Donating Your Dog to Science (But Taking Her Home at Night)

The benefits of enrolling your dog in a clinical trial extend to your pet, to you, to other dogs, to other dog owners, and even to people who don't have dogs.

September 2018 - Do you have a dachshund with a moderate or severe spinal cord injury? Texas A&M University’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, about 90 miles from both Houston and Austin, wants to study your pet to better understand the illness and begin to figure out ways to treat it.

8 Questions to Ask Before Relying on a Nutrition Website

Plus the sites we find most reliable.

When you google “how to feed a dog with cancer” and come upon a website that says to buy your pet a supplement designed by the person running the site, your instinct to feel suspicious kicks in automatically. But when you click on a website that says not to feed your dog a diet with grains because dogs are not naturally grain eaters (and the site points out that you don’t see dogs grazing in grassy fields), whether to pay attention can get tougher. (For the record, dogs tolerate grains just fine, and many do like to sometimes munch on grass, which is not a grain, anyway.)

A Manmade Dog Illness

Obstructive airway disease in brachycephalic dogs.

English bulldogs, French bulldogs, pugs, Boston terriers, boxers, Pekingese, Lhasa apsos, shih tzus, affenpinschers, Japanese chins, Cavalier King Charles spaniels. These are many, but not quite all, of the breeds considered brachycephalic, meaning they have pushed-in faces. And people love them. Their impossibly adorable big eyes, flat noses, and heads that are often large in relation to the rest of their bodies are the very qualities that draw us to infants, and we want to hug these dogs up. Indeed, the French bulldog and the English bulldog are numbers 4 and 5, respectively, on the list of the most popular breeds in America.

Free Vaccines for Life

More and more veterinary practices are making a money-saving deal with their clients.

Google “free vaccines for life” and you will see page after page of veterinary practices that engage in this very type of program — free vaccines annually for dogs who are patients at these clinics. They all operate a bit differently, but here’s the gist. If you take your dog to the clinic once a year for her wellness visit, vaccines deemed necessary at that time will be given at no cost.