pet connection

Study: Removal of ovaries could affect lifespan. A potentially groundbreaking study examined aging in Rottweilers.   The work by a team led by Dr. David Waters of Purdue, published in the December 2009 issue of the journal Aging Cell, strongly indicates that the length of time a dog retains her ovaries is directly linked to how many years she will live.

Dr. Waters’ team spent a decade collecting and analyzing medical histories, longevity, and causes of death for 119 Rottweilers in the United States and Canada that survived to 13 years of age. These dogs were compared with a group of 186 Rottweilers with more typical longevity.

Researchers found that female Rottweilers have a distinct survival advantage over males—a trend also documented in humans. That advantage appears to be determined by whether the female dog is sexually intact, however. “Taking away ovaries during the first four years of life completely erased the female survival advantage,” Dr. Waters said.

This isn’t just an interesting factoid that will impact the spay-neuter debate with respect to dogs.  It could have a lot to say about research into human longevity as well.

Dr. Parker’s group studied more than 29,000 women who underwent a hysterectomy for benign uterine disease. The findings showed that the benefits of ovary removal—protection against ovarian, uterine, and breast cancer—were outweighed by an increased mortality rate from other causes. As a result, longevity was cut short in women who lost their ovaries before the age of 50, compared with those who kept their ovaries for at least 50 years.

How ovaries affect longevity in Rottweilers is not understood, but Dr. Waters’ research points to a new set of research questions, recalibrating the conversation about removing ovaries.

Breed-specific legislation redux: Florida legislators are throwing the baby out with the bathwater by moving toward enacting sloppy, breed-specific laws again, substantively reversing their prohibition of such a thing more than 10 years ago.  The bill under consideration is Florida HB 543 (Senate version: SB 1276).

In effect, they will be turning back the clock to a time when blaming the dog, independent of contextual evidence, was acceptable.   State Rep. Thurston (D-Plantation) isn’t suggesting any move towards owner responsibility.   And the fact that identifying breeds accurately is, at best, a crapshoot, has eluded Thurston, as well as his co-sponsors.    Solving those problems can’t be done through the legislative process.  The losers here will be good, innocent dogs and responsible owners. If you live in Florida, it ’s time to make your voice heard (thanks to Cathy A for the cite).

Cat killed despite microchip:  Sorry, but we’re not done with the Sunshine State yet.    A couple in Broward county lost their Bengal cat, O’Malley.  Fortunately, O’Malley was microchipped.  That’s good, right?  If he is found by authorities, he can be quickly identified and returned to his anxious parents.   Good news:  O’Malley was found by the authorities.  Bad news, according to the Sun-Sentinel: he was put to death anyway.

The cat’s death has the family and county commissioners wondering if the scandal-plagued agency – which was restructured in 2008 after facing criticism for animal abuse and misconduct – has reformed its ways. The county is apologizing, but officials aren’t sure what exactly happened and are waiting for an internal investigation to be completed.[...]

An audit of the agency two years ago found food for dogs and cats in short supply, animal carcasses rotted in maggot-infested bags and workers taking valuable dogs for their own profits. Officials were forced to change procedures to reduce the problems.

“I’m furious,” said Broward County Mayor Ken Keechl, who led the drive to reform the agency. “I’m tired of it – how many years will this keep going on?”

Excellent question, Mr. Mayor.

For some good news, we fly up to New York…

The angel of Union Square: Emelinda Narvaez has rescued 10,000 dogs out of her mobile van in lower Manhattan.  You read that right.  Ten thousand dogs.    This profile of Ms. Narvaez, a cancer survivor herself, shows her to be a truly remarkable woman.

[She] believes dogs are the “Angels of This Earth.” But to the more than 10,000 dogs she’s rescued in New York, Emelinda is the angel. She does her miracle work through her nonprofit, Earth Angels, a no-kill canine rescue and adoption organization established to rescue homeless and abandoned dogs.

For the past 41 years, every single day, rain, shine or sleet, Emelinda has been saving dogs on the streets and taking canines from overcrowded shelters (that otherwise would’ve been euthanized). She then nurses the dogs back to health and finds happy, healthy homes for her four-legged friends.

Thank you for your hard work and dedication, Emelinda.  I have to agree with the author of the Huffington Post article, on behalf of the 10,000 lucky dogs.  You are the angel.

Bow to wow: Now let’s hop on the subway and head a little north, to midtown.  We’re stopping at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.  As part of the adoption drive for Animal Care & Control of NYC, a gorgeous golden retriever named Bailey was on the set of The Today Show last week.   Also present was gold medal winning U.S. Olympian Steven Holcomb, pilot of the victorious and historic “Night Train” four-man bobsled team (the U.S. had never won a gold in bobsled before the Vancouver Games).  Steve met Bailey, and promptly adopted her…a golden for a gold medal winner  (a golden tip of the cap to Jennifer Fearing of the HSUS for the story).

Paws for poetry: Switching gears entirely … April is National Poetry Month. (I learn so many interesting tidbits on this beat.)  In celebration, I’m volunteering you, so listen up.  Paws for Poetry is running a contest, and you are invited. See rules and regulations here for prizes and details.  The deadline is April 15, so you have a little more than  a month.  Good luck!

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 e-mail.

Photo credits:  Chow and pit bull terrier: Laura Dapkus, examiner.com.  Steve and Bailey: msnbc.com.

About a decade ago, not long after walking away from a job at a well-respected daily newspaper — a move that seemed insane at the time but not so much now — I walked away from the second real job of my life, running the Pet Care Forum on AOL as part of the Veterinary Information Network.

I had a $30,000 book advance in my back pocket, a regular gig at Pets.com and a six-month lease for a beach house on Alligator Point, Fla., at the point where a line dropped southwest from Tallahassee and northeast from Apalachicola would intersect. We weren’t talking a beach condo, either, but an old-style Florida family weekend house, a simple wood-frame structure heavy on bayfront windows and decking. The little blue house was perched precariously on wooden stilts with so much give in them that the entire place shook during the spin cycle of the washing machine, which had been named for a relatively mild hurricane that had had a similar effect.

My house may have been on Alligator Point, but to the U.S. Postal Service, I lived in Panacea. Looking back, that seems about right.

But no matter: I had my dogs, my van, a handful of books, some music CDs, a couple week’s worth of clothes and a Sony laptop. I was never going to have a day job again.

Well … ha!

Pets.com collapsed not long after my arrival, its sock puppet one of its only assets, along with the work I did for them, which was sold to a Microsoft content site and still pops up now and then. (The sock puppet was last seen working for a used-car dealer.)

I finished the one book, wrote second editions of two others, continued with my  syndicated newspaper column and waited for news on the new book proposals. After a few months I realized I would have to go back to the empty house in Sacramento that I was still paying the mortgage on.

Shortly after 9/11, I knew the economy and the publishing industry weren’t going to be anything like normal for months to come, so I did what every unemployed writer/editor/journalist does in a town like Sacramento: I took a government job.

It was a good fit, for the most part. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is a customer-owned electric utility with a history of public service,  a product of the state’s progressive era, when civic-minded advocates broke the monopoly of the Robber Barons who ran the railroads and were gearing up to run the new electric and gas utilities. In more recent times, SMUD had become world-famous for renewable energy — solar, wind, biofuel, electric transportation and more — and, to a lesser extent, for mothballing a nuclear plant after a public vote. Who knew infrastructure could be so much fun?

My boss had a relaxed attitude and an infectious, honking laugh, and my co-workers were funny, smart and committed to public service. The gorgeous 1950s headquarters building had been ruined inside by the addition of beige “Dilbert”-style cubicles that blocked the light and made the place gloomy, at best, but the grounds were beautiful and every day I got to touch a 1959 Wayne Thiebaud mural as I walked in — and I almost always did, right at his tile “signature.”  For a public-service-oriented policy wonk like me, it was a great place to be.

And it it still is, but as of last Friday, I’m not there.

The Tuesday previous, I woke up and quit. Well, technically, I retired so I could be able to buy group health insurance, but the end result was the same. I’m outta there.

Of course, the seeds of change had been sown a while back, starting when Dr. Becker and I formally became writing partners, 11 (soon to be 13) books ago. Those seeds were watered by the 2007 pet-food recall, and warmed by the greater opportunities Christie and I gained from our  post-recall blogging cred, and with better, more prestigious and, well, better-paying writing gigs. That, and I have a burning desire to be a part of the sustainable, more humane agriculture movement, the heart of which beats in the Capay Valley, one county to the west of me.

The pet-food recall changed my life. I knew it would from the beginning, when Christie and I immediately realized it wasn’t a “pet story” at all, but one about an industrial  food-delivery system for pets and people gone off the rails.  I wanted to report on it, and I wanted to be part of fixing it. And I also, of course, wanted to keep writing about pets.

By any sensible measure, the decision to leave SMUD is a bad one, but truth is any of my co-workers would tell you with a smile that I was always a square peg in the round hole of civil service.

So it’s  time to put the sensible behind me once again. Besides, I don’t have much time to worry: Dr. B and I have a book due May 1 and another due  six months after that. And two more articles for Parade due within two weeks, and a weekly syndicated news feature due Monday.

This time, I hope I’m really on my way.

Top: Ben (died 2005) and Heather (d. 2009) at Alligator Point, Fla., January of 2001. Bottom: The award-winning SMUD headquarters building (Dreyfuss and Blackford). Here’s another view of this splendid building, which is awaiting California Office of Historic Preservation for being  “a virtually pristine example of the International/Miesian style of post-WWII Modernism.”

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.

When Bella turned 14 in January, I was hopeful yet cautious. She has clearly slowed down over the past year, spending the majority of her time sleeping under my desk but still eating enthusiastically, going out for short walks and going up the stairs on her own if I didn’t immediately whisk her up in my arms. I thought she was stable enough that I felt comfortable–mostly–going on vacation and leaving her with her breeder in a home she had known all her life.

But the change, I fear, was enough to tip her over the edge. We came back to a dog who was depressed with little appetite. That’s the one thing that really scares me when it happens with my girls, because they all love to eat, Bella especially. She hasn’t lost weight, but she will soon if we can’t get her appetite back. We’ve increased her dose of lasix, a diuretic, and added pimobendan, which often has a salutary effect on appetite, as well as various heart benefits. And, of course, she’s getting any delicious tidbits that I think might tempt her taste buds. They may help for a while, but I’m not kidding myself that we have months together still. Right now I’ll be grateful if we have weeks.

And in this twilight of Bella’s life, I’ll be asking myself that most difficult of questions: When? When is the right time to let her go? I’ve made the decision so many times and written about it so many times and I still don’t know the answer. I know all the quality-of-life questions to ask myself and I’m still not sure if we’re there yet. Or if she is but I’m not.

Susan Little, DVM, president of the Winn Feline Foundation, says quality of life is degraded when pets have more bad days than good, when they stop interacting with their owners, or when medical problems can’t be controlled or are too burdensome. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but it’s hard to tell with Bella. She’s like me: she doesn’t say much and she’s mostly stoic about discomfort, with the exception of having her ears combed out.

I thought it might be easier with a 14-year-old dog. I don’t know why I thought that because it wasn’t easy with a 13-year-old dog or a 15-year-old cat or a 19-year-old cat. I have to go now. For the first time in her life, Bella is making me cry.

Portrait of Bella by Terry Albert.

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.