Your dog still meets you at the door and still wants the walk. Lately, though, it takes a moment longer to get up afterward, and the nap that follows runs longer than it used to. Nothing looks wrong, exactly. That is how the senior years usually arrive: quietly and in pieces, so the signs your […]
Read Post »You have a new puppy, a vaccine card with one sticker on it, and a clinic asking you to come back in a few weeks. It is fair to wonder why one shot is not enough, how many more are coming, and when your puppy can finally meet other dogs. Vaccines work by teaching the […]
Read Post »You are standing in front of a wall of puppy food, every bag promising healthy growth, and the puppy at home has one opinion: more. For most puppies the brand matters less than two things you control every day: how much you feed, and whether the food fits the size your puppy will be. Start […]
Explore Products »A puppy comes home carrying somebody else’s immunity. Antibodies from the mother’s first milk do the defending at the start, and in most puppies that borrowed protection has faded by about 8 to 12 weeks of age, while the puppy’s own defenses are still being built. Infections and parasites take hold more easily in that […]
Read Post »The recheck sheet says lipase or cPLI is still flagged. The dog it came from has finished his dinner and is asleep on the kitchen floor. Those two facts disagree, and in a dog recovering from pancreatitis the disagreement is usually normal rather than ominous. In a straightforward acute case the values fall as the […]
Read Post »If your dog’s pancreatitis blood levels came back high, the first question is whether that makes this an emergency, and the answer depends on the dog far more than on the number. Severity in pancreatitis is read off the dog, not off the enzyme value, and that holds nearly all the way down. A dog […]
Read Post »Hour Zero: One Vomit and a Skipped Meal Pancreatitis and an ordinary bad night look identical at the start. Both begin with one vomit, a bowl left untouched, and a dog who seems a little flat. The two come apart later, and they come apart by the clock far more than by any single symptom, […]
Read Post »Laboratories do print reference bands for the two pancreatitis blood tests, and the lipase normal range in dogs is the shakiest part of the report. One laboratory calls a dog’s lipase normal up to 118 U/L and another up to 228 U/L. That spread is why checking a flagged result against a number found online […]
Read Post »Your dog has vomited twice since breakfast, left dinner untouched, and is now lying flat on the kitchen floor looking sorry for himself. This could be gastroenteritis (from the Greek gaster, stomach, and enteron, intestine), an irritated gut that often settles with supportive care. It could also be the start of pancreatitis, an inflamed pancreas […]
Read Post »Your dog has been vomiting, the bloodwork points at the pancreas, and somewhere in the conversation the words acute or chronic came up. Both mean pancreatitis, an inflamed pancreas, and both cause the same signs of pancreatitis: vomiting, a lost appetite, lethargy, and a sore belly. What separates them is whether the inflammation leaves permanent […]
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