Fleas stink. No doubt about it. They make your pet miserable, you miserable, they carry parasites, and they’re gross. Worse still, once they take up residence in your home, they can be very difficult to get rid of.
Why is that?
My childhood dog was a Lhasa Apso named Taffy. For the first 8 months of life on the East Coast, she was an adorable ragamuffin of flopsy adorableness. Then- we moved to California.
In the warm Southern California climate, flea season is year round. And over the next few months, Taffy became Scrappy. Her long lustrous fur fell out, to be replaced with that hyperlichenified elephant skin indicative of massive irritation. Her skin was one raw welt.
The only way to keep her comfortable was to shave her short like a rat, dose her up on steroids like a Mr. Olympia wannabe, and routinely smoke out the house with nasty-smelling flea bombs probably just as bad for us as they were for the fleas.
Then Advantage came out.
I will tell you, and I will stand by it until the day I die, that dental cleanings are an extremely important and helpful measure in keeping your pet healthy. My teeth are white. My gums aren’t red. My teeth aren’t falling out of my head. And I still get cleanings twice a year. Visible disease is not the only sign your mouth needs care.
Every once in a while, someone will come in a few months after a cleaning and point out the fact that there is, again, some visible plaque. “How come?” they ask. “Why aren’t the teeth still pearly white?”
As many of you already know, February is National Pet Dental Health Month. Do your pet a favor and take a few seconds to take a peek at his or her teeth- a GOOD peek. You might be surprised at what you find.
According to many veterinarians (including this one), periodontal disease is the most commonly diagnosed disease in dogs and cats. According to Dr. Brook Niemiec, “By the age of just two, 80% of dogs and 70% of cats have some form of periodontal disease.” As a board certified veterinary dental specialist, he knows what he’s talking about.
There’s a double whammy with dental disease- not only is it pervasive, it’s sneaky. Sometimes the signs are obvious- painful eating, bad breath, obvious tartar and plaque accumulation. But most of the time that is not the case. It takes a thorough physical examination and usually sedation to truly understand the state of your pet’s mouth.
Here are three things to do in order see if your pet is one of the 80% with some form of dental disease:
We’re all a little on edge these days, with all the mayhem, destruction and parvo we’ve been seeing lately. So much so that when any puppy with a peep of diarrhea comes in, my techs have taken to whisking it into the back, shouting “POSSIBLE PARVO! OUTTA MY WAY!!” as they rush by with a little furry ball into the isolation ward. I don’t blame them. It’s been a long couple of weeks.
So when I saw a little furball go whizzing by this morning, I sighed inwardly. I asked the tech to get a parvo test started while I finished up with the old dog who just had a seizure in the parking lot. By the time I finished, the test was back and thank goodness, it was negative.
I pop my head into the lobby, ask the owner a couple of questions, and let him know the good news.
The tech, who hasn’t seen the negative test yet, follows me into the iso ward. “Watch,” I tell her as I pull a mystery syringe out of my pocket. “Magic water.”
5 minutes later, the dog is up, happy and jumping and licking. “I’ve never seen water do that!” gushes the tech, who is 19 years old and thus hasn’t figured me out yet.
My older, more experienced RVT is shaking her head at me from across the room as she puts the dextrose back into the cupboard. After I talk to the client, we can explain hypoglycemia to our newbie. But for a minute, we just revel in the fact that it’s Not Parvo, and all it took to fix this obtunded puppy was a syringe full of “water”. (sugar water)
I was in the grocery store yesterday, and like I always do, sort of did a double take at what some of the brands are charging for their food.
Clients come in every day and say that they are feeding their dogs high quality, all natural food- a common example would be something like Beneful- believing it is top quality food simply based on the marketing. But when they go back and read the label, they are inevitably surprised.
“I can’t afford the really expensive food,” is something I hear every day. And I understand- I really do!- that when times are tough people need to compromise. But the point I really want to drive home is that you don’t need to feed your pet super premium dog food to improve the quality of what they eat- you just need to be willing to read labels.
For my Incredibly Unscientific Study of the Day, I decided to take 2 adult maintenance dog foods and compare the price per kilocalorie of food as a general way to compare cost. You can’t compare just price per ounce, as the amount of nutrients per cup of food varies widely from food to food. It’s harder than it looks- food labels can be tricky beasts.
The numbers are approximate- obviously the calculations vary depending on the size of the bag, so I tried to calculate two similar size bags of food. OK, let’s begin:
Contender One: Pedigree with Lamb and Rice Adult
Widely available and heavily marketed, this food describes itself as “Easy to digest: real lamb, wholesome rice. Made with highly-digestible ingredients like real lamb meat and rice — and no fillers or artificial flavors.”
Let’s look at the first 5 ingredients, which is a nice rule of thumb for evaluating the majority components of a food:
Ground Whole Corn, Chicken By-product Meal, Ground Wheat, Meat And Bone Meal, Animal Fat
Where’s the lamb and rice? Somewhere beneath “meat and bone meal”. Remember, according to pet food label rules a food need only have 3% lamb and rice to say “with”.
The price is $23.46 for 16.3 lb bag on Amazon. At 3450 kcal/kg of food, this works out to about of 1088 kilocalories of food for every dollar you spend.
Contender 2: Evangers Chicken with Brown Rice
Available in many feed stores in North America and online, but not as widely distributed as Contender 1.
The first 5 ingredients:
Chicken, Ground Brown Rice, Chicken Meal, Potato Product, Pearled Barley
Better, right?
Their online price is $26.98 for 16.5 lb bag.
At 3850 kcal/kg , the food works out to be about 1070 kcal per dollar of food.
Almost the exact same.
Pet nutrition is a huge topic with thousands of variables, but I think the number one skill for any pet owner to get the hang of is label reading. You don’t always have to spend more money to improve the quality of what your pets are eating. You really can pay a premium for packaging and good “looks”.
No one is arguing that there is no correlation between quality and price- Orijen Adult, for example, is approximately 767 kcal per dollar- a bit more expensive. Hopefully this indicates the quality of those calories is very high.
Let’s look: Their first five ingredients are “Fresh deboned chicken, chicken meal, turkey meal, russet potato, fresh deboned pacific salmon.” In this case, the ingredient list justifies the cost. In my opinion. 
Obviously this is the tip of the iceberg on this topic, but if it gets the dialogue going I can certainly expand and do more posts. Who else label reads? It’s pretty fascinating.
Small print: Company selection was random and not the result of any solicitation. I encourage you to try it on your own and see what you come up with!
