pet connection

There’s my “side” of the bed, and Teresa’s “side,” and then there’s the overwhelming majority of the nighttime real estate, which is owned by our dogs.

Yes, the Beckers let their dogs and cats sleep on their beds. We also allow them on the sofas, or, as Quora, right, and Quixote refer to them, “the dogs’ sofas.”

We’re not alone. The American Pet Products Association reports that 62 percent of cats and small dogs, and a smaller percentage of larger dogs, sleep on their owners’ beds.

Some experts warn that letting your dogs sleep on the bed with you will create behavior problems. Others contend it can make allergies worse. We’ve never had those problems, but we have to admit there is one small downside to surrendering the vast majority of our mattress to the dogs: Neither of us has had a good night sleep in the last couple of decades.

That’s right. The dogs wake up every morning, refreshed and rejuvenated, and Teresa and I stumble out of bed bleary-eyed and groggy. Teresa fortunately looks beautiful even without eight hours of restful sleep. I’m not so lucky.

If I’m ever tempted to change the sleeping arrangements, all I have to do is hit the road, which I do constantly, flying to veterinary conferences or to film “Good Morning America” or the “Dr. Oz Show,” or even just going on vacation, as Teresa, our son Lex and I are right now.

Teresa and I have all these hotel room beds to ourselves. We can stretch out, cuddle in the middle of the mattress, and move our legs around all we want. What we can’t do is get warm little dog kisses, see their eyes light up with happiness when they see us there first thing in the morning, or feel the comfort of a furry dog body when we crawl into bed after a freezing cold midnight bathroom trip.

And when we come back to the hotel room at night, there’s no four-footed, tail-wagging welcoming committee there to tell us how much we were missed and how wonderful it is that we’re back.

The way we see it, the unconditional love they give us every hour of every day is worth a little missed sleep.

What about you? Where do your pets sleep? And why?

Sometimes I feel guilty when I tell a pet owner to give medication to a cat or dog. I know that only a small percentage of pet owners actually give that medication to their pets, and chances are those pills will sit in the refrigerator or cupboard and never find their way into the animal at all.

The reason for this epidemic of non-compliance is simple: it’s hard to give medication to a pet who absolutely doesn’t want it.

There are two problems with this reality. One, of course, is that the pet needs the medication, in the dosage and at the intervals the veterinarian has prescribed. Two, by letting our pets sense that we’re reluctant to give them medication, and then rewarding them for resisting, we are teaching them that medication is bad, scary or otherwise unpleasant.

Fortunately, for many medications, help is available in the form of compounded drugs. Compounding pharmacies can make big pills tiny, bitter pills sweet, and turn your cat’s worst nightmare into his favorite tasty treat. How? By mixing the medication into savory liquids or pastes that pets will lap up eagerly.

Compounded medications are prescription only, and you’ll need to ask your veterinarian for them. The good news is that there are compounding pharmacies all over the country that will fill your veterinarian’s prescription. The bad news is that you need to be a little careful about the use of compounded drugs, as last year’s tragic deaths of 21 polo ponies should remind us all.

At the recent Western Veterinary Conference, Ron Johnson DVM, PhD, a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology, gave some tips on how both pet owners and veterinarians can make sure that compounded medications are safe and effective.

Some owners and even a few veterinarians think that compounding is legally questionable, but Dr. Johnson (no relation to our own Dr. Tony!) assured us that’s not the case. “The Animal Medicinal Drug Use Clarification Act (AMDUCA) was passed in 1994 and become effective in 1996,” he said. “Compounding is legal under AMDUCA, as long as guidelines are followed.”

That means only your pet’s veterinarian — the health care provider like me who has actually seen and examined and made some kind of diagnosis of plan for that pet’s treatment — can prescribe compounded drugs.

We also need to be available to monitor that treatment and change it if things go wrong, or if the pet’s condition changes.

That part’s simple. But Dr. Johnson next launched into a long list of other legal, regulatory and medical issues related to compounding, all of which would make most pet owners and even some veterinarians run just as fast as your cat ran the last time you tried to give her a pill. Fortunately, he also threw us a lifeline in the form of this piece of advice:

Veterinarians wanting to create or prescribe compounded products should seek the advice of a reputable pharmacist.

Those would be members of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, the Professional Compounding Center of America, or the American College of Veterinary Pharmacists.

The compounding pharmacists should “also be willing to provide product and ingredient information when requested by the veterinarian, including a certificate of analysis and the background of the drugs.” He warned particularly about drugs originating in China, and said that if the pharmacist is reluctant to provide that information, it’s a big red flag that there’s a problem.

What does that mean for you and your pets, especially those notoriously unpillable cats?

As long as you work with your veterinarian and a reputable compounding pharmacy, there’s a very good chance that your pet’s icky medicine can turn into something tasty and appealing, and you can get your pet well without making both your lives miserable in the process.

And that’s just plain good medicine.

Image: Getting pills into pets can be such a problem many owners just give up. A compounding pharmacy can help, by turning “treatment” into “treat.”

After hearing what Dr. Laura D. Garrett of the University of Illinois had to say about Palladia at last month’s Western Veterinary Conference, I realized there’s more to the story than the fact that this is the first drug approved in the United States to treat canine cancer.

Palladia (toceranib phosphate) is what’s known as a “tyrosine kinase inhibitor.” That means it blocks an enzyme that can help cancer spread.

Other tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) include the human drugs Sutent (sunitinib) and Gleevec (imatinib mesylate), and a European veterinary drug, Masivet (masitinib), which will be known as “Kinavet” if it’s approved in the United States.

Right now, Palladia is approved to treat mast cell tumors in dogs, and it’s fairly successful at treating those that don’t respond to other forms of treatment. In one study, mast cell tumors were reduced in size in 43 percent of dogs who received the drug, while only 8 percent of the dogs given placebo responded similarly.

Dr. Garrett, who is a board certified specialist in oncology, cautioned that TKIs are not a first line of treatment, but are meant to be used for particularly severe mast cell disease and only after other forms of treatment, like surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, have failed.

Even then, these drugs don’t always work. But for some mast cell tumors, particularly those with mutations in what’s known as the c-kit gene, TKIs have a much greater chance of success. Your veterinarian can have your dog’s tumor tested to see if it has that mutation.

Another big plus to treating cancer with Palladia is that it can be given at home, unlike other forms of chemotherapy. However, that’s a minus, too, because it can cause pretty severe side effects, mostly gastrointestinal. Owners have to be very vigilant in watching for signs of diarrhea or vomiting, and getting the dog to the veterinarian immediately.

There’s another potential benefit for dogs in the approval of a veterinary TKI: research. Manufacturers of human drugs don’t test them for how well they work in animals, but those making veterinary drugs do. Pfizer and AB Science are continuing to sponsor research into mast cell tumor treatment and other uses of their TKIs, which can lead to better ways to treat many kinds of cancer.

And once a veterinary drug is approved for one use, it can legally be used “off-label” to help animals with other problems. So veterinarians can try TKIs in the hope that they might benefit animals who aren’t responding to other therapies. Their outcomes will contribute to the body of knowledge about this class of cancer drugs, and possibly lead to new research and new and better therapies.

The first FDA-approved veterinary cancer drug isn’t going to cure every case, or even most of them. Neither will other tyrosine kinase inhibitors as they roll out of the pipeline. But cancer is one of the worst enemies a veterinarian ever battles. The more weapons we have against it, the better.

Right now, only boarded specialists who treat cancer have access to the drug, although it’s expected to be available to veterinarians in general practice later this year. If your dog is diagnosed with a mast cell tumor and you want more information on TKIs, talk to your veterinarian and see if he’s likely to be helped by this drug.

Photo courtesy of Pfizer Animal Health.

Disclosures: Palladia is manufactured by Pfizer Animal Health, and Pfizer sponsors the web archive of the Pet Connection syndicated feature.

Dr. Garrett does not work for Pfizer, but received an honorarium for presenting on Palladia at the Western Veterinary Conference. She also received, as did all board certified veterinary specialists who treat cancer, free Palladia for use in her patients during its testing and introduction.

Last Friday afternoon I got back to my pickup in a parking lot in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, where we’d been scouting locations for a possible TV show.

I turned on my cell phone and got the news that our precious 16-week-old granddaughter, Reagan, had been hospitalized in Twin Falls with a serious respiratory problem called RSV.

I tried to talk with daughter Mikkel and wife Teresa about this logically (as a father and grandfather) and clinically (as a doctor), but could only mutter a few words each attempt before crying — can’t catch your breath, blow your nose crying. For over an hour I sat in my truck, engine running but not moving, paralyzed with fears and overcome with tears.

I’m not a guy who’s afraid to cry. I tear up when I see members of the armed forces greeting their families after returning from deployment. I cried when Reagan was born, and when we had to say goodbye to my best friend, Teresa’s dad Jim Burkholder.

I get tears in my eyes when the “Star Spangled Banner” plays, and on seeing images of suffering in Haiti or a single dog shaking with fear at the back of a shelter cage.

But none of those are anything like the tears that flowed when Reagan was at risk.

What is very much like the tears I shed for Reagan are those I cried six years ago when our Wirehaired Fox Terrier Scooter (our daughter Mikkel’s first dog) was euthanized at the age of 13, suffering from terminal cancer. My colleague and friend Dr. Rolan Hall at Bonners Ferry Veterinary Hospital pushed the plunger as I held our special Scootie.

I kept it together in the veterinary hospital, but as I held her lifeless body in my lap — wrapped in her favorite blanket with her favorite toy — and began the drive home to bury her in the dog cemetery we have in our orchard, the geyser started. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and had to pull off the road for almost 30 minutes.

Yesterday I read Kim Campbell Thornton’s wonderful post about the possibility of saying goodbye to her beloved 14-year old Bella, and decided to go out and visit Scooter. I told her how much she’d meant to Mikkel during a difficult part of her childhood and reflected on the pure joy and love we’d shared. I told her about Reagan’s illness, and shared with her the good news that she’d been released from the hospital and was on the mend.

With the loss of a pet like Scooter, or Bella one day all too soon, your heart breaks. But luckily for many of us pet lovers it expands to allow other four-legged family members into our life — like Teresa’s beloved canine cocktail, 7-year-old Quixote, pictured above by Scooter and Lucky’s graves.

Some might say it’s wrong to compare the tears shed for a dog to those that flowed when my granddaughter was ill, but they’re missing the heart of the matter. Love is love, and there’s enough to go around for the dogs that cuddle little Reagan and for Reagan herself, too.

The same is true of tears.

Four voices on lessons learned: Opinions abound on what happened in Sea World last week, but I want to highlight four responses to the death of Dawn Brancheau, not from armchair pundits but from thoughtful voices of considerable experience.   First, Dr. Mehmet Oz’s editorial in The Huffington Post, “A Requiem for the Pursuit of Knowledge”, which contains a kind tip of the cap to our own Dr. Marty Becker, and an important point.

This world is too precious not to take an active role in understanding its other tenants.  While killer whales will always remain wild animals and command respect and reverence, gifted animal trainers like Dawn Blancheau and Julie Scardina devote their lives to furthering the boundaries of relationships humans can have with them. Dawn gave her life in the name of science and discovery, and her efforts brought enlightenment to thousands of people.

Second, consider Jean-Michel Cousteau’s compelling, eloquent YouTube commentary.   Next, a response from widely respected training guru Karen Pryor’s clickertraining.com blog.  Finally, our friend Heather’s sharply acerbic rant the day of the tragedy in the most wonderful RaisedByWolves.

Drive or walk — not both: The weird story of the week comes to us from the London Guardian.   A 23-year old man in County Durham had his license revoked after he was caught walking his dog — from his CAR.

Sharon Lowrie, prosecuting, said a cyclist alerted police that two men were dragging a dog along from a car. She said: “The driver was hanging on to the dog’s lead through the driver window, approaching a blind summit.” [...]

Paul Donoghue, defending, said Railton had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity. “He accepts it was a silly thing to do and there was an element of laziness. He does not usually drive in a such a manner,” Donoghue said.

“Not usually”?  Why does that not make me feel better?

The problem with bad breeders: One more example of FAIL, courtesy of trusty reader/researcher Susan and the fabulousness of YesBiscuit…we take you to Greenville, South Carolina.  A pit bull breeder had entirely too many dogs of the wrong color.   Well, he can’t dump them with his pickup, right?  So he drops them off at the Greenville Animal Shelter in a U-Haul.

Shelter manager Shelly Simmons says it’s evidence of a growing problem…. “We’ve never had a U-Haul before,” she said.  Simmons said the owners were trying to breed “blue” pit bulls because they sell for higher prices. Instead, they got 17 puppies in every color except blue.”You have amateur breeders who try to have puppies for the wrong reason and when they do that they end up over their heads,” Simmons said.

This isn’t funny.  The Greenville facility where the puppies were dumped is a kill shelter.   I won’t get into the whole fallacy of the color issue.  It’s bad enough as it is.

Beautiful and amazingly creative furnishings: Another tip from YesBiscuit….if you have a cat, need a new coffee table and have the money to spend, you have got to check this out.  A seriously gorgeous table with an integrated cat hammock.  You read that right: cat hammock.

I always like to hear from readers, especially if you have tips, and links for interesting stories.  Give me a shout in the comments, or better yet, send me an email.

Photo credits:  Trainer with whale, KCPT. Cat table, O VALOR DO DESIGN, via bookofjoe.com.