Home Alone

Marty and Laura tackle separation anxiety, a tough topic for folks trying to manage returning to office life while keeping their pooch entertained.

A lot of “pandemic dogs” that have never had 30 seconds of being by themselves, find a new way of life more challenging.

“So there are some things that you can do to help prepare them for being left alone,” Marty said, “whether it’s to go to work or something more significant. And some of them are pharmaceutical and some are non-pharmaceutical. It’s okay to use pharmaceuticals if you need them because it can shorten the learning curve. So I don’t want people to feel guilty or bad or any of those things if they feel like a pharmaceutical assistant to shorten the dog’s learning curve is appropriate.

“A lot of dogs figure out pretty fast if they’re going with you that day or you’re leaving them for that day or they’re going to daycare what’s going to happen based on the pair of shoes that you put on, believe it or not, or which bag you pick up, or whether you’ve got this jacket or that jacket on. 

“It’s called back chaining when they figure those things out is they first see you leave, and then they see you put on the shoes that you wear when you leave, and then they see you put the jacket and the shoes on before you leave, and then they see you pick up the keys. And so they start to back chain. So very quickly, you can see that they’re developing anxiety as you’re prepping to leave them or take them along.”

For a deep dive on this topic, check out this archived episode from Pure Dog Talk.

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

How do We Give Our Dogs the Best Chance at a Long Life

Marty and Laura walk through best practices for giving our pets the best chance for a long life.

Our hosts share their experiences with losing dogs in old and young ages, while providing detailed recommendations to help our pets live long, productive lives.

“So preventive care is going to be probably the most important,” Marty said. “And that means routine blood work. That means routine dental cleanings, that means the right nutrition.

“There’s some really important things that we can do for (our pets) that are pretty simple and pretty straightforward. They’re not always easy, but they’re pretty straightforward.

“I think going in for a routine blood work, people are like, ‘ohh, I don’t need any, he’s fine.’ No, you’re going to be surprised at what kind of things we can find and preemptively get ahead of whether it’s kidneys, whether it’s liver function issues, whether it’s heartworm disease or some of the tick borne diseases, other disorders that we can see. So if you’re veterinarian says, ‘I think we should do blood work this year and it’s usually an annual thing then you should go up and down with your head and say yes, yes, I think we should do that.”

Marty continues with food recommendations, why dogs should be crated in a car, weight management and more.

Working through final decisions about our pets is incredibly emotional.

“My favorite current book is Promises to My Pet,” Marty said. “It was written by a social worker who wanted to help people go through the process to let their pet go. And basically they go in and you can take pictures from your dog when it was young and you could put all kinds of things in there. But essentially what you’re doing is you’re promising your dog or your cat that you are not extending their life beyond what you think would be reasonable.”

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

Marty and Laura take a deep dive into what does and does NOT constitute an emergency for your pet.

“Your dog scratching at his ears, not an emergency. You can wait. Cat can’t urinate. That is an emergency,” Marty says.

With the nationwide difficulty finding and accessing emergency services for our pets, a little bit of knowledge can save you an enormous amount of time, grief and frustration.

From bloat to dog fight to bloody stools, we take you through the details of what can and can’t be managed at home.

Check out Marty and Laura’s K9 First Aid 911 series.

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

Marty takes us to school on understanding blocked cats.

“Cats have a very serious medical condition when they cannot urinate. And you can only imagine how A, painful, and B, dangerous, that is, for cats, and it’s almost always male cats. I can tell you, I can count on one hand the number of female cats I’ve seen obstructed, but male cats, pretty commonly. It accounts for about 3 % of all veterinary hospital admissions, so it is a common disorder.

“If you have a cat that’s urinating inappropriately, male or female, blood in the urine, not in the litter box, straining to urinate. It can look like constipation also. Clients think this is a bladder infection, but cats don’t get bladder infections the way that other species do.

“People think that their cat missed the litter box. Cats don’t miss. If you watch them in the litter box, they dig a little hole and then they turn around and they look and then they dig a little bit more and then they look a little more and then they dig a little bit more. And then when they finally urinate or have a stool, it is nailing it right where they dug the hole. So cats don’t miss.

“If they’re not using the litter box, you absolutely, positively are getting the advanced notice from your cat that ‘I’m gonna be in trouble and you need to get this fixed fast before something goes wrong.’”

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

Marty and Laura tackle some tough topics around when and whether to spay or neuter our pets.

Research has shown that early spay/neuter in dogs causes an increased incidence of several cancers as well as cruciate ligament tears and increased odds of both problematic and nuisance behaviors.

“They don’t routinely spay and neuter dogs in the European countries and they don’t have a pet overpopulation problem. They don’t have a mixed breed overpopulation problem. So when I’ve traveled in Europe and you go places on the train or go to a restaurant or a cafe or whatever, and there’s dogs there. They’re intact dogs, and they know how to behave themselves because they have been trained to go out in public and behave.

“So it’s a whole different experience, and they don’t have oodles and oodles of puppies pouring out of shelters and rescues because they have inappropriately bred dogs. So I think we really need to take a hard look at ourselves as Americans to say, where have we gone awry? And what have we done wrong here? And what do we need to do to regain that? Because there’s some really important information about the improvement in health and longevity by keeping our dogs intact.”

Below are links to a few of the studies and research Marty mentioned.

• https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Suggested-Guidelines-by-Breed-for-Age-of-Neutering-Suggested-guidelines-for-age-of_tbl1_342751264
• https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.therio.org/resource/resmgr/docs/spay-neuter_basis.pdf
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36656681/

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

Marty and Laura get waaaaaay into the creepy, the crawly, and the one-celled organisms… All of your pets’ potential parasites in one itchy episode.

Learn about a “tick quest,” “tick nests” that could be under your bed, the potential role of ticks as vectors for diseases up to and including cancer, and more parasitology than you even knew was out there.

Catch up on the life cycle of fleas, the scourge of heartworm and mosquitoes, even “Kissing Bugs.” Then venture into the “bowels” of veterinary medicine with updates on one-celled organisms and actual worms that attack our pets.

We’ve got you covered, top to bottom and inside out! Lol

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

Marty and Laura work through what vaccines to give, when, and to which pets. We have science-grounded, fact-based, experience-tested knowledge for everyone.

Marty’s observations:

I think there’s a lot of misunderstandings about vaccines, and I hope we can help clarify some of that information. I’m going to start off by saying that I don’t want to come off sounding like I’m pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine.

When Jean Dodds and Ron Schultz started talking about vaccinations being given more frequently than they needed to be, I was one of the first people that got on board with it in 2002. So, three years after they started, I had already put my personal dogs on a three-year vaccination protocol and was then ready to move forward.

We felt in 2002 that it was appropriate to change from an annual vaccine for distemper, for parvo, and for some of these vaccines that historically had been given on an annual basis, to a three-year rolling protocol. But I had people signing consent for that because it was really not cutting edge; it was bleeding edge at that point.

We’re going to break this down into some detail as we go through this, but overall, many of the vaccines in many of our pets can go to a less frequent system. And then, during COVID, vaccine hesitancy became a bigger deal. It happens on the human side. It happens on the veterinary side.

One of the big concerns is that, about 30 years ago or so, there was this big hoopla about vaccines causing autism in children, right? And that still floats around out there, even though it has been disproven, and we don’t see autism in dogs or cats.

So, we need to make sure that we are all understanding the reason for vaccines and the reason to be thoughtful about what vaccines your pet needs based on their lifestyle and their immune response.

That being said, I think that vaccines have probably saved more lives in the world than any other medical breakthrough. You can look at anesthesia, you can look at sterile surgery, you can look at chemotherapy, you can look at all kinds of different medical breakthroughs that have happened, and yes, they are all really important. I mean, I wouldn’t want to have my appendix out without anesthesia, without sterile surgery, and that saves lives.

But if you think about the number of lives, veterinary and human, that have been saved by vaccines preventing disease, I don’t see that there’s anything that has happened medically that’s been a more significant breakthrough. So, I want to preface my remarks with, ‘I have a huge respect for vaccines.’ I have a huge respect for vaccines on the human side and on the veterinary side, but they need to be given thoughtfully and wisely.

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.