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Home health check: Spot feline health problems early while petting your cat
By Christie Keith
February 4, 2009
It’s a lot easier to spot the signs of illness or injury in your cat if you’re familiar with how she looks, acts, and feels when she’s well. From this week’s Pet Connection newspaper feature:
To keep your cat healthy, you must be able to recognize what is normal for your pet so you can tell when something isn’t right. Changes in appetite, drinking habits, litter-box routines, grooming, and even a change in the sound of your cat’s voice can all mean trouble — and should mean a trip to the veterinarian.
Physical changes are important, too. A monthly hands-on examination will help you become aware of changes that could signify something serious.
Before starting a hands-on exam, though, stand back and study your pet for a few minutes. Consider his posture, activity level, gait, coat and overall appearance for an impression of good health. Trouble signs include exposed skin, thin or dry coat, ribs showing, sluggishness, limping or just a lack of “spring” in his step.
Gina and Dr. Marty Becker share a step-by-step physical exam you can give your cat while you’re curled up on the sofa together. What could be easier?
Does your dog lick the carpet? Susan Tripp, MS, and Rolan Tripp DVM discuss the causes of this annoying habit, and share some suggestions on what to do about it. Then, tips on parrot training from Gina:
Parrots are brilliant pets. They learn quickly and respond best to owners who practice consistent, firm handling and gentle training. Punishment is a parrot no-no.
Some guidelines:
- Learn when to leave your bird alone. Birds are emotional and sometimes quite moody, and there are times when it’s best just to let them be.
- Control your bird’s comings and goings. Instead of opening the cage door to let your pet out, ask your bird to step up onto your hand and then bring him out. Likewise, give the “step up” command when it’s time to put your bird back in his cage. This routine sends a message of leadership to your bird.
- Keep training sessions short and upbeat. Parrots are highly intelligent, but they don’t have the longest attention spans. They get bored easily. Several short interactive sessions a day — just a couple of minutes at a time — are better than one or two long ones.
- Don’t let your bird ignore a command. If you say “step up,” persist until your bird complies or you’ll set yourself up for trouble down the road. Birds are very smart, and if they figure a way around you, they’ll take it.
Dr. Marty Becker and Mikkel Becker Shannon have this to say about dogs, treats, and envy:
Loyalty may be why we love our dogs, but scientists have found that dogs can display a less-appealing attribute: envy. Austrian scientists found that a dog may stop obeying a command if he sees that another dog is getting a better deal.
Until now, chimpanzees and some monkeys were the only non-humans to show what is called “inequity aversion” in the absence of a reward. The study used well-trained dogs who offer a paw on command. The researchers put the two dogs side by side but treated them differently, giving one a better reward (sausage) and the other a lesser one (bread) when the paw was given, or giving one dog no reward at all. The quality of the reward made little difference. But in the case in which one dog got no treat at all, that dog became less and less inclined to obey the command.
All this and more, in our Pet Connection newspaper feature, which you can read right here.
You can also see it exactly the way we send it to our client newspapers here. (PDF)
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To me, pieces of the parrot advice are contradictory. “Learn when to leave your bird alone”—I agree completely, just as you don’t want to be bothered when you’re in a bad mood, sometimes your bird just wants to keep doing his own thing. But then “don’t let your bird ignore a command.” In my experience, this is the quickest way to teach a bird to bite early and often. If my bird is indicating to me that he really really really would not like to step up right now, by leaning away, moving away in the cage, or displaying body language cues of agitation, I am going to let him be. I am not going to force him to step up, because that tells him that humans ignore your very clear indications that you don’t want to do something, and the only way to communicate with humans is to bite them. If I want my bird to do something, I make sure he wants to do it too, and I will definitely resort to bribery to get it. In fact, I often ask him to go back into his cage by putting a treat in his dish, so that he doesn’t associate his cage with the end of fun times with me and will willingly go back in. To me, living with parrots, the sensitive and intelligent creatures they are, is not about firm leadership and telling them who’s boss, it’s about compromise. It’s about learning what he wants and figuring out how to convince him to do what I want and make him believe it was his idea in the first place.
Comment by Selasphorus — February 4, 2009 @ 1:22 pm
It’s about learning what he wants and figuring out how to convince him to do what I want and make him believe it was his idea in the first place.
Comment by Selasphorus — February 4, 2009
I hear that works with spouses, too.
Any advice written with a tight word count always ends up with some of the detail left out. Given a few hundred more words — and every writer always wants a few hundred more words, or a few thousands, believe me! — the expanded explanation would be that yes, with parrots it’s a bit of a balancing act.
But the basis of that advice is from my “Birds For Dummies.” And although I certainly don’t present myself as an expert parrot trainer, I don’t have any qualms saying my esteemed co-author, avian veterinarian Dr. Brian L. Speer, is the best there is. A great deal of what he does in private practice is give behavior advice, and the number of parrots he has worked with is simply to large to be counted.
Parrots do appreciate knowing they have a stable niche in a loving family, and that does mean demonstrating some leadership. Not abusive dominance, but subtle body-language and handling techniques that help your bird to understand and accept his place in your family.
That said, there are times with parrots where you just let them be. My own parrot goes through a bout of hormonal nuttiness every spring, where I become “abused spouse” to his macho parrotness. We work it through, every year, and it was Dr. Speer would helped with the “relationship counseling.”
Parrots are a total trip. Nothing else like them … except maybe pre-school children. :)
Comment by Gina Spadafori — February 4, 2009 @ 1:37 pm
Does advice aimed at parrots “hit” Cockatiels too, or are they different personality-wise?
Comment by Lori — February 4, 2009 @ 1:45 pm
I’m so glad you asked that!
“Parrots” are generally considered to be everything in the order Psittaciformes. And that’s everything from a budgerigar to a cockatoo to an Amazon to a Macaw.
So yep, cockatiels, too!
Although certainly there are differences in personality species to species. Some parrots, for example, can be a bit challenging for beginners (cockatoos are needy, louries are really messy) or not for people with a low tolerance for constant screaming (aratinga conures, such as the sun).
Good parrots for beginners: Cockatiels, budgies, poicephalus (Sengal, Meyers and Jardine) and pionus. Although think very carefully before jumping in, since parrot lifespans are lllloooonnnnnnnggggg.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — February 4, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
There is a cockatiel where I live. And while she’s not really my responsibility, I enjoy just watching her. She’ll walk all the way around the sides of her cage, go down the ladder, get one food pellet, walk all the way back around on the sides to her favorite perch, eat the one pellet, and repeat… I thought she would kind of sing, but she only whistles in one tone, really.
I did help name her, though. Her name is Weeks after Samantha Weeks the first female pilot in the USAF Demonstration Team, the Thunderbirds.
Comment by Lori — February 4, 2009 @ 2:31 pm