Staranais

Have you rung around looking for some cheaper options? $6000 AUS sounds a little on the high side compared to the prices I've seen quoted for fixing a PDA, although I have no idea of the complications of your particular case so it might be entirely fair. But if I were you, I'd investigate further just in case you can get the PDA corrected more cheaply. If I were in your situation, I would get surgery if at all possible. It's risky, and it's expensive. But if it works, the dog has a very good prognosis for living a normal life. If surgery isn't an option, I would probably keep him until quality of life deteriorates, before giving him his wings. They tell us that about half of dogs with a PDA will die within a year without surgery, but each dog is different - you don't know how long your boy will last. He might surprise you.

I never leave my dog alone with fresh bones (except for those huge cannon bones, where the worst she could do is chip a tooth, she couldn't possibly chew off a bit and choke on it). She gets edible bones, but only when I'm home to watch her. And I will only feed soft bones that won't splinter and form shards. So mostly she only gets brisket, flaps, fish heads, and sometimes chicken backs. I think it's up to the individual owner to weigh up the risks of feeding, and not feeding, bones. They're great for dental health, and I think they're great behavioural enrichment too. But they certainly can cause serious health issues if you're unlucky.

It's the nitrogen, not the pH, doing the damage. Dog urine rarely gets more acidic than rainwater. Getting the urine more dilute (by getting the dog to drink more by flavouring the water, or feeding wet not dry food) or feeding less protein are supposed to be two ways to help the problem. But I suspect some dogs just make more patches than other dogs do, regardless of what you feed them, due to genetic differences perhaps.

Intra operatively, you know it's a success, so for eg, doing a splenectomy, its considered a success if the spleen is removed and there's no haemorrhaging. Same things with an intestinal operation, if you tie off the wrong thing, you'll see the intestine going blue pretty quickly. The students were actually encouraged that if they wanted to take home one of the dogs or cats, they were allowed. Yes. You also have the surgery teachers watching over your shoulder as you operate, telling you you've done a part of the surgery well, or why you've done a bit badly & how you should do it better next time. They're experts, and have done thousands of surgeries, so they know if what you're doing is good or bad, and they tell you. We were not allowed to wake up & keep our sheep, partly I suppose because they're not pets, but also partly because it is considered cruel to do unnecessary invasive procedures then wake them up to suffer through the recovery. They apparently used to do multiple recovery surgeries on the same sheep during the year, but doing non recovery surgeries as we do now is considered kinder and less stressful (although it uses more sheep), so now we only have ethics approval to do non recovery. I'm glad we don't do non recoveries on dogs, I'd find it emotionally challenging. Dissecting already dead dogs, and being involved in euthanising and postmorteming various animals, is hard enough for a softie like me. Although I have learned a lot from doing it on sheep, and am very happy I had the experience.

Perhaps education for primary or even secondary school kids on picking a dog, caring for a dog, and what happens to dogs that end up and the SPCA or pound. Most clinics I've been to already subsidise desexing heavily compared to other major surgeries, simply because people expect it to be cheap. But the council further subsidising it for low income owners would be a great idea.

Both. When I pat my side & say "here", my dogs will come & stand beside me, facing the same way, kind of like a heel position I guess. Generally they are looking at me. When I say the word "ready", they look away from me & straight ahead. I never release unil they are looking straight ahead. I think of "ready" as a position, they are beside me & focussing ahead. Oh, I get it, thanks! I will give this a go. Yes please Vickie! That would be very helpful.

Erny, I know that bone cancers are more common at sites where implants (bone plates, & bone pins) are. So I guess it's possible that other implants like microchips could raise the chance of cancer at the site. Like VetG though, I would wonder how if the studies distinguished vaccine related sarcomas (a proven phenomenon in cats, especially with the rabies & feLV vaccines) from cancers caused by microchips, since they'd be found in the same location?

Ooh, could you please explain this a little more, Vickie? It sounds interesting but I don't quite get it yet. By teaching a position, do you mean like sit or stand or down? Or a position like, look away from me? & by a lateral movement, do you mean like sending her between targets in front of me?

Thanks for all the ideas so far, people! I think I'll experiment with placing or throwing the toy ahead of the obstacle before releasing her, & see if that makes any difference to where she chooses to stare as she waits to be released. I'm thinking she might understand the difference between being marked & me playing with the toy (for a correct performance), and her getting to the toy but not getting playtime with it (for an incorrect performance), so I'll play around with it and see where we get. Just waiting for her to look away merely seems to frustrate and confuse her, although I'll go that route if I have to do so. Also thanks for the all the different DVD recommendations, although to be frank I probably won't be able to get any dog DVDs for a wee while yet.

For what it's worth, I think I've eaten Teflon before and I feel fine.

Tenille, even as a worst case scenario, I bet you could still do tracking with your dog. Tracking champion is nothing to be sniffed at!

I've got to ask... why? Why did they decide these colours weren't OK, who decided it, and what were the reasons behind the decision? I can see that maybe cream would have skin cancer associated with it, but why not blue & tan, or chocolate & tan?

Thanks Ness! Do you mean you throw the food before sending her, or after? Yes, that is an interesting thought. She is actually already very good at watching the dumbbell after I throw it for her to retrieve, so perhaps throwing the toy and then letting her run to it past the poles is an idea? At the moment she runs, then I throw when she's successfully negotiated the last pole (so it lands in front of her). The only issue is that then I can't choose whether to reward her or not, so if she buggers up the entrance, she still get the toy? She has officially gotten the all clear to try some jumping (hooray!) but I'm an overprotective dog owner, so she'll be jumping at ridiculously small heights for a while yet! I'll try to get my paws on a copy. Not sure if anyone I know will have it, but sounds useful.

I don't have nearly the experience that Rappie does, but of the animals I've seen in practice, I would have to agree that most over the age of 3 would have had some degree of periodontal disease. There are some really foul mouths out there. I know very little about the vaccine. Maybe it will turn out to be a good alternative for dogs with genetically really bad mouths, or if the owners can't or won't brush, or can't or won't feed bones. But for my own animals I think I'd rather try brushing first, if RMB weren't doing the job for my dog (and they don't, for some dogs). Brushing is pretty quick and easy to do once the dog is used to it, & controls plaque really well if you do it regularly. You can even get chicken flavoured toothpaste.

Wow, he is gorgeous! I've mostly only ever seen black & tan huntaways, never anything as exotic as a merle, so I'm guessing the merle must have come from the koolie parent? But of course it's not a registered breed, so no one who breeds them would care if they were pink so long as they worked really well. I love huntaways, they're fantastic working dogs.

I just get small chunks of red meat or liver, and bake it slowly in the oven on a low heat until dried out. You can do this with dog roll too but have to bake it very slowly. I try to make them dry on the edges so they're nice to handle, but mushy in the middle so they're tasty. Pup loves them, and they're very healthy.

How do you agility people change the behaviour of dogs that have too much handler focus, and not enough obstacle focus? Most of you know the background to the question - 16mo malinois girl is on heat, I have to do something to exercise her on the property, so she's temporarily become my experimental agility puppy. So I have managed to get her weaving two sets of two poles so far. They're not stuck together yet, and not parallel yet, but I'm really happy with her level of understanding & motivation. She will enter the poles correctly at a run from various angles, no matter where I am or what I am doing, and she will keep running past the last set to intercept the toy she knows will appear from above. My issue is that when she waits for me to release her to the poles, she will not look at the poles, she will look at me. This is reasonable, as in the past she has always been taught that watching me is the best way to get released to do what she wants. In general I like this behaviour. But in this instance, it's not ideal, since she often misses the entrance of the poles when I release her. She runs so fast when released that if we are close to the poles, she hasn't really got time to see the poles & find the entrance before she hits them. I could start further away, but that's not really fixing the issue, and I'd like to fix it. I'd like her to stare intently at the poles until released, instead of staring intently at me! I initially thought I'd just wait her out & release when she happened to glance at the poles, but she just doesn't give up, and will stare at me ever more and more intently, getting more and more spun up ("ha, lady! You can't trick me into looking away! I will stare at you and scream until you release me!") And even if she glances away from me, it's not to look at the poles. I have created a handler focus monster! How do you all create obstacle focus in an agility dog?

Fair or not, I suspect the reactions would probably depend not only heavily on the situation, but also on how you were dressed, on what gender you are, and on how you acted. i.e., are you a seedy looking guy taking photos of girls in bikinis on the beach with a zoom lens (creepy)? Or are you a professionally dressed person taking photos of fully dressed girls on the street (much less so)? Also, are you following someone around taking multiple photos of just them (creepy), or are you discretely snapping shots of lots of people (much less so)? etc etc It is a very interesting topic to think about.

Sometimes it's not an option since the bubbies are already born. The friend I mentioned, she currently is fostering one mumma cat that was dumped with four tiny babies, and also has two tiny orphans kitties that were apparently found with a dead mother. But I do think that you do have a point, in that sometimes aborting a pregnant animal is a better option than letting it have babies that also have to be rehomed.

OK that makes more sense, and on the whole I agree with you. But... what about rescue puppies and kittens? I have a friend fostering some orphan baby kittens for the SPCA right now. Should they be given away for free, or PTS, or kept until they are adults before they can be sold? Or can the SPCA sell them when they are 8 weeks old? Perhaps genuine rescues should be exempt from the rules of only breeders being allowed to sell puppies and kittens.

I kind of liked it until that bit. What's an aggressive "breed"? They were doing so well in explaining that any dog could bite, until that point.

Really? I find that hard to believe Steve, but would be interested to know your reasons. In that case, that would mean any cat & dog whose breeder can't be identified must either be PTS or given away free? That would pretty much be the nail in the coffin of rescues, since they can't survive on nothing.

Hooray, and thank goodness!

Sorry, more to add for anyone who is interested in a vet student's perspective. I'd also like to point out that at my university we do do lots of recovery surgeries - in final two years we do all the desexing for the local SPCA, we also run a small and large animal hospital and operate on many client's animals. These are very important experiences, but different to doing non recovery surgeries. I have come to believe that doing both are ideal when you are learning to be a surgeon. Recovery surgeries are valuable. But non recovery surgeries are too, in a different way - they not only give you more surgeries under your belt, but give you experience in doing (simulated) rarer operations, and give you experience in managing (simulated) anaesthetic or surgical emergencies. This is so important, as many vets will have to do these things on their own, unsupervised, as soon as they graduate. We don't have a prolonged, supervised, internship like human surgeons do. When a vet student graduates, the buck stops with them. It's not good if you're trying to work out how to do a bloat surgery when you are presented with an unstable, dying, septic, bloating dog (since you never got to practice it at your recovery-only school, since you didn't get a bloating dog on your surgical rotation). And it's not good if the first time you try to manage an anaesthetic emergency is in your first month in practice, after hours, unsupervised, on someone's beloved pet (since you never got to practice it at your recovery-only school, since it never happened during a recovery surgery). It is important to make sure that the animals we use are treated humanely and compassionately. But just banning all non-recovery surgeries is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When I was doing some overseas work, I worked with one new grad vet from a British university where they did not do non-recovery surgeries. They were only allowed to operate on whatever happened to walk in the door, and had to recover all the animals, so the students only got the "easy" cases. I am not sure if it was just her, but she was the most incompetent, indecisive surgeon I have met in my life (although a lovely girl). I would not have let her anywhere near my animals. I would hate to graduate with as little experience as she had.

I'd need a little more information before I'd sign that, I think. If these are rehomeable animals that were only PTS for the purposes of learning, then I do have an issue with that. If the cats and dogs were going to be PTS anyway, I see no trouble with students using them to learn via non recovery surgery. It's not an inhumane way to die - it's generally at least as kind as being PTS any other way. The animal is sedated, then put under anaesthetic, exactly the same as any other pet having an operation. The only difference is that the animal isn't allowed to wake up after the surgery. I've personally learned a whole heap from doing non recovery surgeries, things you just don't learn as easily from doing recovery surgery, and that you definitely don't learn when dissecting a dead animal. At my university we do non recovery surgery on sheep, not cats & dogs, which I am grateful for since as a dog and cat owner I find it emotionally easier (although I'm not sure it's "morally" better). I had reservations before doing this - I'm a big softie, I won't even eat sheep - but I have to say I learned an incredible amount from my non recovery surgeries, and I think they will make me a better vet when I graduate. Our sheep were treated very respectfully - most if not all of us would have treated them kindly anyway, but we also had it drummed into us by all the staff that using these animals was a huge privilege and that we must be very respectful to them. Our sheep had a far kinder end than they would have gotten at the meat works, since the last thing they knew was being sedated then going under anaesthetic, not going on a scary truck and then being captive bolted. So I would oppose any petition trying to stop all non-recovery surgeries. I think banning non-recovery surgeries would be misguided, and not help anyone. As I said above, if they are killing cats and dogs that could be rehomed, then that IMO is a different matter.