Today a lady arrived at our door with a drooling, twitching puppy, and around a half-gallon of insecticide. It had been a full gallon when she left the house. When she returned home from her errand, she found the puppy in considerable distress. He had chewed on the spray-tube apparatus, and managed to drain half […]
Author Archives: Doc
We can do so many wonderful things with medicine and surgery that we begin to think we can fix anything. If we just do the right thing, make the right choices, do the right tests, perform the right treatments, we can make the patient well again. Well, doing the right thing is certainly better than […]
People are searching the internet for information on how to care for their pets. Some veterinarians hate this. Not me. It would be pretty hypocritical for me to rant about "Dr. Internet" when I sort of am "Dr. Internet". The thing is, I try to confine my advice to subjects that I personally know well. […]
I received a review copy of Sleeping With the Beast, by Dale Ryan. It’s not your everyday dog-book. To quote the dust jacket notes, “In Sleeping With the Beast, Dale Ryan invites us into her home for a close-up view of what it’s like to live with dogs – from cooking to decorating to gardening […]
Well, it seems like only yesterday that I was writing about the importance of consulting a specialist, and here we have a case in point. Jack looks a lot like the cat in one of our favorite pictures, “The Favorite Cat”. A print hangs in our family room. He’s an older cat, and he has […]
My tag-line that follows my signature on Veterinary Information Network is “I’m lost, but I’m making good time.” When I am putting a puzzling case up for consultation, I have already done one of two things. One is, I’ve done everything I know how to do, and I’m still stumped. The second is, I’ve reached […]
In a nearby small town, the counselor organizes a “career fair” every two years. She doesn’t call on the same professions each time, as she presents the program to the entire body of middle school and high school students. No point hearing about the same career twice, especially if you didn’t want to hear it […]
My last post about cats hating restraint was more directed at being physically held down. This is about a cat named Murphy, named for Murphy's Law ("Anything that can go wrong, will.") He hospitalized a while back because of an intestinal obstruction. He had consumed a pinky-sized portion of cat-toy and it stopped about half-way […]
I find that sometimes cat-owners are reluctant to have their pets sedated for examinations and what appear (to the casual observer) to be minor procedures. When I recommend this, it is really done for the cat’s benefit as much as mine. If you’re a cat-lover, you already know that you have to more or less […]
The horsehair worm is a parasite that lives in water, and its larvae infect insects. Every year or two, a panicky client finds one of these in a toilet bowl, water dish, or a bit of pet vomit. They do not infest the pets, but the crickets or beetles may be eaten by a pet, […]