Brrr. With temperature in some parts of the country hitting 20° or below, it’s pretty cold even for your household pets. Here are some tips for cold weather safety for dogs and cats. Tip 1: In cold weather most dogs and cats should be kept inside. Some long-haired double-coated dogs such as Alaskan Huskies can do well in freezing temperature if they have a well-enclosed dog house filled with clean insulating straw, are used to the cold weather, are not too young or too old, get a special high-calorie diet and are closely monitored while others with a more meager coat, inadequate shelter, inadequate diet or an

Brrr. It’s below 20° and the only sane place for a person is sitting inside in a nice cozy, heated home. But what about your dog? While I generally recommend all pets stay inside too, some dogs love being outdoors and were bred for cold weather—when is it safe for dogs to stay outside in the cold? I had the extreme good fortune to meet veterinarian, Dr. Susan Whiton on a recent trip to Anchorage, Alaska. She provided a personal tour of her sled dog kennel and told me how she and her husband, top musher Vern Halter, own Dream

A reader recently emailed me about a hot topic of debate in his town of Carl Junction, Missouri. The town is considering revising their leash law to allow owners to walk their dogs on electronic collars including when they are running their dogs next to them in the street while driving golf carts. His specific question was, “Does this provide good control?” There are several factors involved in answering these questions. First, you have to understand how such collars work and how dogs need to be trained in order to learn the goal behavior of heeling next to their owners

Here are some tips to make traveling with your pet safe and enjoyable.

Every year members of the Golden Valley Harrier Running Club, to which I belong, start the New Year with a major fat burning event – an 18+ mile trail run. Well, I ventured on this run two years ago with Jonesy, my Jack Russell Terrier. He fared well. In fact, he probably ran 20 miles and had plenty of energy the rest of the day for other activities such as fetch. My legs however, were sore for days due to the several miles of downhill running right at the start. That and the fact that the longest I’d run in

Question: We have a Boxer and a Lab. Both are 5 years old. They get into the cat litter and we can’t seem to break them of this habit. We have a covered box for the cats and keep the opening facing the wall but cannot keep them from actually turning the box and eating the poo. Definitely yucky! Do you have any suggestions? Answer: Newsflash! National pet food marketing firm reports, “Next to week old fish, decaying road kill, and napkins from a woman’s monthly you know what, dogs vote cat poop favorite flavor.” Yuck is right, because immediately