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all for free. And you know, as we know, veterinic
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you have insurance out there. And as a matter of fact,
that we've talked about this before, only about one percent
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go ahead and look for Prosents. So one of the
things I do a lot of rescue work in my
practice and we always have a dilemma an argument if
you will, and I'd love to hear you guys chime
in and what you think is right and how.
Speaker 3: Should be handled. And that is the following.
Speaker 2: There are literally thousands and thousands of animals, dogs and
cats in our nation shelters. The guestimate is that a
dog or cat is put to sleep in a US
shelter once every five seconds. Another scary statistic with cats
is that a cat who ends up in a shelter
has a less than ten percent chance of either being
reunited with his family in the case of a cat
being lost or rehomed in the case of probably an
outdoor cat that has never had a home, that means
ninety percent are going to be put to sleep.
Speaker 3: That is really frightening. So there are a lot of.
Speaker 2: Rescue groups now, sometimes just general rescues. Some will specialize
in large dogs and cats and some small.
Speaker 3: Some are breed.
Speaker 2: Rescues you can go to you know, German Shepherd Rescue
or Golden Retriever or Labador Trieve or Rescue, etc. And
they specialize in certain breeds of dogs or types of dogs.
I work with two rescues that do a lot of
work with pit bulls, trying to save these pit bulls,
but we're often faced with dilemma in that, as we know,
it's tough to place dogs and one of the limiting
factors is space. So a lot of these shelters don't
have rescues, don't have their own shelter, they don't have
their own facility to do what's called fostering, and they'll
foster these pets, and now they're running out of foster space.
So what's happening is decisions are having to be made
what to do with these dogs, do we take them
to shelters or not? And one of the biggest issue
is the deciding based on the limited funds that most
of these rescues have. In fact, I have yet to
meet a rescue that has unlimited funds. So at what
point do you make that decision? At what point do
you say to yourself the following that I'm a rescuer
and I have a limited amount of funds. Let's say
I have five thousand dollars from donations, and I have
a dog that is going to need two thousand dollars
worth of veterinate care, and that's at a discount and
with no guarantee that after this two thousand dollars spent,
this pet is going to get a home, And also
no guarantee, especially with very sick animals, that even with
once that money is spent, that the dog's going to
be adoptable or the dog is even going to survive
the treatment. So what point if you have this very,
very sick dog that's going to need extensive care and
extensive money spent, do you say, Look, I know I
have a bleeding heart. I know I would love to
save them all, But do you know how many more
pets that are adoptable tomorrow with no help are sitting
on death row in our local shelter that is not
a no kill shelter that I can pull out with
two thousand dollars at forty fifty sixty bucks a pop.
Speaker 3: At what point?
Speaker 2: And this is what I try to relay and discuss
with my rescues all the time. And that is the following.
We call it herd health mentality. As a small animal practitioner,
I don't have to practice herd health mentality. Every single
animal is an individual. Every pet that I see is
someone's four legged kid, and we treat them accordingly. But
I have classmates and colleagues that chose to go large
animal and they're working up in ranches and farms, and
they're working with ranchers that might have, you know, hundreds
hundreds ahead of cattle, for example, and these ranchers don't
have the bond with one animal that is their pet.
So when there is a certain sickness that starts going
through the herd, they don't look to try to treat
every individual animal. Instead, what they do is they try
to find out, by usually sacrificing that one animal, what
that could be done to find out the disease, and
then we'll go and treat or prevent the disease in
the rest of the herd. So you have to think
differently as a large animal practitioner when you're dealing with
large hurts. We call that herd health mentality. And I
feel and this is me because I've seen it. I've
seen these rescuers that again have such bleeding hearts. They
just want to save everyone, and I get it, but
they spend so much money and it's really throwing it away,
and that same money could have been put to such
good use to save so many other lives. Had they
just said, you know what, this one is.
Speaker 3: Too sick, too bad.
Speaker 2: Two week we're going to have to put this guy
to sleep, and we're going to save all this money
instead of spending it, and instead we are going to
end up with pulling out fifty sixty dogs out of shelters.
Speaker 3: So what do you think? What do you think?
Speaker 2: Do you spend up every single dime you have on
saving everyone or do you sit back, look and say, okay,
we have our limited funds. What is the best use
of these funds. What is the most likelihood that we
can save the most number the largest number of lives
with these funds?
Speaker 3: What do you do?
Speaker 2: So I want to hear from you. It's pretty philosophical,
or isn't it. You know, we're getting into some pretty
heavy duty stuff. So I'm going to let you all
it over when we come back from our break. I
want to hear from you at eight seven seven three
eight five eight.
Speaker 3: Eight eight two.
Speaker 2: Tell me what you would do? What would you do
if you're a rescuer. Maybe you are a rescuer out there,
How do you think it's the best way to spend
the limited funds that you have to help the most
animals that you can think about it. We'll be right
back here on pet Life radios. Ask thevets with doctor Jeff.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back right after these messages. Stay tuned.
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Let's talk past, Let's done, pet Talk about Life Radio,
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Speaker 2: Com And welcome back and here here with Jeff Werber,
Doctor Werber, and we are just finished talking about some
rescue work and some very difficult philosophical decisions that many
of the rescuers have to make and advice that I,
as a practitioner, have to give them when they seem
to be so unrealistically focused on helping the one animal
at the risk of the potential to save hundreds of others.
Speaker 3: And I love you to chime in.
Speaker 2: And while you're getting a courage, I don't know why
it's taken somebody to do so difficult, so much difficulty
calling us in to share your views, talk to us.
We are I mean, it's great. This is the only
live call in show on pet Life Radio. So we
want to hear from you. Eight seven seven three eight
five eighty Dy to pick up the phone. It's Sunday morning.
Come on, put the bagel down, put the coffee down,
and give us a call. Let me know what you think.
The more we know kind of what you think and
how you think, the more information we can provide you.
So I think it's a good idea to chime in.
It's painless, I promise, And and you get free pro
Sense product and you got a free cong toy so
come on. Your dog is telling you, come on, mom,
call in, call in. I want my cong So anyway,
another thing.
Speaker 3: We know it's hot out there.
Speaker 2: Let's face it's been here. I'm sitting here like like
this is great. Now I'm in La and it's it's beautiful.
It's it's ninety deg ninety today. And a question often
comes up, and I think it deserves some attention, and
that is you have let's pick the akida or the
samoy it. I mean, I'm picking these breeches on purpose,
of course. So you have these really great, thick coated
dogs and it's summertime. So you take your dog into
the groomer and you want that summer clip. You want
that trim, you want that the lion's clip.
Speaker 3: You know what that is? Right, You basically shave all
the hair except you leave the head and the tail
looks like a lion. Are you doing your dog a service?
What do you think?
Speaker 2: The one hand, I'd like to hear from you to
see what you think. On the other hand, you guys
are so afraid to call that. I'm gonna I'm gonna
give you the answers. So anyway, the uh when I
said call I didn't mean calling my house.
Speaker 3: The issue is this, that thick coat is really a thermos.
Speaker 2: Now what do I mean by that? Well, you know
when you have your thermis, good old fashioned thermos, they're getting.
Speaker 3: A plug here.
Speaker 2: What happened if you put hot coffee in a thermis?
Stays hot. Likewise, let's say you put your iced tea
in your thermos. What's gonna happen to the iced tea.
It's gonna stay cold. So what the thermist does It
regulates the temperature of that which is placed inside. If
something is hot and placed inside the thermist, it's gonna.
Speaker 3: Stay hotter longer.
Speaker 2: If it's cold and placed inside thermis, it's gonna stay
cold longer. That's what the coat. I should confirm A
healthy coat of these Arctic type breeds does yes when
they are up in the snow, when they're in Antarctica
and it is way sub zero freezing, however many degrees
that coat does keep them warm, how because it doesn't
let the outside temperature affect the inside. So it does
its job to maintain that dog's body temperature to where
it needs to be.
Speaker 3: Likewise, However, it does.
Speaker 2: This same thing when it's warm, and that is that
if it is hot out there, that thick, healthy, thick
coat will prevent that heat from getting into the dog. Now,
when does this not work? Well, it doesn't work if
the coat's not healthy. So therefore, when you have dogs
like this, you need to brush them regularly. It's very
important to keep them well groomed and well brushed. Secondly,
another danger of shaving a dog like this is a following,
especially which is why I purposely use the samoid as
one of my examples, and that is the following.
Speaker 3: You have a dog, a white dog, and.
Speaker 2: How much sun has the skin of this extremely thick
coated white dog has seen? Right, this dog? The sun
doesn't shine on this skin. This skin is not seen
the sunshine because it's so protected. Ah, So what happens
when you take this skin and by shaving the dog down,
you are now potentially exposing this barren, newbile skin if
you will, that has never really experienced sunshine, and you're
gonna put it outside in the sun. And can these
dogs get sunburned?
Speaker 3: You bet?
Speaker 6: You?
Speaker 3: When you look.
Speaker 2: As an example of squamous cell carcinoma, which is a
sun induced cancer in cats, what color cat is the
most susceptible to squame a cell carcinoma.
Speaker 3: It is the white cat.
Speaker 2: And even more so, what part of the body typically
do we see it? We see it in the ears
because they're shooting straight up. We see it around the
head that you know, the part of a cat right
in front of the ears. The hair is much thinner,
the coat is almost gone. It looks like you're a
little bald. Well, those are areas that are extremely sensitive
to sun. How about another condition that we see sun
induced nasal solar dermatitis. Okay, and where do we see this?
We see this on the tip of the nose, the
nasal plan them. We call it of a lot of
deep pigmented or hypopigmented dogs, for example, some of the
Australian shepherds, some colligues. We also hear the term collie
knows but they have all that white right on the bridge.
So again, these areas are highly susceptible to sun induced damage.
So you really need to reconsider and think twice when
it comes to do I should I shave my dog
down for the summer? So what can you do? What's
the best thing to protect your dogs from the heat
during the summer? Long coat, short coat, whatever. Well, first
of all, if you have a very short coated or
thin coated dog that's going to be spending time outside,
you want to use some sort of sun block or
if you have a light. Obviously don't want to use
a sweater, but you want to use some because remember
the same reason that I advocate and don't laugh putting
the little sweaters on these little teeny dogs during the winter,
because based on body surface area, they have a greater
tendency to lose heat to the outside. These same dogs
have a tendency to attract gain heat from the outside
during the hot weather. But again, you don't want to
put something too heavy on them. But if you had
something light and you wanted to put it on them
to almost like an you see people walking around with
umbrellas during the summer, not to protect them from the rain, obviously,
it's to protect them from the sun and not a
bad IDEA sunblock would be a very good idea to
keep them on any area of your dog or cat
that is going to be more exposed to the sun
because of thin coat, because of short, short coat. White here,
when you can actually see the skin, then you want
to put some sunblock on. And as far as those
thick coated dogs, what you should do is keep.
Speaker 3: Them well groomed, well combed.
Speaker 2: Well brushed, because the coat will have an opportunity to
do what it's supposed to do when it's healthy. So
the goal of going in to the groomer shouldn't be
to shave the dog down. It should be to really
do a thorough com out, get the mats out, make
sure the skin is clean and healthy, and then it
will do better what it's supposed to do, and that
is to protect your pets from the heat. So don't
rush to clip your dogs down, shave them down unless
their skin is in terrible shape, unless it is advised
by your veterinarian, unless there's no way they're so matted
because you fell so far behind in brushing that gorgeous
coat that now you.
Speaker 3: Have to shave.
Speaker 2: And then if you do have to shave, keep in
mind that you want to do something to protect your
pets from the heat and the sun damage. Provide plenty
of shade. It's the basics. Water at all times, fresh water.
If you have dogs that seem to like to play
with their water bowls because it's a toy, so they
dump the water. There are some great things you can do.
There is a device you can hook up to your
faucet that's licks it that will work very well to
basically it's like a hamster thing where the water will
come out only when they lick this device. There's also
ways to anchor. I've heard a great idea which is
if you have your dog in your yard where there's
some dirt, you can take a large bunt pan okay,
and you know it's got that hole down the center.
You could take a wooden dowel and you bang it
into your pretty deep into your dirt or area somewhere
or grassy area, and then you fill the bowl the
bunt pan and you set it right over that wooden
dowel that is now anchored into the ground. So what
happens is now this bowl cannot be tipped over. Another
thing you can do is if you have a large bowl,
you could put some a couple of heavy rocks on
the bottom and then fill it up all the way.
Speaker 3: And there are a lot of good things you could
do well.
Speaker 2: Another great idea is to fill your bowl the water
bowl about half to three quarters full when you're inside
in the evening and stick it in the freezer. So
in the morning you're going to have a bowl of
basically a huge block of ice, and then you can
put a little water on top of that because you'll
have some extra room, and then as the ice melts,
they'll have some nice ice cold water. How cool, How
refreshing is that. And lastly, one thing I like doing
I recommend this often is you can take a bandana.
You know, there are a lot of places give them away.
They're great for your dogs, and you again wet it
and you roll it up and stick it into the
freezer at night. In the morning, you now can take
that ice cold bandana literally ice cold, and wrap around
your dog's neck and again a lot of nice cool,
soothing temperature drop. It's going to make them feel really
good as they're outside in the sunshine. So that's about
it for us today and for those of you, I
do want to hear what you think about the rescue thing,
so you can send us an email to doctor Jeff
Drjef at Petlife Radio dot com. Drjef at Drjef dot
com or next week if it's called eight seven seven
three eight five eight eight eight to two chime in.
We're here nine am in the Pacific time noon Eastern time.
Speaker 3: I know you're up there.
Speaker 2: I know you're listening, So give us a call and
let's talk about this because I think it's pretty important
and I think other people should know. Kind of when
you see you don't feel bad about some of these
rescue groups when they have to do what they have
to do.
Speaker 3: So we want to hear from you.
Speaker 2: The thanks again to our sponsors pro Sense and Calm,
and I want to thank Mark for doing the amazing
job that he does.
Speaker 3: And we will be here next Sunday. Have a great week.
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