Report: How To Travel With Your Dog (My Expert Personal Experience)

Dogs are outstanding traveling companions – they don’t back-seat drive, misread road maps, insist on eating at truck stops, snore, or steal your covers!

They are kind, affectionate, adventurous, easygoing, protective, and courageous. At this point I doubt that I would trade my dog Sam for a two-legged traveling companion, if offered.

Sam, full name Tycoon Sam, is a five-year-old, 70-pound Weimaraner. Over the years, since he was a tiny puppy, we have traveled some 90,000 miles, visited twenty-five states, met with high adventure and low comedy and loved every minute of it most of the time.

I think I now know more than the usual expert about how to travel with a dog staying in the good graces of policemen, park rangers, motel managers, and out of the city pound.

What To Take With You

So, first of all, what do you take on trip with a dog?

This is my own personal favorite list:

Shortly before 3 o’clock on the morning of August 5, 2007, Donna Hedl was jolted awake by shouts of her niece and nephew, who were visiting Donna and her husband Joe in their Roselle, Illinois, home.

Something was wrong with Congo, the family’s six-year-old German Shepherd!

He was retching, but to no avail, Mrs. Hedl recounted later. There was a slight foam around his mouth and he was constantly swallowing.

As she watched, Congo’s behavior became more peculiar. The dog would sit glassy-eyed and hang his head, or crawl behind a chair and stoop as if to defecate… but, again, to no avail.

Then Mrs. Hedl noticed a slight swelling in Congo’s abdomen.

My first thought was bloat… but of course that just couldn’t happen to my dog, she said. Besides, the last time he had eaten was more than twenty-four hours earlier.

When she called the animal hospital in nearby Dundee at 3 a.m., Mrs. Hedl said that the dog had been poisoned, an assumption based on the fact that the Hedl’s yard had recently been sprayed with weed killer. But when she mentioned the abdominal swelling, she was told to bring the dog to the clinic immediately.

Most dog owners are familiar with diarrhea in their pets; the condition is a very common one. But only a handful of owners really know anything about diarrheas varieties and causes.

Perhaps the greatest single cause of diarrhea is a change of diet. Thus, a dog that has been used to eating a commercial brand dog food and is suddenly given table scrapes is very likely to suffer diarrhea. A change in drinking water, especially when traveling, can also cause temporary diarrhea.

Abrupt changes in diet are particularly distressing to puppies whose intestinal tracts are still very sensitive. If you purchased your puppy from a breeder, you have probably been told what to feed the dog based on what he had been fed in the past. If, on the other hand, you got the dog from other sources such as a friend or an ad in the paper, it is advisable that you find out what he is eating. In any case, you should consult about your dogs diet with a vet. There is always the chance that the dog is not getting the proper nourishment he needs.

Are diet changes required as a dog ages? If so, at what age should you change your dog’s diet? These are questions that many pet owners wonder. We have all seen pet foods that cater to elderly dogs, but are they necessary? As dogs get older, they do require a change in diet

Read more:
Feeding Senior Dogs

i recently ordered pit bulls for dummies, and will soon acquire a copy of dog training for dummies.

the lady that lives downstairs from me gave me a book titled ‘Smarter than you Think’ and it tells you to throw things at your dog to teach it to come, and to stick a match in its butt to poop, and not trust dog food companies, and all this weird stuff, not too sure about that book.

any other suggestions? or tips?

Dog meals and snacks don’t have to hard to make or take a lot of time. Many snacks can be grabbed straight out of your refrigerator and are much healthier than baked goods.

However, there are a few things that I have noticed regarding many homemade dog food recipes that you should avoid doing.

1. Don’t microwave your dog’s food. Microwaving kills vitamins, minerals and nutrients. The radiation also alters the cell structure of the food. Scientific studies have shown that humans that eat microwaved foods have significant and disturbing changes in their blood cells. Microwaving has many serious side-effects, including altering the minerals in vegetables into cancerous free radicals. It’s bad enough that we humans continue to use microwaves to cook our food… let’s not subject our animals to it as well.

2. Many recipes that I’ve seen promote using beef/chicken bouillon cubes and/or canned beef/chicken broth. These products have very high and unhealthy sodium levels. Either use sodium reduced broths or better yet make your own.

Liver disease in dogs is a more common occurrence than feline liver disease. Liver has always been a mysterious organ, which performs more functions in maintaining life than any other organ in the body. Its large size with the capacity to continue work even when it is affected by disease makes it difficult to diagnose a liver disease. In addition, given the right support, liver cells can regenerate and bounce back to normal functioning.

One of the major functions of liver is to metabolize fats, carbohydrates and proteins. If the liver does not function properly, the nutrients cannot be metabolized effectively and harmful by-products cannot be broken down. This can greatly affect the detoxification process. For example:

* The bacteria in large intestines produce toxic ammonia while breaking down proteins for absorption in the blood stream.
* When the liver is unable to provide essential nutrients to the body, cells break down body tissue to cover up the loss. Ammonia is also produced during this process.
* Liver disease leads to an inability to detoxify toxins and they enter the blood and circulate throughout the body.
* In severe conditions contaminated blood reaches the brain and causes hepatic encephalopathy leading to fits, seizures, excess salivation and head pressing.

Nearly the same antibiotics used to treat urinary tract infection in humans are the ones that are used to treat canine and feline urinary tract infection. Several natural remedies and herbs can also used to help boost the immune system and to resist such infections.

However, before any treatment starts, it is useful to get the condition duly diagnosed since the early signs of urinary tract infection in dogs and cats could be signs of some underlying endocrinal disorders like diabetes. It is also necessary to rule out the presence of bladder stones, identify the location of the infection and identify the location of the disease-causing- bacterium that responsible for it. This necessitates a urinalysis and a urine culture.

The root cause of the UTI can be diagnosed in most cases and only a small proportion is idiopathic or without any known cause. The causal factors can help in identifying the right antibiotic and in providing quick relief to the suffering animal.

Another aspect of urinary tract infection in dogs and cats is the recurring nature of such conditions in most cases. It has an inherent quality of recurring, despite the initial remission of the disease. Even though the antibiotics required to treat urinary tract infections are strong and concentrated, an overdose of these can lead to a resistance to the drug.

The liver is a major organ that helps in detoxification of the body. Carcinogenic and toxic compounds consumed by dogs pass through it, which can potentially cause primary liver cancer in dogs. The liver is also a front-runner in destinations for metastatic tumors in humans as well as dogs. Primary cancer tends to metastasize to other parts of the body quite easily and this can happen before the disease has even been diagnosed.

A liver than functions improperly is tantamount to shutting down the multiple functions that the liver has to perform. These include:

* Detoxification of toxins and drugs.
* Storage and dispersion of nutrients.
* Regulation of body temperature and circulation.
* Metabolism.
* Digestion of food.

Initially the symptoms of liver cancer in dogs appear as abdominal pain when the dog is lifted from the stomach, a large mass felt in the abdomen or excessive weight loss. High levels of bilirubin in the blood stream or urine and an ultrasound that shows an enlarged liver or inflammation in the pancreas are indicative of liver cancer. A definitive diagnosis, however, is done with a liver biopsy.

During the first 24 to 48 hours after delivery, take the mother and all puppies to see your vet. The purpose of the examination is to insure healthy puppies with no obvious defects or illnesses, to be sure no puppies are retained in the uterus, to correct vaccination deficiencies, and to give the mother a hormone injection which will aid in contraction of the uterus and removal of the debris from stage 3.

The nursing period begins with the secretion of a complex milk-like substance called colostrum. Puppies nursing during the first 24 hours of life get antibodies from colostrum, giving them protection against diseases for the first few weeks of life. Puppies failing to nurse during the first few hours face a stormy start in life and may fail to survive.

Sick puppies, or those unable to survive the competitiveness of a large litter, soon become too weak to nurse. The result is a vicious cycle: the less they eat the weaker they become, and the weaker they become, the less they eat. Weak puppies require extra help; use an orphan formula to feed them. Several products are available over-the-counter for this purpose. For feeding instructions follow the label recommendations of the manufacturer.