Archives: Uncategorized

Sweet Irma Follow-Up

The ever so heartwarming tale of Irma the gentle 8 year old rescued Rottweiler (for those not familiar with Irma, see my 2/18/2008 post titled Sweet Irma) has gotten even more touching. Now long fully recovered from her life saving procedure, she lives free of pain or discomfort. However, with her surgical procedure having left her lower jaw 25 % shorter, Irma was having a...

What Species Make Better Family Pets (dogs or cats)?

This was the topic of the latest Web-DVM poll that yielded the following results: of the 202 participants in the poll, 52% voted for dogs, 24% voted for cats, 20% voted for both, and 4% voted for neither. I was very curious to arrive at these polling results, as I find that the breakdown of my office visits in practice seem to be consistent with this finding. While I have not...

Pet Owners, Control Your Children!!!

Before I begin this brief venting session, please let me be clear that I love [good]children and truly see them as a miracle, a notion that is substantiated in the fact that my wife is expecting our first child in what has been a very planned pregnancy. That aside, one of the biggest aggravations I have to deal with as a veterinarian in recent years is children that are out of...

You Never Know

Tuesday afternoon, I was presented with a very sick and rapidly deteriorating 13 year old, male, German Shepherd, that ended up with a grim diagnosis of severe chronic renal failure (kidney failure). This left me in the always uncomfortable but necessary position of having to inform the owners who love this dog dearly of their beloved pet’s bleak circumstances. When...

Should Pit Bulls Be Banned?

There is a movement in our country to implement the banning of a dog breed known as the Pitt Bull Terrier, due to claims by proponents of this policy that these dogs are innately dangerous to society. A recent web poll posted on the Web-DVM, polling visitors on whether these canines should be banned, yielded the following results: Of 172 visitors that participated in the...

Sweet Irma

Irma is an 8 year old Rottweiler who is as gentle, friendly, and calm as any dog can be. Unfortunately, up until the point when I first met Irma, she had lacked a stable/loving home for most of her life, having been given up and then passed around in foster care for a while. I first met Irma when her newest owner of one week, Barry, had brought her in for a swelling under her...

Careful pet owners, charlatans now target your pets!

Charlatans have been around since the beginning of human history. They use your love of health and well being for yourself and your loved ones to convince you that their concoctions born of quackery and pseudoscience are the answer to good health. They tag their so called remedies with titles like “homeopathy,” “alternative medicine,” and...

Incredible but true. . .

This is a little segment I like write periodically about recent experiences that seem hard to believe. Whether funny, inspirational, despicable, stupid, or miraculous, as incredible as these short stories may seem, they are oh so true. . . The Horny Pit bull A nice senior age gentleman brought his pit bull in for having a right sided head tilt. He explained that despite the...

Missouri, you should be ashamed!

The puppy mill situation in our nation is appalling beyond comprehension. For those of you that are not aware of what a puppy mill is, it is a facility where tens to hundreds of dogs are kept in cages and repeatedly bred to continuously pump out litters of puppies. In many cases, the breeding animals are let out of the cages very infrequently or not at all. Puppy mill dogs are...

“But doc, isn’t he too old for anesthesia?”

This is a question I get at least once, some times several times a day in daily practice, following my recommendation for a senior age patient to undergo a necessary procedure that requires anesthesia. Whether it is a severely needed dental prophylaxis, tumor removal, or castration for an enlarged prostate, pet owners tend to have serious trepidation toward the administration...