pet connection

Veterinary critical care specialist and Pet Connection blogger Dr. Tony Johnson has seen it all… and tonight he’s going to share it with you in “Tails from the Pet ER,” at 10 p.m. ET as part of PetHobbyist.com’s 12th Annual Chat Month!

Dr. Johnson, a veterinary emergency care specialist and professor at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, will be talking with PetHobbyist.com and Pet Connection’s Christie Keith in live streaming audio — a perfect “fit” for this particular guest event, since his “Tails” are long on humor — so long, in fact, that you’d better consider this a warning not to listen with beverages in your mouth.

You won’t just be listening, though — bring your questions! You’ll be able to type them into the chat room so Dr. Johnson can answer them.

To join the chat: Registered users of PetHobbyist.com log in here; if you’re not registered, log in as a guest here and select “Auditorium” from the drop down menu!

We’ll see you tonight!

Point of fact: I have always hated Barbie.

I hated that you couldn’t do anything with her but stand her up to look pretty, and that playing make-believe with her was about as interesting as playing with a pointy-headed stick. (Which may actually be all that Barbie really is, anyway.) And that was before I got old enough to figure out that she didn’t look like anyone ever has or could without bulimia and plastic surgery. Or before I got older still, and realized that the standard set for large, high and surgically augmented racks on women young and old and the accompanying fetish for the kinds of shoes that would be considered abuse if forced on us by law meant that there are a whole lot of women looking — or trying to look — like idiotsBarbies instead of, you know, women.

No, the Barbie or two that came my way was ignored (but at least not tortured, which still creeps me out). For me, Breyer horses, all the way. Before you could buy accessories for them, I made my own: String halters, tissue-paper blankets and felt saddles, all lovingly preserved by my mother. (OK, honestly: Tossed in a box and forgotten for decades until my mom  told me  in no uncertain terms that I needed to get my stupid plastic horses and other childhood debris out of her garage.)

When my niece went through her very brief Barbie stage at age 8 or so, her parents dutifully threw her a Barbie-themed birthday party. I was chided and considered a Bad Sport for refusing to support that crap, and brought her a Breyer, which I continued to do pretty routinely for the next decade.

It worked.

My smart and beautiful niece is an equine studies major now, a witty three-sport athlete who can lift hay bales and saddles, back a horse-trailer into a parking space sized for a compact car and is more than woman enough to wear  a strapless short sundress and drag the eyes of a couple hundred men off the finish line at the Del Mar race track with a flip of her hair. She rode her horse to pick up her high school diploma, the day after graduation ceremonies.

She is an action figure, not a Barbie.

So what does this have to do with pets? Turns out my Barbie hate and my intense dislike for the Paris Hilton tiny-puppy-mill-dog-as-fashion-accessory craze have dovetailed neatly, if rather depressingly, into a Barbie that comes complete not only with the standard Barbie idiocy, but also with fashion accessory plastic puppies.

No, they didn’t name it Puppy Mill Barbie, which would have been far more accurate, of course.  The model is Barbie® Potty Training Pups^TM, yours for around $20 in your nearest big-box China crap retail outlet.

Puppy Mill Barbie comes with three purse-sized puppy mill dogs, toys, dishes and “papers” for “potty-training” — although the word on the street is that the puppies leak from the wrong places, probably from some puppy-mill caused illness.

For anyone tempted to get a toddler indoctrinated into the cult of idiocyBarbie early, please note that Puppy Mill Barbie is not suitable for girls under 3, because the small parts may be a “choking hazard.”

I can attest to that. I’ve been choking on the vomit in my mouth from the very second I laid eyes on the thing.

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I had to laugh (bitterly, but still, a laugh) when I woke up this morning to find Puppy Faith’s latest “victim” on the dining-room floor. The timing of this murder is most peculiar, I tell you.

See, this time last week, I had book deadlines and other writing projects weighing heavily on my shoulders, and at the “day job” (which I do like, really) they were pushing me to work more hours even as I had asked to work fewer.

I was thinking it was time to quit (well, technically, retire) from the day job, which I didn’t want to do, but it seemed as if my options were limited.

Except … welll … the last time I left a day job was to write for Pets.com.

Little did I know that Pets.com would collapse not six months later, about six weeks after its IPO. The Sock Puppet and the domain name were about its only assets, and both are still working. I did learn something from the experience, a lot of things, really, most it was about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Nowadays, I have not one source of income, but many.  Some sources are very modest, but it all adds up, doesn’t it?

In the end, my status remained quo, The “day job” agreed to the reduction in hours, I got on with the book project after a week of nasty writer’s block, and so it goes.

Which is why this morning I considered the “death” of the Pets.com Sock Puppet to be a mess, not a message.

Thanks, FayBee, for helping me to focus. Good puppy!

Admin notes: I’m in S.F. today pulling a volunteer shift for the S.F. food co-op, Christie’s in L.A. Dr. Becker’s recovering from three weeks on the road, Kim’s heading to Paris (yes, Paris!), Dr. T is recovering from a bout of illness, Liz is giving training classes all day, Phyllis, David, Dr. Narda etc., etc. … Those of you in Snowmaggedon, be careful and stay safe. We’ll be back tomorrow.

If you’re visiting for the first time, coming from Dr. Oz’s site to buy a shelter pet a bed, I hope you’ll bookmark us and check back regularly. And don’t forget to “fan” Dr. Becker on Facebook and follow both his  Twitter feed and our PetConnection Twitter feed. You can also sign up for the free monthly e-newsletter, here.

Please feel free to leave a comment, but do know that the comments of first-time commenters are moderated. Once you comment once, you’re free to comment without moderation. (Although we do reverse the right to moderate discussions here when need be.)

Now that those pleasantries are out of the way, let’s help some pets rise up (off the concrete), lie down (on a comfy bed), and move out (into a loving home)!

Pick a shelter and donate a bed, here.

I practice at North Idaho Animal Hospital in Sandpoint, and I love taking care of the animals who come in our doors.

Infected toenails, itchy skin, bad breath? Bring it on. Love it. There’s nothing I like more than to put people’s four-legged best friends back together, and see them go home, healthy and happy.

But being a “television veterinarian” is different. I stand up in front of a camera on Good Morning America or the Dr. Oz Show and talk about a medical breaththrough for canine arthritis or how to help a cat lose weight, and it’s not the same. You just can’t compare smiling at a news anchor and pointing at a new pet product to really getting in there and expressing a dog’s anal glands.

But every now and then, one of those moments happens. The kind where you find out a single animal is walking around barking or purring because of something his owner learned from you on television.

That happened to me most recently right around Christmas, when a Toronto newspaper ran a story about a 7-year-old Boxer named Sheena who collapsed at the park. She wasn’t breathing and her heart had stopped.

Her owner, Kevin Eldon, didn’t know what to do, but his neighbor, Kathryn Armstrong, did. She talked her husband Matt through the process of giving Sheena CPR, and he got her heart beating and lungs moving again, long enough for her veterinarian to diagnose a dangerous arrythmia and get her onto medication for the condition.

And then Kathryn sent an email to the Dr. Oz Show, saying she’d learned how to do CPR on a pet from the “Pets 911″ segment I’d done on the show a short time before.

Christie Keith from the Pet Connection team phoned Kathryn, who shared some details on what happened:

I suddenly heard my husband screaming Sheena’s name, and turned around. She was sliding down an embankment, and when I got to her she was gone. No signs of life. I thought she’d had a seizure. My husband kept going, what do we do? What do we do? And that twigged that memory of the show. I don’t think I’d have known what to do if I hadn’t seen it.

I said, pull her tongue out, blow into her nostrils, blow into her airway, and she just came right back. We walked back to the car and we got her to an emergency clinic.

I’d have never known to do this if I hadn’t seen the show.

I want to thank Kathryn for writing that letter and letting me know that I made a difference for Sheena. I know it made Dr. Oz’s day, too.

But more than anything else, I want to thank Kathryn for learning what I tried to teach, and using it to save Sheena’s life.  That’s what being a veterinarian is all about — even on television!

Screencap of Sheena from Toronto Sun.