Pets

My friend La Maya and her partner favor wiener dogs: they had two miniature dachshunds for years and then, after the extreme elder of the two passed, they got a standard dachshund, which is not what you’d call a huge beast. Whatever its size, a dachshund, like a corgi or a greyhound, is a dog that causes veterinarians to do a little dance of joy, because the critters’ long pointy snouts predispose them to expensive teeth-cleaning bills. I would not even dare to ask La Maya to tote up the amount she’s spent on the pooches’ teeth: it might bring on cardiac arrest.

Cassie the Corgi, AKA the Queen of the Universe, passed the vet’s examination of her teeth the last time she visited those precincts. However, she’s given to dogitosis in the worst way: very, very stinky dawg breath.

As you may have noticed if you read this site much, I resist succumbing to Corporate Profit-Making Pet Products just about as vociferously as I resist Big Pharma. The Queen gets real food prepared in the kitchen, and interestingly, she never evinces an ailment that requires veterinary attention. That may have to do with her breed…maybe with raw luck…or maybe it’s a perquisite of reigning over an entire universe. Who knows?

Some time back, I was cleaning my own teeth with some baking soda — not because I’m interested in whitening them, but because it’s actually pretty good for your teeth and used once in a while does a nice job of beating back the Microbial Enemy. In the course of thinking about this, I came across a site that suggested you can use the stuff on Fang’s teeth, too. And lo! What should I find but advice from the august American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to the effect that a small amount of baking soda can be used to clean doggy teeth.

Hot diggety dog.

We’re told not to use human toothpaste on dogs — it ain’t good for them to swallow the stuff. And that’s self-evident. If a toddler swallows toothpaste, thinking it’s some sort of minty candy, it can make the little human very sick. Most dogs are smaller than toddlers, and size nothwithstanding, none of them ARE humans. But, being the crank that I am, I will be da^^ned if I’m going to go out and spend money on special doggy toothpaste. Soooo…. I decided to try this stuff on Her Majesty.

You understand: the Queen of the Universe can be pretty imperious. Baking soda, to my taste, is approximately the opposite of delicious. And so it was reasonable to expect some serious resistance, possibly even rage. The Queen’s fangs are intact. While she does not bite, she certainly could. And so the Human suspected this scheme amounted to taking its life in its hands. But there’s only so much stink even a lowly human can be expected to tolerate.

Here’s the strategy:

1. Get yourself a roll of gauze from the bandage department of your local drugstore or supermarket.

2. Cut off a small amount, about three inches’ worth.

3. Cut off another small amount, in a similar size.

4. Get one of these very wet with cool tap water. Set aside.

5. Wrap the other piece around the tip of your index finger.

6. Dampen this slightly and dip it in some baking soda.

7. Capture the dog.

8. Rub the baking-soda-laced, gauze-wrapped finger around the dog’s teeth, starting with the outside edges (the inside edges can use some attention, too, but good luck with that!). Scour as many edges of the animal’s teeth as you can get to before you are repulsed by the dog’s struggles (which will be pretty quickly).

9. Quickly grab the water-saturated gauze and resume the attack! Wipe off the teeth as best you can before you are again cast out.

The improvement can be amazing.

And weirdly, the dog doesn’t seem to mind the baking soda in its mouth. Cassie sort of smacked her lips a couple of times, but as soon as I wiped her mouth down with fresh water, she was fine.

First time I tried this with Her Majesty, the Eau de Stinko Dog Breath went completely away. This effect lasted for several days! And, IMHO, that is amazing.

Do not expect this to remove existing tartar stains. You’ll need a veterinarian’s professional cleaning to accomplish that. However, as a way to clean the dog’s teeth without having to buy expensive dog-treat-flavored canine “toothpaste,” this is mighty good to know about.

I would not inflict it on the Queen every day. About once every three days seems to suffice to suppress the dogitosis. Baking soda is very high in sodium; inevitably the dog will swallow some of it. Excess sodium is bad for you. So it’s probably safe to assume it’s just as bad or worse for your dog. But as an occasional thing, paired with an effort to rinse off as much as possible: why not?

Adjunct Strategies

Try to get Fang to chew on foods or treats that abrade the teeth a little without adding sugar, salt, or weird chemicals. Some dogs really love various kinds of raw veggies and will chew them up. I once had a golden retriever that thought hearts of cabbage and pieces of cauliflower were gourmet delicacies; in absolute doggy delight, he would chomp on them, scrubbing his teeth in the process. Cassie likes carrots — she’ll treat these like chew sticks, too. Choffing on something like this helps to scour the exposed surface of the teeth. Experiment around with things like raw cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and apple slices to see if your dog can be tricked into a little self-cleaning activity.

Prefer these kinds of natural treats to commercial treats from the pet store or grocery store, which are akin to muffins or candy in terms of dog dental health.

The cleaner you can keep Fang’s teeth, the more you will save on vet bills. The veterinarian has to sedate your dog (expensively) before having at its teeth. If you’d like to be scared, VERY scared, visit this terrifying site on the subject.

Check out this treacly, sentimentalized report from one of the local Play-Nooz stations: A woman crashes her car. One of the two dogs she’s carting around is killed. She and a second dog — a puppy — fly through the windshield. The woman is crippled — still in a wheelchair to this day — and the terrified, presumably injured pup runs off into the desert.

Miraculously, heart-warmingly, and swathed in goopy emotion, the dog is found — trapped, actually — after two months of wandering around in 110- to 115-degree heat.

Isn’t that sweet?

Hm.

The driver goes through the windshield: no seatbelt. The dog goes through the windshield: not crated. The other dog is killed…not crated?

All very touching, but WTF? If the driver had been driving safely — wearing her seatbelt and seeing to it that the animals were secured safely inside the vehicle — she likely would not be in a wheelchair. The puppy would not have been thrown out into the desert to survive on its own. And the other dog probably would still be alive.

Sorry to throw iced acid on another sugary Hallmark Moment, but from the curmudgeon’s point of view, this is not an uplifting story. It’s a tale of raw stupidity.

Just sayin’…

I’m guilty of driving my dogs around uncrated, too, though I’m at least bright enough to figure out how to use the seatbelt on myself. After reading between the lines here, you can be sure I’m getting a car crate for the Queen of the  Universe. Today.

Some pet crates are pretty pricey — like all pet-related gear, much exploitation of people’s sentimentality goes on. However, at Amazon prices are as low as $22. Since some crates can be pretty flimsy, I personally would pick one from Target (also flimsy, in my experience) or a pet store, where I can actually see and handle the things. But it’s useful to check Amazon for the consumer reviews — especially for reports like these, which show one brand of portable kennel falling apart repeatedly. Paying a little more to secure the animal, considering how much you’ve already spent on the beast(!!), is worth the extra security.

Soon as the stores open this morning, it’s off to the nearest Petsmart for me and the hound.

How about you? Do you keep your pets safe in the car, as well as yourself?

Jestjack’s comment on last Saturday’s post, about the vet who opined that the wide-ranging pisser of a cat had “anger issues” (heeee!), reminded me of Anna the German Shepherd, a dog for whom “trainability” was an alien term.

Actually, Anna was highly trainable. But she was a working dog with a capital W and a capital D, and she had so much drive that she really needed a full-time doggy job to run off her bottomless reserves of energy. This was an animal that needed to herd sheep. Or cattle. Or camels. She was so strong that for many months I faced quite the challenge keeping her under control.

A woman who trained search dogs and drug dogs for the police had been the most successful of a largely unsuccessful lot of dog-and-human trainers. By the time Anna was about 18 months old, she was marginally leash-trained, despite daily efforts on my part. This police dog trainer favored a vicious pinch collar, something that just made me cringe…but I couldn’t afford to have the dog drag me into the traffic, or to have to let her go as she charged in front of an oncoming vehicle. Since she craved to bring cars and trucks down by their oil-pans, suicide by car was a likely end for Anna. The pinch collar at least put a damper on that activity. To a degree. A low degree.

One day I mentioned this to Jerry Jenkins, a now-retired veterinarian who over the years had become a friend. He said he knew a “dog behavioralist” that maybe I should try. Silently thinking “holeee mackerel, what next?” I took the guy’s phone number. In a moment of desperation, after having been dragged around the neighborhood again, I called him.

Now, you should bear in mind that another friend of mine, at the time, was a lady who claimed to believe in astrology and who was in the act of hanging out her shingle as a pet astrologist and mind-reader. No. Yes. She was serious. I think. Who can tell?

At any rate, you can imagine the eye-rolling over the “dog behavioralist.”

So I call the guy up, and it turns out that under the silly psycho-babble veneer, what he really does is teach owners (not dogs) how to behave. Abhorred by the stainless-steel pinch collar, the first thing he did was demonstrate how to get Anna to heel using nothing more than a leather leash and her ordinary everyday rolled leather collar. It wasn’t very difficult. The trick was, you had to do it several times a day. Didn’t matter whether you did it in the house, did it in the backyard, did it on a sidewalk, or did it in the park. You just had to do it for a short period, over and over, every day.

Here’s how to do it:

Get a rolled leather collar (it’s better for long-haired dogs and it will work better for your purposes). Get a sturdy leather leash (not nylon). Place the collar on the dog and hook the leash to the collar. Have the dog sit next to you. Step forward with the dog at your left side. Each time the dog surges ahead of your knees, say “HUP!” and give the leash a sharp jerk. Always precede the jerk with the “HUP!” sound. Never jerk the leash and then say “HUP.” Walk steadily and confidently forward. Never let the dog get past your knees without going “HUP” and giving it a jerk.

This won’t hurt the dog, but it will get its attention. Reward the dog with friendly noises for heeling correctly over brief periods. You may heel and sit, heel and sit, heel and sit if that’s necessary to underscore the idea that the human walks the dog, not the other way around. Do not fail to do this for a few minutes at least three times a day — five or ten minutes per session will suffice.

After awhile, the dog will start to expect a jerk whenever you say “HUP!” You can then use the word “HUP” to mean, approximately, “heel.”

It works.

The other day Cassie flew into the air, chasing Ball up the driveway, and came down wrong on a hind leg. She yelped once, licked her foot, and then went on about her frenetic business.

She seemed OK. Maybe a little sore but not enough to slow her down. She’s still racing around like a rocket, lobbying for doggy walks, and throwing stuffed teddy bears, stuffed vultures, stuffed Angry Birds, and tennis balls at the human in an unceasing campaign to get all of the above airborne.

And yet…and  yet, she’s been off her game a bit. Instead of harrying the human every waking moment, she’s taken to moping in the back room or the office. Her enthusiasm for trotting outdoors at the drop of every hat is limited.

A close inspection of the offended foot reveals a worrisomely lopping toe.

Notice how that toe on the inner side of the foot on the left looks deformed? The corresponding toe on the other foot looks straight and smooth, and it lies tight against the foot. The bent toe is loose and stands away from the other toes.

Looked this up on the Internet and came away abhorred: vet bills running into the thousands of dollars; dogs wrapped up in casts under which any number of infections and mildew grew; dogs who ended up having to have infected legs amputated; dogs developing gangrene under too-tight wrappings; dogs ripping their own foot off trying to remove the damn cast; dog owners reporting that casting the leg in such injuries appears to be a scam whose main purpose is to milk the owner’s bank accounts; dog owners reporting that some vets say to just leave the dog alone and let nature take its course; dog owners hacking off casts themselves, to find the dog was just fine without it and healed up with no problem when left alone…. Oh, shit.

Well, by this morning she didn’t seem great. So I took her to a vet M’hijito found by way of his father’s current wife. This lady practices in a part of town called “Little Mexico,” where most of the shopping consists of Dollar Stores and Goodwill outlets. Which is to say, she doesn’t cater to a clientele with deep pockets. The vet I’ve been using, referred to me by La Maya (who has an actual income and a partner with an actual income), is what we might call a thousand-dollar-a-day vet. She’s close, and that’s nice. But she knows how much dog lovers living in the $400,000 to $1.5 million houses that populate North Central can be persuaded to pay.

Vet looked at the dog’s foot and opined that it was either broken or dislocated. In either event, the best course of action was to leave it alone. She said she would try to pull it back into place if she were sure it was dislocated, but without an X-ray, she didn’t want to do that — because it could, after all, be broken. She thinks the best thing to do is let nature take its course. Gave me an anti-inflammatory, handed me a $58 bill, and said good-bye.

In six days, I can afford to have the dog X-rayed (can’t just now, unfortunately: am at the end of the budget cycle and all is pretty much spent). I may call again then and ask if they’ll X-ray her, just to see what the story is.

Maybe not, too. The vet said the dog will recover. Maybe less really is more.

You know, consumers have to be careful with veterinarians. It’s no less true that you should get a second opinion when a vet recommends some pricey procedure than that you should when a dentist does the same. Yesterday I talked to a young fellow who came by to provide an estimate for pruning a hugely overgrown carob tree in M’hijito’s front yard. By way of chatting, we found we each had wounded small dogs. His family’s lab had landed on their chihuahua during a frolic. Whacked the little dog’s leg.

Wife took the lap-dog to the vet, where several hundred dollars’ worth of X-rays ensued. She was informed that the dog needed $1700 worth of surgery “to round off” a hip bone, and that was just for starters. When he recited this story, I said, “Look. Really: get a second opinion. I had a German shepherd that a vet said needed dual hip replacements, to the tune of thousands of dollars. I took her to another vet for a second opinion, and he said the X-rays the first outfit had done were not good enough to diagnose anything about the dog’s hips, and that the dog most certainly did not need surgery.”

This tale got his attention. He said he would do that before giving the go-ahead for this elaborate procedure.

Most vets are good people who do not want to cheat you or inflict unnecessary treatments and pain on animals by way of fleecing their owners. However, there’s no question that some of them are in it for the money. In general, U.S. and British pets are over-vaccinated, over-examined, and over-treated.

Caveat dog owner…