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Health Care Veterinarians’ prescriptions for what ails your pooch. Plus, a healthy dose of prevention advice.
Like so many of life’s firsts, first dogs have a special place in our hearts. Patch, the handsome and powerful German Shepherd of my youth, was no exception. I was a teenager when Patch’s healthy body began to deteriorate. At the time, I resigned myself to our family vet’s opinion that my 13-year-old dog was suffering from the chronic effects of hip dysplasia. |
February is national Pet Dental Health month— do you know where your dog’s toothbrush is? If not, put one on your list of things to pick up the next time you’re out, along with a tube of made-for-dogs toothpaste (human brands can upset a dog’s stomach, among other things). Daily brushing is one of the easiest things you can do to protect your dog’s overall health. |
Dog? Check. Buccal swab? Check. Apply the latter to the former, inside of cheek. Rub for 10 seconds. Voilà. DNA collected.
Until fairly recently, the garden-variety dog owner could only wonder if potential problems lurked in her dog’s DNA. Now, however, it’s possible to know—maybe not everything, but at least the possibilities. Which can be kind of comforting, since it allows you to focus your anxiety where it might be more useful.
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Denis Marcellin-Little is an orthopedic surgeon at the College of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University. Over the last seven years, he has been pioneering a remarkable intervention for dogs with missing legs, giving them prosthetic limbs that are permanently attached to their bodies. In the procedure, known as transdermal osseointegration, Marcellin-Little implants one end of a titanium rod into whatever remains of a dog’s leg, attaching the metal directly to the bone. Comments (1) |
What would you give to be able to spend another month, another week, or just another precious day with your best friend? Anyone who has ever loved and lost a pet has probably had such a wish.
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As a colleague of mine once said, “a spay is a procedure routinely performed, but it is not a routine procedure.” In the U.S., “spay” refers to the surgical removal of the ovaries and uterus. In Europe, however, removal of just the ovaries (ovariectomy) appears to be the most popular sterilization technique. Why are my European colleagues doing things differently, and is there evidence to suggest that they’re right? Is it possible to achieve the same surgical result using a less-complicated, less-involved procedure?
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