All posts by Dr. Marty Becker

Do indoor cats need rabies vaccinations?

Pet Connection, Veterinary Medicine, , ,

Are rabies vaccinations necessary for cats who don’t go outside? One of my Facebook followers asked just that question. Here’s my response!

Q: Does my indoor cat need a rabies vaccination? It’s not required by law in our state. I want to protect her, but I worry that she’ll get cancer from the vaccine or have some other bad reaction.

A: I understand your concern, but even though the laws of many states don’t mandate rabies vaccinations for cats, the American Association of Feline Practitioners considers rabies a core vaccine for cats, even those who live indoors. The reasons are twofold. One is because rabies is a public health problem. The other is because life is uncertain. There’s no guarantee that your cat won’t escape outdoors someday, or she may one day live in a home where she is allowed outdoors. And it’s not unheard of for bats, the primary species causing rabies exposure in humans, to fly into homes through open doors or windows or to inhabit houses in areas such as attics.

According to a 2014 article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, rabies was confirmed in 247 cats in 2013 (the most recent numbers available). That’s more than in dogs, with only 89 cases during the same year.

To reduce the risk of vaccine-related cancers, my colleague Alice M. Wolf, DVM, an internal medicine specialist who speaks widely on vaccination, recommends using nonadjuvanted rabies vaccines in cats because they produce little to no inflammation at the site of the injection. That’s important because it’s suspected that chronic inflammation is associated with the development of vaccine-associated sarcomas.

According to the 2013 fact sheet on feline vaccinations from the AAFP, cats with a history of injection-site sarcoma believed to be associated with a rabies vaccine should not be revaccinated, although local rabies ordinances or statutes may apply.

Read more, including about the dogs I met on my South American trip, in this week’s Pet Connection.

Why we almost didn’t neuter our dog

Veterinary Medicine, ,

Some things are good — dogs, for example. Some things are bad — Ebola virus springs to mind. And some things are a mixture of both — like neutering our dog, QT Pi Becker.

That might surprise you. For decades I championed and did early spay/neuter. All of our other dogs (Quixote, Quora, Gracie, and just-deceased Shakira) were spayed or neutered around four months of age. But new research points to some serious health risks from these protocols, and that’s why we delayed the decision for QT, who is now a year old.

Now, I’m not only a veterinarian, I’m a passionate advocate for homeless pets. All our dogs were adopted, and I certainly had no intention of letting QT breed. What’s more, I know that a high level of spay/neuter among owned pets is responsible for driving down shelter intake across the U.S. in the last two decades.

But as a veterinarian, I also know there are health downsides to removing a male dog’s source of testosterone, a hormone that has certain protective benefits for a number of body systems, including bone strength and reducing the chances of some kinds of cancer, allergies, torn ligaments, and even some behavior problems. And while I worked for some time with a product that sterilized dogs while preserving some testosterone production, that product is currently not available, so I didn’t have that option for QT.

That’s why to neuter QT was not an easy decision. And speaking honestly, if it weren’t for factors such as being unable to bring him to doggy playgroups, I would have kept him intact because I believe it’s better for his health (and absolutely not because I have some macho attachment to my dog’s McNuggets!).

Let me just say again that whether or not QT was neutered he would not have been allowed to breed, as I’m 100 percent on the side of no unwanted litters. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a tough choice for this veterinarian; it was. Continue reading →

Why dogs bark but wolves don’t

Pet Connection,

A reader had a question about barking dogs. No, not how to get them to stop, but why wolves — who are the same species as dogs — don’t do it!

Q: I read recently that wild dogs like wolves don’t bark. How come dogs do?

A: Wild dogs aren’t silent, that’s for sure. They howl and yip and whine, but they don’t make the percussive and repetitive sound that we know as the bark. It’s one of the behaviors that separates dogs from wolves.

A Hungarian ethologist (someone who studies animal behavior) named Csaba Molnar suspects that dogs bark because, well, we designed them to. In several studies published in various scientific journals, he hypothesized that a dog’s barks share information about his emotions or surroundings and that humans are able to understand what dogs are communicating with their barks.

In an article on Wired.com, Brandon Keim explains the results of one of Molnar’s studies:

“Molnar’s statistical algorithm showed that dog barks displayed common patterns of acoustic structure. In terms of pitch and repetition and harmonics, one dog’s alarm bark fundamentally resembled another dog’s alarm bark.”

That makes sense because it’s important for people to recognize an alarm bark quickly.

Other studies found that people could reliably identify the context of different dog barks. People with different experience with dogs were asked to describe the emotional content of several artificially assembled bark sequences based on five emotional states: aggressiveness, fear, despair, playfulness and happiness. The researchers found that people with different levels of experience with dogs described the emotional content of the bark sequences similarly.

According to study summaries, the authors suggest that dog barking emerged through selective processes and that dog barks may present a functional system for communication in the dog-human relationship.

The other thing to know about barking is that in wolves, it’s a behavior seen only in juveniles. When we domesticated dogs, it’s likely that we selected for more friendly, less threatening behavior and appearance, and perhaps the bark accompanied those traits.

All this and more, including how to rehome a pet, in this week’s Pet Connection!

The scoop on dogs eating poop

Pet Connection,

As a veterinarians (and avowed dog-kisser), I had a lot of sympathy for the reader who wrote about her dog-poop-eating canine pal!

Q: My dog, a healthy 13-year-old male German shepherd-bluetick coonhound mix, loves to eat stool droppings like candy. We live next to a conservation area with trails where others walk their dogs leash-free, as do we. He never eats any fresh droppings but finds dried ones to eat. I have done everything to stop him, short of putting him on a leash. Do I worry needlessly?

A: There’s a name for that not-so-charming habit: coprophagy. It comes from the Greek words “copros,” for “feces,” and “phagein,” meaning “to eat.” For dogs and other species, it can be a natural behavior, but to humans, it’s distasteful — to say the least. Who wants to be kissed with that mouth?

We don’t know exactly why animals dig poop, but we do know a few things about the tasteless habit. It’s more common in dogs than in cats, and it’s more common in females than in males. It’s possible that females do it because it’s normal for them to clean up after their pups in this way.

One theory as to why dogs eat poop is that they do it out of stress or boredom. Some people suggest that dogs who do this are lacking certain nutrients in their diet or aren’t getting enough to eat. Dogs who have been scolded for pooping in the house may be attempting to hide the evidence of new transgressions. The behavior may also be in response to an underlying medical cause.

Besides the yuck factor, eating poop can result in a case of intestinal parasites. And if your dog snacks on manure from a horse recently treated with ivermectin, a common deworming agent, he could become sick.

Take him to the veterinarian to make sure the cause isn’t health-related. Otherwise, since your dog seems to only eat poop that he finds on the trail, the easiest solution may be to fit him with a basket muzzle if you’re unwilling to keep him on leash.

Read more, including about new vaccine recommendations, in the Pet Connection!

Just $750 to get this dog her hip replacement!

This and That

I’ve been trying to help raise money to help a sweet shelter dog named Valentine get a necessary hip replacement. She lives in my town, she was adopted from the same shelter my own QT Pi Becker came from, and she nearly died in the same distemper outbreak that nearly killed him. How could I not want to help?

https://www.gofundme.com/283cuejw

My friends, between the incredible response to the GoFundMe that Panhandle Animal Shelter created and some checks that were mailed to the shelter, Valentine has almost reached her goal of $4,500 — she only needs $750 more!

Please go to https://www.gofundme.com/283cuejw and help get her over the top. She and her family are counting on us!