Sheridan

Recommending health insurance is all very well and good but what happens when the dog is ineligible, say, due to age? I can't get insurance for my old boy because he's over ten. What I do instead is pay into the vet's account each fortnight.

Why would it take three weeks for the pound to desex the dog?

My little girl's on Bonnie Complete which is around $36 for 20 kilos. I tried her on Orijen and she hated it so back to the cheapo stuff she went. She loves Bonnie.

Unless the dogs have some sort of deficiency, I'd be trying a well balanced diet instead.

I can get Grumpy to disappear under my bed for several hours just by mentioning the word 'brush'.

Yes, take the dog to another vet. Get copies of the blood test results from the current vet. No vet should have a problem with that. The first time I got asked why I wanted copies of particular tests, I just stared at the vet and said that it was my dog, I paid for the blood tests and was entitled to a copy of the results. They should receive as many copies of results as there were tests.

Cutaneous t-cell lymphona is probably what they meant. Excerpt: If it's this then those patches may not be ringworm.

Buy a fly swat.

I understand from an email list I'm on that dachshunds are often still used for hunting in Germany. It's unlikely that they'd be able to do so if they were constantly prone to putting their backs out. Since the problem appears to be largely hereditary, what are breeders doing to breed it out?

ditto. Surely the carer knew this old dog was in its last legs well before it got to this point. How very sad that an old dog passed with pain I knew my last dog had been given a death sentence the day he was diagnosed with a protein wasting kidney disease. It didn't stop me from trying to do everything I could to stave off the inevitable. People come to that most painful decision in their own time and usually when the dog lets the owner know that it's time.

When I did PPS with my last wheaten, we went for one class then left. It was run by a company whose reputation, I've since found, is not that great. There was a 3 month old lab puppy who terrorised my 9 week old wheaten. The owner did nothing, the trainer did nothing and, in fact, told me not to do anything, and my dog was terrified and end up being sick. I ignored this advice but not soon enough. I got my money back and went elsewhere. The second one was better but it took some work for him to get over the first experience. He spent several of the classes hiding behind me before plucking up enough courage in the final weeks to have a little play.

What are the animal fats? Chicken?

Try West Queanbeyan vets. Not sure how much it would cost, though. They were very good with a rescue dog.

On one US email list I'm on it was mentioned that the cheapo rawhide chews from overseas get preserved in formaldehyde. Could be apocryphal but given the dog food scare from China, I wouldn't be feeding them.

Which Super Human model? I'm looking at the dryers on CLipperworld here: http://www.clipperworld.com.au/shop/index....Cat&catId=6 Do you know if the SD1000 mentioned can be used hands free? You can buy something like a groomer's arm thing to hold the SD1000. I think Clipperworld have them.

I recently bought the Oldfield SD1000 for a friend and it's great. Costs around $400, though.

I think dyeing a wheaten terrier and a kerry blue terrier's coats defeats the point of having breeds where the coat colour is an integral part of the dog, so wouldn't do it. Don't care if other people do it.

If he doesn't require much work, Narelle at Roll Over Rover does a good basic job. She's a chow chow breeder so is used to 'difficult' coats. She also put up with my first wheaten who had to have three people hold him to do his feet. She has a bundle of crates. Roll Over Rover is in Grovedale, which isn't close to West but your sister could always double up with a buy at Merle's cakes which is a few shops down from Roll Over Rover.

Nekhbet and all, that may be why the vet hasn't given it to the dog. I wrote down what the dog's being given but, of course, I can't find that scrap of paper at the moment. I'll post when I sort out all the unpaid bills that it's hidden in ...

Thanks for that, folks. I don't believe Ivomec is being given so I'll get her to ask the vet about it.

Friend's westie x has demodetic (sp?) mange. Not too bad at the moment but getting worse. She's been told to bath the dog twice a week and she's been given various antibiotics for her. Vet says that the problem was made worse by cortizone tablets that the dog was being given when they adopted her because it just masked the problem to start with rather than it being treated. I know some westies are prone to skin problems and would be interested in hearing from anyone with a westie with a skin problem and those who have had dogs with mange. They'd like to sort this out pretty quickly because the vet was making pts noises.

Sparky, what measurement was used for the creatinine? My dog's results came in mmol/L, where the range is 0.06-0.16. My dog's was 0.61 mmol/L. The US specialist said that his (various) levels were six times higher than any other dog she'd seen. :D The drip brought that down then?

What sort of kidney disease? There are different sorts and could have a bearing on the type of diet. Bear in mind re the Yahoo kidney-dog groups, that the Americans (in particular) are dead keen on supplements. I got lots of recommendations for supplements, many of which were not available here and which actually replaced good food. You need a low but good quality protein diet that's low in things like phosphorus. You'll need a binding agent and the K/D diet from Hills might work well. My dog wouldn't eat it but by then he was too far gone. Hope the drip works. It didn't for my dog but PLN is a very different disease to other kidney diseases. Bear in mind with the drip, your dog may become oedemic. If that's so, a Lasix injection may help. If the K/D doesn't work, take a look at the Ultra Z/D as the protein in it is hydrolised and will last longer in the system.

Edited because the issue is no longer an issue and no one responded anyway.

Last year for cataracts and nuclear sclerosis. He had neither, just normal ageing lenses. It may have worsened, of course.