chunks of his prey so that he can gulp them down.  The big piece is what the handler obtained.  All the other pieces were sheared off and gulped down.

Fortunately,  I was able to retrieve the debris by the simple expedient of inducing vomiting. No surgery  was needed to extract it (before or after a blockage occurred).  The irony of this situation is that we had to do this on a night emergency basis because I had not yet finished preparing the officer's emergency kit for dealing with accidental drug ingestion.  If I had finished it (and now I have), the officer could have used his kit to induce vomiting right at home. 

Of course, the up side is that the officer got to see a real-life demonstration of how to induce vomiting... and watch me clean it up.  Ah, yes, seven years of college (sigh).