Author Archives

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Abused alpacas recovering at OSU, many find new homes

Abused alpacas recovering at OSU, many find new homes

Christopher Cebra, department head and professor of clinical sciences at the college, has watched most of the 175 alpacas gain strength little by little since they were seized from a Falls City ranch where the owners allegedly abused and neglected them.

 

 

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More domestic violence shelters are taking in pets

More domestic violence shelters are taking in pets

Animal welfare and domestic violence groups have found common cause in recent years amid growing interest in connections between animal cruelty and family abuse. Those links have spurred about two dozen states to start letting pets be included in protective orders since 2006; others are considering it, including New Hampshire and Ohio.

I’d like to see more of this. I’ve been involved in a few cases where we boarded an abused spouse’s pet while they went to a shelter. It’s a scary situation, especially when the abuser comes looking for the pet and wants to take him or her home. We as small animal hospitals aren’t set up nor trained to deal with these situations. It would relieve a lot of stress on pet and owner alike if they were allowed to stay together.

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Dog Brains Link Pleasure With Owner’s Scent

Dog Brains Link Pleasure With Owner’s Scent

There has been an explosion of research on the canine mind lately and I’m loving it!  I always thought the concept of animals as emotionless automatons was suspect. It makes much more sense to me that many, if not most, animals are creatures of emotion and sophisticated scientific studies are bearing this out. I get the impulse to avoid anthropomorphism but I think we went too far with it in the past. It’s great to see solid evidence of the human-animal bond.

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Half Of Americans Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

Half Of Americans Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

People who backed the conspiracy theories were less likely to rely on a family doctor. Instead they looked to family and friends, the Internet and celebrity doctors for their health information.

This spills over to veterinary care as well. I can think of several instances where an owner didn’t trust what we said because of something her breeder or Dr. Google told her. And those are the ones who still come to us. I had to leave one pet message board because I kept seeing the opinion from several different posters that veterinarians and their staff prefer to keep pets sick. They think that things like vaccines, heartworm preventative, flea and tick preventative and dentals make their pets sicker and therefore serve only to put money in our pockets. Infuriating, right?!? I tried to argue sense but you can’t fix stupid. I mean, what costs more a DHPP vaccine or parvo treatment, a basic dental prophy or multiple extractions, a box of Frontline or hospitalization for flea bite anemia? 

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Untangling the Veterinary Abuse Network’s Web of Lies

Untangling the Veterinary Abuse Network’s Web of Lies

Armed with nothing more than her personal vendetta against vets, some unverified information from a discreditable source, tunnel vision, poor reading comprehension and spin, Catalano was able to sway her followers into believing she had a convincing case against a veterinarian, based on nothing more than an allegation coming to her thousands of miles away from where she resides.

 

The newest post on the Ban the Veterinary Abuse Network blog is a chilling recounting of just how Julie Catalano convinced her minions to attack Dr. Koshi. Anyone with the slightest sense of perspective can see that this woman and her allies need to be held accountable. This is not behavior that should be accepted in a civilized society.