Posts in Category: Cats

Photographer Lori Fusaro is compiling photos of older animals for a book she hopes will inspire people to think about adopting older pets from shelters. Fusaro’s idea for the book coalesced when she met Sunny, an ailing 16-year-old mixed-breed dog, at a Los Angeles shelter. Fusaro adopted her, and a year later, they are still together. Fusaro knows letting go will be difficult. “I didn’t want to open my heart for that kind of pain, but how much sadder and more horrible for me would it be to leave her at the shelter,” said Fusaro. “It will be terrible to lose her but much worse to leave her to die alone.” The Washington Post (tiered subscription model)/The Associated Press

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Renters with pets typically pay an additional deposit to cover damage or cleaning fees. Rental expert Niccole Schreck advises pet owners to provide evidence of their animals’ good behavior, such as obedience school certificates or letters from previous neighbors and landlords, and even bring their pet in for an “interview.” She advises owners to resist any temptation to conceal their pet, or they may find themselves looking for a new home for the animal or the whole family. U.S. News & World Report/My Money blog (7/17)

In a recent Rent.com survey of 500 U.S. renters with pets, 48 percent said the pet deposit was the biggest headache when moving with a pet. Pet deposits are usually charged in addition to your security deposit before you move in to cover any damages that may be caused by your pet during your lease term. At the end of your lease, some landlords will refund your pet deposit if your rental is undamaged, while others will keep all or part of the pet deposit as a cleaning fee.

Why do landlords charge a pet deposit? Most landlords have legitimate concerns when it comes to renting to pet owners. Though you may be a responsible pet owner who takes care of your rental home, there are plenty of people who do not, so allowing animals can be risky for a landlord. Many property owners are reluctant because they fear pets will damage the unit, make too much noise or inconvenience other renters.

How much is a typical pet deposit? On a one-year lease, 71 percent of the pet owners Rent.com surveyed said they would expect to spend $200 or less on a pet deposit, while nearly a third (29 percent) said they would typically spend more than $200. In general, there is no typical pet deposit. Deposit amounts will vary depending on how many and what kinds of pets you have, the size, the breed, where you live and even the landlord’s past experiences.

Can I negotiate a pet deposit? Given the inconsistency in pet deposits, they can be negotiable depending on the landlord. The best way to barter for a lower pet deposit is to build the landlord’s comfort level with you and your pets, which can be done in several ways:

• Recommendation letters: You know that your cat isn’t going to scratch at the walls, but your potential landlord can’t be sure. Put his or her mind to rest with recommendation letters from past landlords stating that your four-legged friends were well behaved and left your previous rentals in good shape. You can also obtain letters from previous neighbors to reassure the landlord that your pets won’t bother or harm other renters, as well as a letter from your veterinarian stating that your pet is spayed/neutered and up to date on vaccinations.

• Obedience training: The more evidence you can provide that you’re a responsible pet owner, the better your chance of lowering the pet deposit. Written proof that your dog has completed obedience training will show your new landlord that your dog is well-behaved and socialized.

• Renters insurance: Renters insurance is always a good idea, but having a rental insurance policy – especially one that covers pet-related damages and has liability coverage – can be a helpful tool when discussing pet deposits. Your willingness to be financially responsible for your pet shows the landlord that you are respectful of their concerns and feel a sense of responsibility for your rental.

• Pet interview: Ask your landlord if he or she is willing to do a pet interview, so you can demonstrate that your pet is not aggressive, destructive or too energetic for an apartment. If you opt for an interview, make sure your pet has been walked, fed and relaxed so he or she is on their best behavior.

The bottom line: Don’t be like the 10 percent of renters surveyed who have hidden a pet from a landlord. You could put yourself at risk for eviction or have to find a new home for your pet. Your best bet is to be honest and find an apartment that is happy to have you and your furry companion.

Niccole Schreck is the rental experience expert for Rent.com, a free rental site that helps you find an affordable apartment, gives you tips on how to move and then says, “thank you” with a prepaid $100 reward card.

Have you ever wished a popular Smithsonian exhibit could come to you rather than the other way around? Thanks to an exciting collaboration initiated by the AVMA and joined by the Smithsonian and Zoetis, “Animal Connections: Our Journey Together” recently made its debut at the AVMA Convention. Housed in a mini-museum inside an expandable 18-wheeler, the exhibit features interactive displays introducing visitors of all ages to the many roles veterinarians play and the complex bond between humans and animals. View a video from Tuesday’s public opening of the exhibit.

Texas A&M University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences has teamed with the Houston SPCA to give fourth-year veterinary students a chance to work alongside experts in investigating and treating dogs, cats, horses and other animals that have been subject to neglect and abuse. “We will be graduating new generations of vets who will disseminate throughout Texas and beyond with a deep understanding of animal welfare and shelter medicine,” said dean and veterinarian Eleanor Green. The Bryan-College Station Eagle (Texas) (7/12)

By Brooke Conrad brooke.conrad@theeagle.com

Happy, healthy pets are key to human and animal health, according to this article. Veterinarian Joan Hendricks, dean of veterinary medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how owners can ensure good health and well-being for their animals and themselves. It’s important to start by researching the species and breed of pet that best fits your family, Dr. Hendricks points out. Pets need proper training to prevent injuries to people, regular veterinary care and good nutrition, and it’s essential to properly handle animal waste to prevent disease, Dr. Hendricks explains. U.S. News & World Report (7/3)

Sudden outbreaks like swine or bird flu remind us all too well that humans are not immune to diseases animals carry. These particular illnesses are most likely to affect people who work with animals regularly, like in a farm setting, but being at risk to an animal’s health hazards can happen in your own home. Improper care for a pet can lead to diseases, and a misbehaved pet can be dangerous to families.

At the same time, being around animals has been shown to increase a person’s well-being. The American Heart Association released a study this year that showed people who own pets have improved cardiovascular health. Animals often are used to help children with special needs or in visits to hospitals. Their presence can abate loneliness, increase altruism and reduce anxiety.

With pet ownership at 62 percent among American households, according to the American Pet Products Association, it is important people understand their risks and benefits. Having a healthy pet requires first learning about the animal you want, then caring and providing for it accordingly, says Joan Hendricks, the Gilbert S. Kahn dean of veterinary medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. U.S. News turned to Hendricks for advice about pet and family dynamics.

Understand your pet’s natural tendencies. Before you adopt a pet, know what role you want it to have in your family. Do you want a pet for companionship or to guard the house? Do you expect that your pet will join you on your morning run? Do you have the finances to pay someone to take care of your pet while you work or while you’re on business trips?

“People should know enough about their animal when they get it and after they get it,” Hendricks says. “They also must be open to the idea that they may not know as much as they thought.” Even dog breeds vary in terms of what they need from people, Hendricks says. Some dogs are meant to work, some need intellectual stimulation and some need little exercise. Bulldogs, for instance, are happy to lie at home sleeping a lot and show affection when you return from work. Great Danes also don’t need to run around much.

“If a pet’s specific needs are not attended to then they will not be good pets,” Hendricks says. They can even get sick with gastrointestinal upsets and develop behavior disorders – which could lead to wrecking furniture – if a family is not the right match. There are cases when pets aren’t the right fit for the family, she says, which is why it’s important to become informed before you adopt.

When it comes to exotic animals, such as tarantulas or pythons, there isn’t as much information available for pet owners. “There’s always a health concern for veterinarians that anyone who has one of these animals doesn’t know how to take care of them,” she says.

Train your pet properly. Animal bites are the single biggest health risk to kids when it comes to pets, Hendricks says. Avoiding this danger returns to the first principle of understanding your pet’s needs.

“People treat animals as if they were people, and they treat us as if we were their species,” she says. For example, dogs often bite each other out of play, but owners must reinforce that this kind of behavior isn’t acceptable when playing with people. Work with your pet to manage its behavior so everyone is happy. Make sure your children show mutual respect by not teasing or harming the pet, she says.

An irritated cat, for instance, could scratch its owner and spread bartonellosis, commonly called “cat scratch disease,” which causes swollen lymph nodes in people as well as possible fever, headache and fatigue, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite the common belief that some cats are indifferent to their human caretakers, new research indicates cats are more likely to respond to their owner’s voice than a stranger’s. However, the response is, in typical cat fashion, subtle: ear or head movement or pupil dilation. The study contributes insights into cats’ cognition and shows how their natural tendency to mask their responses to stimuli translates into the home environment. Discovery (6/25)

Cats may try to hide their true feelings, but a recent study found that cats do actually pay attention to their owners, distinguishing them from all other people.

The study, which will be published in the July issue of Animal Cognition, is one of the few to examine the cat/human social dynamic from the feline’s perspective. Cats may not do what we tell them to, but they usually adore their human caretakers.

Co-author Atsuko Saito of The University of Tokyo explained to Discovery News that dogs have evolved, and are bred, “to follow their owner’s orders, but cats have not been. So sometimes cats appear aloof, but they have special relationships with their owners.”

“Previous studies suggest that cats have evolved to behave like kittens (around their owners), and humans treat cats similar to the way that they treat babies,” co-author Kazutaka Shinozuka of the University of South Florida College of Medicine added. “To form such baby-parent like relationships, recognition of owners might be important for cats.”

Their study, mostly conducted in the homes of cats so as not to unduly upset or worry the felines, determined just that.

The researchers played recordings of strangers, as well as of the cats’ owners, to the felines. The cats could not see the speakers.

The cats responded to human voices, not by communicative behavior- such as by vocalizing or moving their tails — but by orienting behavior. In this case, “orienting” meant that the cats moved their ears and heads toward the source of each voice.

The felines also, at times, displayed pupil dilation, which can be a sign of powerful emotions, such as arousal and excitement. Other studies have found that natural pupil dilation can be directly tied to brain activity, revealing mental reactions to emotional stimuli.

All of these reactions happened more often when cats heard their owners, and particularly after they had become habituated to, or familiar with, the strangers’ voices.

The feline reactions are therefore very subtle, but cats have evolved not to be very demonstrative.

Cats, for example, hide illness because “in the wild, no one can rescue them and predators pay attention to such weak individuals,” Saito said. Even though a watchful owner would try to save the cat, the feline’s gut reaction is to remain stoic and avoid any possible threat at a time of vulnerability.

Felines may be hard to read sometimes, but not always. Saito said some of the cats during the study and elsewhere have “fawned over me eagerly,” purring and displaying affection familiar to many other feline fanciers.

The researchers point out that, after 10,000 years of cohabitating with humans, domestic cats have the ability to communicate with us, and we seem to understand them, for the most part.

Humans who have never owned or been around cats much can pick up basic feline emotions solely by the sound of certain purrs and meows, Saito said. In studies, such people can classify the cat vocalizations according to particular situations.

Kazuo Fujita is a researcher in the Department of Psychology at Kyoto University who has also studied cats.

Fujita told Discovery News that “this is an important study” on how cats think, “which has remained mysterious due to difficulties in testing them.”

Substances Poisonous to your Pet

Cancer is the foremost killer of older dogs and cats, but pets stricken with the disease are gaining new options from clinical trials for new treatments that hold promise for helping animals and people. A team of physicians and veterinarians has launched the National Veterinary Cancer Registry to help pet owners find trials that might offer their animals more time while helping advance science. Cats and dogs are often afflicted with many of the same types of cancers as people, including lymphoma, leukemia and bone cancer.

U.S. News & World Report/HealthDay News (6/14)

By Barbara Bronson Gray
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) — If you hear that a friend’s beloved family member has joined a clinical trial for cancer treatment, don’t assume the patient is human.

Cancer is the leading cause of death in older dogs and cats, and clinical trials offer hope that effective medications will be developed — for humans and their four-legged friends, cancer experts say.

The new National Veterinary Cancer Registry, launched last month by a national team of animal and human cancer doctors, will point pet owners toward clinical trials that might benefit their beloved companions and speed up the development of life-saving therapies for humans.

“We will be able to decrease the cost and beat the time involved in drug discovery,” said the registry’s founder, Dr. Theresa Fossum, a professor of surgery at Texas A&M University’s college of veterinary medicine.

Because many similar diseases affect people and their animals, veterinarians and physicians say a lot can be learned from studying how treatments work in cats and dogs.

The drug-assessment process could be accelerated by a simple fact: dogs age many times faster than humans, and their cancers progress more rapidly too. Also, many canine and feline cancers — including sarcoma; non-Hodgkin lymphoma; leukemia; mesothelioma; and bone, ovarian, kidney, uterine and oral cancers — are virtually the same cancers humans have.

Experts not involved with the registry said the concept of the database looks promising.

“These clinical trials would be more real-world than a lab experiment,” said Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and head of the Yale Human Animal Medicine Project, which studies clinical connections between human and animal medicine.

Dogs often are an interesting model for better understanding environmentally induced cancers, Rabinowitz said. “Asbestos causes cancer in humans 35 years [after exposure], but if you’re a dog, you get it in four to five years, so we can see how the cancers develop more naturally,” he said.

Fossum said she has always been bothered by the slow and cumbersome way drugs are tested. “If it’s a cancer drug, they’re going to put a human tumor in a mouse … but it’s not very predictive of how drugs will work in people,” she said.

Then, after tests to see if the drugs might be toxic in humans, the drugs are evaluated in human clinical trials, which take more than a decade to conduct. “So the drugs that are coming out now were starting [to be evaluated] 12 years ago,” she said.

Testing the drugs in pets speeds up the process, allowing researchers to determine if a medication works before taking it to human clinical trials, Fossum said. With a pet owner’s informed consent, “we can try a new drug that seems promising a lot sooner,” she said.

The concept of a cancer database for dogs and cats could expand to include other diseases, such as diabetes. About 800,000 dogs have type 1 diabetes in the United States, Fossum said. Other conditions that a veterinary registry could serve include endocrine, neurological and cardiac issues.

About 6 million dogs and 6 million cats in the United States receive a cancer diagnosis each year, according to the Animal Cancer Foundation, in Norwalk, Conn. If your dog or cat is one of them, you can register your pet with the National Veterinary Cancer Registry.

The registry was created by a consortium of animal and human cancer doctors, including specialists from the Baylor Healthcare System in Texas, the Texas Veterinary Oncology Group and the CARE Foundation, a Florida-based animal rescue and wildlife education organization.

Because the registry is new, it may take some time before effective clinical trial matchmaking can occur between animals and drug developers, Fossum said.

More information

Learn more about the connection between animal and human health from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

University of Sydney veterinarian Vanessa Barrs began investigating in 2006 after three cats presented with unusual infections that spread from the nasal cavity to create growths in the eye socket. After six years of research, Dr. Barrs and an international team of experts identified the fungus as Aspergillus felis, a newly identified species with the power to cause dangerous respiratory infections in people as well as cats. The pathogen may be confused with the more easily treated Aspergillus fumigatus, Dr. Barrs said. PhysOrg.com (6/18)

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June 18, 2013 – Natura Pet Products of Fremont, Nebraska, has today announced it is voluntarily recalling specific lots of dry pet food because they may be contaminated with Salmonella.

The recall includes specific lots of these brands…

• Innova
• EVO
• California Natural
• Healthwise
• Karma
• Mother Nature

No canned food is affected by this announcement.

The news of the event has been confirmed in a news release posted by the FDA.

What Products Are Recalled?

Where Were They Distributed?

The affected products are sold in bags through…

• Veterinary clinics
• Select pet specialty retailers
• Online in the USA and Canada

About Salmonella

Salmonella can affect animals eating the products and there is risk to humans from handling contaminated pet products, especially if they have not thoroughly washed their hands after having contact with the products or any surfaces exposed to these products.

Healthy people infected with Salmonella should monitor themselves for some or all of the following symptoms:

• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Diarrhea or bloody diarrhea
• Abdominal cramping
• Fever

Rarely, Salmonella can result in more serious ailments, including arterial infections, endocarditis, arthritis, muscle pain, eye irritation, and urinary tract symptoms.

Consumers exhibiting these signs after having contact with this product should contact their healthcare providers.

Pets with Salmonella infections may be lethargic and have diarrhea or bloody diarrhea, fever, and vomiting.

Some pets will have only decreased appetite, fever and abdominal pain. Infected but otherwise healthy pets can be carriers and infect other animals or humans. If your pet has consumed the recalled product and has these symptoms, please contact your veterinarian.

These products were packaged in a single production facility. During routine FDA testing, a single lot tested positive for the presence of Salmonella.

There have been no reports of pet or human illness associated with this product. In an abundance of caution, Natura is voluntarily recalling all products with expiration dates prior to June 10, 2014.

What to Do?

Consumers who have purchased the specific dry pet foods listed should discard them.

For further information or a product replacement or refund, call Natura toll free at 800-224-6123, Monday–Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM CT.

You can report complaints about FDA-regulated pet food products by calling the consumer complaint coordinator in your area.

Or go to https://www.fda.gov/petfoodcomplaints.

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