pet connection

I took the day off from writing yesterday to train dogs. Ive got two young working dogs here who have been giving me the stink eye for not working them much during the summer heat. Finally, it’s starting to feel a little like fall, so they got back to work.

I’m not an outdoorsy person, and I think of this whenever I’m in the training group, out on the training grounds, sitting in a camp chair with a bag of bumpers for throwing, a duck call for getting the dog’s attention  and a starter’s pistol standing in for the shotgun. (We all take turns helping each other train, so if someone’s running a dog, other people are out in the field throwing.)

McKenzie, who has been in and out of training as many times as I’ve co-authored books in her life (that would be eight), did splendidly. She loves the retrieving everything and anything, loves swimming and loves pleasing people. It’s a great combination.

But I came home too wind-burned, sun-burned and filthy dirty to do anything more yesterday afternoon than peel off the dirty clothes, take a long, hot shower, feed everyone and crash. (Update: I forgot to mention bug-bitten, which I’m now discovering. Yikes, must remember the DEET.)

So now I’m up at 5 a.m., dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on this week’s syndicated feature, which is off to our darling editor Greg Melvin at Universal Press in about an hour. And then, off to the day job.

(The picture of McKenzie is from last spring, and here’s a hint why that’s kinda obvious: Green is NOT the color of late summer in California.)

Update, good reads elsewhere: I like Dr. K’s post on the top 10 reasons to break up with your vet. I love my vet, absolutely love him, and I don’t know what I’ll do when he retires. But I would fire his practice in a heartbeat. The place was purchased by a chain and remodeled into a super-hospital in a grand new location. It offers absolutely top medicine with all the bells and whistles, but the handling of clients leaves much to be desired (with the exception of the couple of staff members who pre-dated the buyout and are still wonderful). The front desk never seems to have a clue that I’m a regular client, even though I’m there all the time, and I have one helluva time getting through to my vet, since they’re trained to keep people away from the professional staff.

Once I get my vet, either in person or on the phone, everything snaps into place. But until then … It’s pretty clear that the chain ownership believes my entire reason for being is that I have a credit card. And that the staff’s entire reason for being is to extract money from my credit line without bothering the doctors.

The place has never given me the warm-and-fuzzies, to say the least.

Be sure to check the comments on Dr. K’s post.  The “grounds for divorce” added to by commenters are wonderful, as always.

Interestingly enough, I once split with my own doctor over this very thing. I felt as if I were a widget, not a person, and was treated like a piece of paperwork by the office staff of the multidoctor practice. Once I got in to see the doctor, she was great. But getting help or getting in … well, let’s just say I got very, very tired of listening to “The Girl from Ipanema” while an office staffer who couldn’t have cared less if I were dying on the other end of the line put me on hold and left me there, forever.

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Nancy Freedman-Smith blogs on the pet screen door that’s available from Orvis, Gardener’s Supply, etc., I second the endorsement. I’ve used this product for five years and love it.

A frantic email supposedly originating from the Humane Society of Kent County in Michigan started making the rounds this week. It warned of a “new” strain of parvo against which current vaccines didn’t provide protection.

Sound familiar? It should. This is the same “new” parvo that’s been around for 7 years now, but just last February there was an internet explosion of worry about it, due to a press release about a new lab test that came with some unfortunately inflammatory language and details.

The mass-forwarded email ostensibly came from a veterinarian at HSKC, and it was quite alarming, suggesting that many vaccines didn’t provide coverage against this “new” strain of parvo, and that it was particularly deadly.

That email was, of course, considerably more alarming than the actual press release (PDF) from HSKC, which warned of a nasty parvo outbreak at the shelter and limitations on animal surrenders and shelter hours while they dealt with it.

Vets in the area where HSKC is located got together this week to discuss the outbreak, and they, along with the shelter, issued a new press release (PDF) yesterday:

There has NOT been an obvious increase in the number of canine parvoviral infections in properly immunized dogs this season. However, dogs that are not appropriately vaccinated may run a very high risk of parvoviral infection. This disease is a potentially devastating, life-threatening illness.

There have been no confirmed cases of the new C2 strain of canine parvovirus in Michigan. This strain of the virus has been isolated in Europe and in 12 other US states and has been present for 7+ years.

Currently, it appears that properly immunized dogs are protected from the C2 strain of parvovirus.

It is imperative that dogs be properly immunized in order to have the best chance of protection from all forms of parvovirus. All the vaccines currently being used by area veterinarians are protective against the 2C strain of parvovirus (providing the proper vaccination protocols are followed).

Unvaccinated puppies and unvaccinated or inadequately vaccinated adults dogs are at greatest risk for parvovirus and should be seen by their veterinarian as soon as possible.

So there you have it. Just like last time, when I wrote about this same subject.

I realize these types of messages don’t have the wings that the more alarming ones do, but hopefully when someone on your dog email list or at the dog park tells you the sky is falling, you can at least say, no, actually… it’s not. Yes, there are testing issues related to this virus, but it’s no more deadly than the already-deadly-enough parvovirus in dogs, and the main pets at risk are, as always with parvo, young puppies.

My original article on the “new parvo” scare is here. My interview with veterinary clinical virologist Dr. Melissa Kennedy is here. Spread the word!

Didn’t take much, just a few thousand dead pets, contaminated baby toys, and oh yeah, the heparin thing… but the FDA just announced it’s opening three offices in China. From the Irish Times:

The co-operation is significant. It’s a sign of how China’s growing openness is combining with its need to improve its international standing in the pharmaceutical business, and Chinese health authorities hope the offices will also increase China’s own capacity to produce safe foods, drugs and medical devices. Thirteen employees would be assigned to work there.

The move is also a reaction by the FDA to criticism over its lack of overseas inspections after heparin, a widely used blood thinner, was contaminated and imported from China earlier this year. Heparin has been linked to more than 80 deaths in the United States.

[...]

Beijing has been under pressure to do something about consumer safety, after a series of scandals in the past couple of years did serious damage to the “Made in China” brand. Billions of euro worth of counterfeit and substandard goods, including snack bars, liquor, medicines and face creams, are produced every year in China and there are regular horror stories.

In one of the most highly publicised scandals, China revealed in 2004 that 13 babies had died from malnutrition in the eastern province of Anhui after being fed fake baby milk powder.

In July last year, Zheng Xiaoyu, formerly China’s drug and food safety czar, was executed for corruption.

Ah yes, I’ll never forget listening to a reporter asking FDA food safety czar David Acheson what he thought about that sentence during a pet food recall media conference last year. Good times.

Full article here.

[Update] From the comments, h/t to Nadine L.: It must be the night for remembering the pet food recall. USA Today’s Julie Schmit continues her tradition of excellent coverage of the issue with an update on the ongoing lawsuits against Menu Foods and other companies for harm suffered by pets who ate contaminated foods:

Almost 6,000 claims have been filed in a class-action settlement stemming from last year’s massive pet-food recall.

Menu Foods, other pet-food makers and retailers in May agreed to set up a $24 million cash fund to compensate pet owners whose cats and dogs became sick or died after eating food that had a contaminated ingredient from China.

The filing period for claims began May 30 and will run until Nov. 24.

“I expect that number (of claims) will go up a lot. There’s quite a bit of time to go,” says attorney Sherrie Savett of plaintiffs’ law firm Berger & Montague.

Julie apparently never drank the “13 confirmed deaths” kool-aid:

The Food and Drug Administration never identified how many pets were affected, but it received more than 17,000 complaints.

[....]

The recall grew to involve 12 pet-food makers and 180 brands of pet food and treats. Along with Menu, other defendants include Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Iams and retailers such as Wal-Mart.

Menu Foods, which supplied most of the recalled foods, has pegged its recall costs at $55 million, some of which went to the settlement fund.

If there is money remaining after claims have been processed, it will go to charities that promote the well-being of pets, the settlement says.

A website has been set up at www.petfoodsettlement.com. The claims administrator can be reached at 800-392-7785.

Catch it here.

If I read one more blog post, comment, or Angry Article™ about the horrors of purebred dogs, using photos of oddly-coiffed Chinese Cresteds or struggling-to-breathe Pugs shown in the arms of a woman who exceeds the U.S. Government Approved Body Mass Index, my head will — yes, wait for it, readers; you know what’s coming — explode. Tiny bits of blobby gray stuff all over your monitors.

Setting aside the irony that the same people who think women not meeting the Vogue magazine standard of the ideal woman are the ones outraged about dog breeders being too obsessed with physical perfection, there’s a much bigger issue here. And before you go, “Yes, Christie, we know what it is, too. Because you’ve got purebred dogs and you used to breed and show them and you’re one of them, aren’t you?”, think again.

I’m actually a strong advocate of opening our studbooks, as well as of open genetic registries, and I think that the concept of “purebred” dogs has done both dogs and those who show and breed them a huge disservice.

But in all the hand-wringing and hair-tearing that’s been inspired by discussions of the recent BBC program “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” — and, for that matter, in the show itself — there’s an exaggerated emphasis on photo-op-ready images of extreme breed characteristics like bracycephalic faces and short legs and long, floppy ears that drag on the ground, at the expense of something that is both worse and far less visible.

“Pedigree Dogs Exposed” holds up the wolf as an example of what dogs should be, based on how they look. But wolves who look just like the ones they used in their video clip can be massively inbred. This is not about how dogs look. Because although those extreme traits might annoy you personally and can cause suffering for the dogs who have them, the problem with “purebred dogs” and the closed studbooks that define them is not something you can film and see and point to — or laugh at. The problem is something you can’t see, the genetic code of dogs who were never bred, who left no offspring: the genes we left behind.

Conformation traits that help dogs win in the show ring and give tabloid reporters and bloggers fodder for the outrage du jour are the product of selection on the part of breeders. Those observable problems that everyone is so eager to ridicule could conceivably be fixed by education and increased awareness. Lost genetic diversity causes far less fixable problems, like reduced litter sizes, reproductive failure, genetic disease, shorter life expectancies, lowered disease resistance, and greater rates of immune-mediated disease.

To put it another way, if your dogs can’t reproduce because their heads are too big and their pelvises are too narrow, that can be fixed if you pluck your own head out of your own hindquarters, but fixing a problem of inbreeding depression in an entire species is a task that daunts the most ardent conservationists and scientists. It’s the problem they warn us about as human development, pollution, and climate change send thousands upon thousands of species to the brink of extinction, and beyond, every year: genetic bottlenecks, inbreeding depression, loss of genetic diversity in a species and an ecology.

Genes, once lost, can’t ever be recovered. Dogs who died without passing on their genetic heritage are gone forever, barring a few stray tubes of semen hanging out in a canine sperm bank somewhere. And by selecting from a small number of popular sires and focusing breeding programs on extreme conformation traits at the expense of preserving genetic diversity and health, genes are exactly what are being lost. Permanently.

So, is the canine species doomed? No. But many of our individual breeds may be “doomed,” at least in the terms we in the United States and most of Europe understand the word “breed” today, breeds defined by closed studbooks. (more…)

Another round of calls and faxes needed …  AB 1634 was not voted on again today. Don’t let up the pressure. This is bad public policy that will hurt pets and people. Mandated spay-neuter hasn’t worked any where it has been tried, and no peer reviewed science supports putting a medical decision in the hands of the state.

If you’re a California resident please call and fax your state Senator and ask him or her to vote NO on AB 1634. If passed, this bill will INCREASE shelter population and kill rates and INCREASE the cost to taxpayers per the California Dept. of Finance report. It also inserts the state into a medical decision that should be made by a pet owner after consultation with a veterinarian.

Why are animal-rights advocates pushing this? This post of Christie’s offers some answers.