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Speaker 2: Well, well, well, good afternoon, and welcome to Ask the
Best with Doctor Jeff and I am your host, doctor
Jeff Warber, here in finally not so Sunday, southern California
at one o'clock PM. And hello to everybody in the
cold East around four o'clock in the afternoon, maybe even
lucky enough to be starting to make your drive home
or on the train or whatever and listening to us,
joining us live here on pet Life Radio Ask the
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questions to any number of our experts and so go
check us out pet HealthNetwork dot com. So, before we
get started on something I want to talk to you about.
I did get an email this week from Sarah and
here is Sarah's question. My twelve year old Westipooh and interestingly,
just another Pooh out there, because those poodles, boy, they're
getting everywhere. They're mixing with sheet shows and Losses and
Maltese and be Shans and labradors, so there are a
lot of Poohs out there. Has recently started going to
the bathroom in the house. I am thinking it is
because of our very cold and snowy winter, but I
wanted your opinion. She has also started panting quite a bit.
Should I be well? Actually, Sarah, there are a couple
of things that do concern me, and that is that
dogs that are stuck inside but want to go out
that are twelve years of age pretty much know the routine,
and that routine is they're going outside. They actually know
which door to go out. So when a dog is
sort of truly stuck, but they also know where they're
supposed to go, what do they got? That's where you're
gonna find the mistake. And when you find it there,
you can't even remotely begin to worry or get upset,
because chances are they knew they had to go out,
they knew it was time, But they know that nobody
wanted to go out there in the cold and let
them outside. So therefore they go usually right by, in
my case, would be the back door. Now, when you
have a twelve year old dog, however, especially a Westy
and a lot of these breeds, the smaller breeds that
are panting and nerves have that nerve and anxiety. The
panting could be pain, could be nerves and anxiety, and
it could be just because oh my god, I want
to go out and Mom's not taking me. Therefore I'm
starting to pant a lot, and I'm going to just
go or I gotta go. But I would worry about
some other urinary tract issues, and very commonly I'd be
worried about stones, urinary bladder stones, and those can cause
some anxiety. It gives them that sensation that they have
to go more often, more frequently, and therefore they just
may go wherever they are. We also have to worry
about some sort of cystitis, which is an inflammation of
the bladder. And again the bladder now that is inflamed,
A can't fill up as much as it used to,
and b because of the increased pressure being put on
the bladder wall by whatever urine is in there, understanding
of course that it is the pressure against the bladder
wall that says the signal to the brain that you
got to go. So when one has a thick and bladder,
ask any woman that has a bladder infection, and they
know you feel the urge to need to go every
twenty minutes, and it's because the bladder wall is thick
and it's lose its elasticity, and therefore that signal is
being sent to the brain that your bladder is huge
and you got to empty it way before it ever
gets huge. And it's because of the thick and bladder
So that too can cause this panting. So what I
would recommend doing if it's still a problem is go
have your twelve year old westpoo checked out by your veterinarian,
running some simple tests, maybe your analysis, maybe a quick
ultrasound of the bladder, and typically when we collect urine,
we're going to use an ultrasound probe. Anyway, then we
get a chance to look at the ultrasound, look at
the bladder wall, see how thick it is, see how
regular or irregular it is. Note if there are any
stones or very large crystals inside, then make our decision
that way. If everything is perfect, then maybe increase the walks.
And also one last thing to think about is that
a lot of dogs, especially spade females, as they get older,
suffer from what's called urinary incontinence, and that's where the
bladder sphincter is weak and they're not actively urinating in
places they typically wouldn't, but when they're sleeping, the urine
is leaking out. So then what happens is they wake
up to a puddle of urine, so they know there
was an accident. And for some dogs, especially if they're
extremely well house trained, that is going to create anxiety.
Uh ohiped, Mom's gonna get mad at me, and they
therefore start the panting. So that is one other thing
to check, and it's very important to note if you
can observe the behavior, is she actively squatting to urinate
or is she waking up from a nap or from
her sleep and there's a puddle sitting there. There's a
big difference between that is urinary incontinence and a bladder infection,
bladder inflammation or some other cause of urine where she's
actually breaking house training because of some underlying medical or
physiologic reason. So, Sarah, thank you very much for the note.
I'll be sending you an email. I want your home address,
and of course, as with anyone who causes in here
on pet Life Radios asvats with Doctor Jeff easy number
eight seven seven three eight five eight eight eight two,
we will send you out a free pro sense pet product.
And I have a lot of good ideas for your
twelve year old Westipoo female, because we have some good
products for twelve year old dogs anyway, So why don't
you give us a call? Anyone who's listening in eight
seven seven three eight five eight eight eight two. It
can also if you'd like, just go ahead and send us.
You can join on the conversation. It's very easy to do.
If you go online to Petlife radio dot com, click
on assbats with Doctor Jeff. Our page will come up
and you're going to see a picture of me and
Lassie and if you scroll down you will see a
conversation that says click here to join the conversation. Go
ahead and click and then we can talk to us.
Another thing you can do is easily send me a
quick note to doctor Jeff. That's Dr Jeff at Petlife
Radio dot com and Mark our producer. We'll see the
email come in and we will just get you in
touch with me right away. Now. One of the things
that I did want to mention and talk about, I
don't remember two weeks ago we were live if we
talked about Henry. Henry was or is I'm happy to
say a probably a man. We're thinking seven or eight
year old American Eskimo that was found on a street
in Los Angeles, walking around aimlessly, weak as can be,
with a basically a neck gash so large that you
can literally see everything inside the neck and I'm talking muscles.
You can actually see the trachia and a hole in
the trachia because whatever bit poor Henry and Henry was
just a name we gave him, clearly went through the
neck mangled. I'm thinking a very large, aggressive, powerfully mouthed
dog or even coyotes. We have done this to this dog,
and we do see coyotes running loose and beingcoming more
and more bold here in Los Angeles. So good Samaritan
picked up this poor dog, taking him to a shelter
for I'm sure what she thought would be euthanasia, and honestly,
in this case, I would not have blamed anybody for
putting his poor dog out of his misery. Well, one
of the shelter volunteers thought that maybe Henry had a chance.
So called one of the rescue groups, the rescu group
that I don't work with, but the rescue group that's
not really based here, at least the woman who manages
the rescue is not based here. So she called a
colleague of hers who is based here with a different
rescue group. My friend Blake over at Rescue pet and
Blake immediately called me, told me a little bit about
the story and said, look, the vet that I want
you to see is doctor Jeff. So she brings this
dog in and I'm telling you, it was a disgusting
site to see. I'm telling you. The exposed tissue was black.
That means necrotic, that means dead, that means dying. There's
no way to help it. The tissue around it that
was wide open, the gap was five six inches wide,
was also like leather. Now had no blood supply. It
was dead, dying tissue. I called Blake. I said, Blake, no,
this is not the kind of dog that we should
be trying to put money into this dog is really
it's suffering. So interestingly she this woman, and the woman said, look,
the problem is we got this dog out because of
a good Samaritan act, and we need to try something.
So if he goes, he goes, but at least try
for the next couple of days at least. So here
it is the Thursday evening. I said, look, I'll do
what I can, but really this is a hopeless case.
But we'll do what we can. So sure enough we
go ahead and start Henry on ivy fluids, start pumping
them with antibiotics and vitamins and plenty of fluids, and
by the next morning Henry actually came to life a
little bit. He was able to at least sit up,
hold his head up. And we then went ahead and
an esthetized and did what we need to do to
remove all the toxic tissue, this dead necrotic tissue from
the area, trimming away tissue, skin muscle. In the course
of doing this, we actually could visualize the trachia. It
was amazing that the crowded ary and the jugular vein
were not severed, and we see the traichia. I sew
up to trachia. We close up as much of the
defect as we could still had a very low defect.
So now we're treating it what we call is an
open wound with compresses and even sugar. Believe it or not,
It tries to keep a lot of the hydration there
and it's healthy for the tissue. And waited a day,
two days, three days, and it darned if Henry started
didn't come coming to sitting up, starting to eat, And
I'm amazed. We did a second procedure a couple of
days later to remove some more dying skin and to
actually fix and close some more of the gap. Well, ps,
it's been two weeks now, Henry his gap, the granulation
bed is almost complete. That means the body's own attempt
to close and fix the defect. He is eating, he
is breathing normally, he's not losing any air through the trachea.
He is happy as can be. He runs, he plays,
he's still you know, we're not one hundred percent there,
but we're like ninety percent there. And I got to
tell you that people are practically lining up to provide
a forever home for this dog. It is just amazing.
It's amazing, you know, it really what it did because
I become I wouldn't say hard. Obviously, I opened my
heart and my hospital to these rescue groups. But I've
become very practical. I learned a lesson a long time
ago that I like to call the lesson of the
herd health mentality. When you're practicing small animal medicine, we
rarely have to deal with this mentality called the herd
health mentality. But my colleagues, my classmates, my friends that
practice large animal medicine, I mean it happens all the time.
And that loosely said is if you have a herd
of sheep, for example, or a herd of cows, for example,
and a few get sick, you're not as concerned with
saving these two as you are as finding out what happened,
what is the problem, because we can't afford to have
whatever this disease is go through the entire herd. So
if anything, instead of trying to save the one or two,
you sacrifice them to do your post mortems, your nie cropsies,
your find out what disease culturing and finding out what
the disease is, and immediately trying to prevent this disease
from spreading through the rest of the herd. Well, when
you're dealing with rescues and these rescue groups, when you're
dealing with the fact that you have thousands of animals
that are literally on death row, that are going to
be put to sleep tomorrow, that are extremely healthy and adoptable,
you can't. You have to stop yourself as a rescuer
from putting all this energy into one dog and spending
several hundreds or sometimes even one thousand dollars on the
one dog, when with a thousand dollars, you can pull
out close to forty fifty animals from a shelter. So
why spend your time and money on the one and
one that may not even survive? And I'm continuously having
this discussion with my rescue groups when they bring these
animals in that really don't have much of a chance.
You have to separate your bleeding heart from your practical
heart and save hundreds instead of trying to save the one.
And yet in this case, boy, good old Henry, those
bleeding hearts won out, and I realized, you know what,
sometimes we're lucky, we get to save the one. And
what a great story. Anyway, with that, we're going to
take a quick break. We'll be back in a few minutes.
Thanks for joining me here on Ask Invests with Doctor Jeff.
You're on pet Life Radio and we'll be back after
this break.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back right after these messages. Stay tuned.
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Speaker 4: Hi. I'm doctor to Robin Ganserd, President and CEO of
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to tell you about our new show, be Humane on
pet Life Radio. Each week will be bringing you the
latest news and issues affecting our animal friends, and will
also be bringing you interviews with Hollywood's biggest animal advocates
here to share tales about their pets and what they're
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Speaker 1: Every week on demand only on Petlifradio dot com. Let's
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Speaker 5: Pet Life Radio dot Com.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Ask the Bats with doctor Jeff
here on cut Like Radio. I am your host, doctor
Jeff Werber. And before we move on, we just finished
in the first fifteen minutes and we were talking about Henry.
I'd like to hear from me. I'd like to get
some opinions, you know, just hearing the commercial from the
new show from American Demain Association, I would love to
hear what some of you have to say, if any
of you are active in your local rescues rescue world.
This is I know it's a great subject for open debate,
and so why don't you give us a call? Come
get the guts up eight seven seven three eight five
eight eight eight two. Let me know how you feel
about this concept of sometimes having to make these tough
decisions on spending a lot on a few animals when
you could take that money and pull hundreds out of shelters. Again,
if you live in community as I do, where shelters
are not no kill, they are kill shelters, Timing is everything,
and you know it's amazing that sometimes we will h
a day for these poor guys. Makes a difference they're
there today and not there tomorrow because they are five
days or seven days whatever we're up. So anyway, think
about that. A couple of other things that I've been
doing a lot of blogging and do a lot of blogging,
and in addition to Pet Health Network, there seems to
be a renewed interest I'm getting about toxins, but not
your standard normal things that people know about. But now
some of the things that people may not know about.
A couple came to mind that we've been writing about.
Most of you I know have heard of raisins and
grapes being poisonous. The problem is we don't know which
dogs might have this hyper sensitivity. It's not every in fact,
it's probably not even a majority, but those that do
it's very dangerous. And since there's nothing that we can
test for, so you can take your dog into your
veterinarian and say, can you run that test to see
if my dog is going to be sensitive to raisins
and grapes. So the recommendation now is we no longer
let our dogs treat on razins grape. I iced to
get my dog's rapes all the time and never had
a problem, but obviously a lucky one. It didn't have
this problem. And people here, you know here about chocolate.
Chocolate's a little overrated. Baker's chocolate, pure, pure, unsweetened dark chocolate, yes,
can be fairly toxic when by the time you start
making it semi sweeter, especially milk chocolate or using the
cocoa powder to make your chocolate cake or your icing,
by that point they'd have to eat way enough, they'd
be full before they eat, you know, they would get
any kind of poisonous reaction. So you know, keep that
in mind. Raw onions, raw garlic can be a problem.
We call it aflatoxins. That's an issue well, one that
it seems like a lot of people don't realize. And
maybe if you do, that's great, but one that's important
would be xylotol. Now, what is xylotol. Xylotol is an
active ingredient that's used as a sweetener, an artificial sweetener
in a lot of chewing gums, sugarless gum especially, and
also mints like little breath mints or you know, if
you look at your ingredients, you're going to see xylotol,
x yl i t o l be really care because
xylotol is toxic to dogs and cats and can cause
kidney disease, and so it's something you really need to
know about and other things that really has a terrible
effect on kidney's. It is being reformulated, interestingly because of
a young girl who wrote to some of the manufacturers
and started a whole campaign in her community that got
something onto a ballot because her dog died from licking
anti freeze. An anti freeze, one of the active ingredients
is ethlene glycol, which has a very sweet sugary taste,
and that too can be a problem. So just one
thing to keep in mind. And it's not just not
that they have to eat anti freeze from the bottle,
but if you have a leak and a radiator and
so the anti freeze leaks out of the radiator in
the morning, you take the car away, and you got
that little puddle there, and then unsuspecting dog, because it
is smells good and is sweet, will go ahead and
lap it up. Therein lies the problem what this little
girl has succeeded in doing. Is now any, if not most,
of the manufacturers have to put in a bittering agent
into the anna freeze so the dogs will not find
it palatable. I think that's amazing now speaking of something
that I just learned for the first time yesterday. And
I've been doing this for this is my thirtieth year.
And interestingly I actually called the colleague of mine who
actively practices with this particular species, has heard of this
disease but had never even seen it, and so this
is how rare it is, but frightening. Nonetheless, I got
a call yesterday from one of the big news shows,
Inside Edition, and they want me to discuss a particular story.
What is a story? The story is in June of
twenty thirteen, a grandmother takes her grandson into a local
pet co here in southern California. They're actually based in
San Diego, and to buy a rat, A pet rat.
How harmless is that I grew up? I had pet rats.
In fact, of all the little rodents that people like
to get for their kids to start their pets, I
think rats are better than hampster's. Hampster's bite way more
than they're better than mice. They bite way less than mice.
And the other thing that's comparable as far as personality
and cute is a guinea pig. And they don't bite
very much either, so they've always been safe. Well, a
few days after the purchase, this little boy starts getting sick.
Grandma Mom thought it was a flu, headache, fever, chills.
Then the boy started exhibiting symptoms of weakness, pain, and
the legs and the joints had a tough time walking.
Then it went to the I guess the brain because
he couldn't speak. Rushed him to the hospital after collapsing,
and a day later, this ten year old boy was dead.
And what happened, Well, it turns out there is an
infectionate bacterium that is present in many many, many, if
not most rats. It's in their mucous tissues, it's in
their body fluids like saliva like the naser fringal fluids,
So any discharge from a nose, their eyes, their urine,
their feces, and it's called strepto basillis manila formis, and
it is a streptoccle b bacterium that can cause this
disease depending on strength, on how powerful or viral the
bacterium is. And it can be transmitted of course a
rat bite. So a little rat nipples on your finger,
you don't think twice about it. It can even be
transmitted in urine feces. So check this one out. Your
kid is playing with a rat that urinated on itself. Okay,
then you're calling in for a snack, and you made
a wonderful little peanut butter and jelly sandwich form or
you made them popcorn. And the kid goes into the
kitchen and starts eating his popcorn of course with his hands,
eating his jelly peanut butter and jelly sandwich of course
with his hands, and he can ingest this bacterium. And
so the take home lesson don't not get rats. That's
not the answer. It's so rare, but just to be
smart playing with a rat before you eat, wash your hands.
And it's true for dogs. Your cats, your anything, Wash
your hands before you eat. If you get a rat bite,
clean it well with soap and water, a little disinfectant
with little beatade, the little chlorhexidine. Then maybe put it
on the osporn on it and keep an eye on it.
If it looks like it's turning into an infected bite,
go to the doctor. Some antibiotics is an easy, easy,
very effective solution to the problem. But you need to
recognize the problem. So my recommendation is be smart, be practical.
As I said, the reason why we don't get sicker
from our pets is because we are smart. We wash
our hands before eating after we play with them, and
that's how for example, certain parasites can even be transmitted
to kids from our dogs. Am I saying don't get dogs?
Of course not. I have five dogs and I have
eight cats. But you just have to practice a little
common sense, a little hygiene, and you can easily still
have these pets. But something that I just wanted to
share with you because I just found out about it,
and that's how uncommon this problem is. Inside edition. If
you're in the West side of Los Angeles three point
thirty today k CAL channel nine, then you get to
watch the segment on Inside Edition. Anyway, our time is up.
I want to thank you all for joining me once again.
Join me, send me an email, give us a call.
We'll send you out a free pro sens pet product,
and you can also send me an email here to
doctor Jeff at petlife radio dot com or my personal
email which is Dr Jef Doctor Jeff at Drjef dot com.
We'll be here next week on Petlife Radio on Astebats
with doctor Jeff and have a great week. Thanks.
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