When you live in a country such as the United States, where vaccination of dogs and cats is common, at least in your neighborhood, it can be easy to forget that there’s a reason why we vaccinate. The core vaccines we provide to our pets were invented in response to specific fatal outbreaks and epidemics that have killed many animals but that are much less frequent now due to our widespread vaccination programs. One can be reminded of the negative effects of non-vaccination by looking at shelters statistics or by visiting a developing country. Says Janice Girardi, founder and director

Have you ever gone to a dog training class or taken a private lesson and left with your head swimming?  With so much information, the main messages can sometimes get lost among the more intricate details.  Here are some take-home messages that I use to guide my every-day interaction with my patients as well as my own pets. Every interaction you have with the animal is a training session. So it’s important to be aware of what you may be doing to reward inappropriate behaviors throughout the day especially when you are not having planned training sessions. Animals care about

Have you ever had a leg injury that was mild enough so that you didn’t limp but serious enough that you had problems during intense sports? For instance, you could run fine in a straight line but favored the leg when making sharp turns or when you had to jump. Luckily as humans we can identify the ache and tell a doctor, but when the problem is with our pooch how do we figure it out? Sometimes the hint can be in their gait. Last month at the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Annual Conference, I attended a lecture given by

Summer conjures up images of shorts and bikinis, but for dogs, at least those in California, the “in” piece of petwear is protective headgear. Not protection from crashes or spills related to athletic play; protection from those pesky grass awns called foxtails. From afar, these awns look like wheat but close up they look more deadly. The awns fall into ears, eyes and get sniffed into the nose and once they have a foothold, their shape ensure they travel only one way—in deeper and deeper. For dogs in California who like to go on hikes or into yards and parks where

Anyone who rises to the 5:00 a.m. wake-up call of a hungry cat knows that this early morning meow has a clear meaning—Feed Me Now! But can meows alone carry clear messages in different contexts? Nicholas Nicastro and Michael Owren, both formerly in the psychology department at Cornell University, have an interesting answer. While Nicastro was a graduate student at Cornell, he recorded the meows of 12 cats in five different contexts—food related (prior to regular feeding), agonistic (when being petted too vigorously), affiliative (when the cat solicited affection from the owners), obstacle (when the cat wanted in or out),

My suspicions were confirmed the day after Christmas at the Metreon Theater downtown. As the youngest in the family, my job was to wait in line and knowing this, I went prepared—with a scientific article called, “Do dogs respond to play signals given by humans?”  The research, lead by Nicola Rooney at the Anthrozoology Institute in Southhampton, U.K., starred 21 owners who were videotaped playing with their dogs. In what surely would have been billed as a comedy, owners patted, the floor, barked, bowed, shuffled their feet, slapped their thighs, crawled on all fours, anything to get their Rovers to