Foxtails and Algae and Snakes and Alligators, Oh My!

Summer vacation with dog as co-pilot, as Marty and Laura discussed last month, is well under way. Today they bring important information to help keep your pet safe in the late summer at various locations around the country. Whether it’s foxtails, blue green algae, poisonous snakes or alligators, your pet can encounter a variety of environmental challenges.

Skunks and porcupines also get rolled into this wide-ranging conversation about what to avoid and what to do if you can’t avoid some of these dangers for your pet.

Deskunking formula: One box of baking soda, a pint of hydrogen peroxide, 2 tablespoons of Dawn dish soap and you mix it all up. Lather mixture all over the dog. Do NOT get the dog wet first. Use the whole batch because if you try to put a cap on it, the peroxide and the baking soda foam up and they blow up the container.

Doctor recommended:

Keep your dogs safe from foxtails and other potential injury with an Outfox mesh hood.

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

Bombproofing Your Pet for the Big Booms

Marty and Laura tackle the big booms of summer, fireworks and thunderstorms, and how we can bombproof our pets ahead of time.

LR: You made a comment to me last week when we were together that I thought was so great. We were talking about our phobias, your fear of heights. My claustrophobia. And you’re like, ‘we don’t know why we have these phobias. Dogs don’t know why they have their phobias either.’ And I just thought that was such a genius comment that I’d never really kind of spun it that way in my head. So can you expand on that a little bit for me?

MG: Well, I’ll try. I mean, the point is that I’m afraid of heights. I know I’m not gonna fall. I know I’m OK, I get that. But there’s something really visceral and really guttural that every sphincter in my body tightens up and I get nervous and upset and there’s a certain things I don’t handle well. And so it’s hard to explain to anybody. Because my friends around me are like, what’s wrong with you? You’re not gonna fall over the cliff. You’re not gonna fall off the edge. You’re fine. I’m like, OK, My head says I’m fine. My gut says I’m not.

And so, that’s kind of the thing. We have to realize that it’s a real true gut reaction. And when you say you think with your gut or you feel with your gut, what’s your gut reaction? I think it’s really important that we realize that our gut is part of our nervous system, and it’s probably a very important organ in all of that. So when you feel like you have a gut feeling, believe it and don’t diss the dog by saying ‘what’s wrong with you, you shouldn’t be afraid of that. It’s just Thunder. It’s just lightning. It’s just fireworks. It’s just, you know, whatever, it’s just the vet, it’s just the groomer, it’s just the car.’ It’s whatever it happens to be. It is not “just,” it is a visceral, true guttural response that you’re dog or cat cannot overcome.

You can try to do some training, you can try to do some counter conditioning. There’s all kinds of stuff people try to undo by training, but sometimes it takes some pharmaceutical agents to sort of accelerate this timeline of getting through those things.

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

Blastomycosis and Other Fungal Infections

Marty and Laura discuss the dangers of blastomycosis and other fungal infections for our pets as well as their humans.

“Blasto tends to be the upper Midwest,” Marty said. “It’s frequently found in areas where wood chipping has taken place, so places that trees have been cut down or chipped or garden centers and you know, things along those lines.

“There are other parts of the country that have other kinds of fungal infections. So it’s not like if you don’t live in Wisconsin that you’re safe from it. So Wisconsin, Minnesota, those areas, we see a lot of it. If you go to the Southwest like Arizona, then you see coccidiomycosis (Valley Fever), which is also fungal.

“And then if you go to the Mississippi Valley. Find histoplasmosis. So there’s definitely regional differences. They’re all nasty, wicked bad diseases, and people think of fungus and yeast as being the same thing and they’re not. It is systemic. It is a bad, bad, bad disease. The commonality between histo and blasto and coccidiomycosis is that it causes fungal pneumonia and then there’s other organs that are involved differently in different of those diseases.”

Marty walks through symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of fungal infections in our pets, both dogs and cats. She also warns these diseases can affect humans.

“I had a client that had two sons that both had blasto. Human sons. So you can see that kind of a typical pattern is it’s from the exposure of the spore,” Marty said. “You inhale the spore, it ends up in your lungs, you get pneumonia and that spreads to other organs. So it’s not spread dog to dog, it’s not spread dog to human. It’s spread through the common source of the soil being disrupted with that kind of pH and that kind of environment that the sports can live in.”

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

Osteoarthritis Diagnosis and Treatment

Marty and Laura tackle the topic of osteoarthritis in our pets, diagnosis, treatment and the differences between cats and dogs with this disease.

“The only time we’ll see a pet cry in pain is if they have either serious trauma or they slipped a disc in their neck and those dogs vocalize,” Marty said. “But they won’t vocalize because they’ve torn a cruciate. They won’t vocalize because they have hip dysplasia or back problem or elbow dysplasia or 1 of 1000 other causes of osteoarthritis. And so our perception, especially in cats, but in dogs as well, is that they’re not in any pain because they’re not crying.”

“We know the dogs are in pain, even if they’re not crying. If they’re not walking normally, they’re in pain. That’s just the bottom line and something you need to just know and understand and accept.”

Marty walks through the various treatment options. There are multiple options for dogs, although only one for cats. Various commercial diets are formulated to provide support for pets with osteoarthritis.

“(These diets are) based on increasing the fatty acids, increasing the glucosamine, trying to improve joint lubrication and just generally making the pet feel better. Dogs and cats, first and foremost, if they’re overweight, get weight off of them because that is going to be the best thing that you can do for them non drug wise or drug wise. That is the one single thing that you can do to really improve their quality of life is for them to not have to carry that much weight on those sore, achy, tired joints. Every part of their body hurts, so get their weight down.”

Dip in to hear the rest of Marty’s recommendations. Don’t forget to like and follow the show and share with your friends.

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

Encephalitis, Meningitis and More

Marty and Laura tackle a really tough topic today, talking about encephalitis and meningitis and other assorted brain and spinal cord inflammation.

“These are scary because the dogs get very sick and it’s a very difficult diagnosis to make,” Marty said. “It usually requires some advanced imaging, some advanced testing. It’s not an easy diagnosis to nail down and it’s not an easy treatment to develop.

This category of illness is complicated due to the variety of causes, from bacterial infection to autoimmune mediated, and the vagueness of the symptoms, Marty added.

“Sometimes you have to just say, okay, we’re going to use a pretty hefty antibiotic and we’re

going to do a pretty hefty anti-inflammatory dose,” Marty said. “And you’re going to like pray like mad and hope like hell that you’re making the right decisions. And sometimes you don’t simply because you don’t have the ability to get the information you need at all or quickly enough to make those decisions because you don’t have 10 days. I mean, you literally may not have 10 days to get this figured out.” 

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