Preparing for the future as best you can
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Pets often tell you when something is wrong. It's up to the owners to listen
LAST NIGHT, the owner of one of my favourite dogs took her out for her evening walk. At first she played around as she usually did. Suddenly, she stopped. Her body shook slightly. She dropped to the ground.
Within an hour, she was dead.
Her owner asks himself if he could have seen any sign yesterday or even the days before that she was sick or in any trouble, but, he says, “She was eating normally, peeing normally. She didn’t show in any way that she was suffering.”
Sometimes because you see your pet every day, you won’t notice changes, especially slight ones, that have gradually worsened over time.
Mee, that part-chow who lives next door, is recovering quite nicely after her life-saving operation two weeks ago. She was suffering from pyometra, a deadly infection of the uterus, and required a major operation to remove the uterus and treat the infection.
The infection was quite advanced by the time J took Mee to the vet. J had noticed that over the months, her dog had been drinking more water and urinating more than usual.
Then she saw the blood in Mee’s urine.
“I thought Mee was in heat,” J told me. “I didn’t think anything was wrong.”
It seems to me that if J had used some common sense, she would have realised something was wrong.
Mee had already recently come out of heat. It was too soon for her to go into heat again.
Besides, the soi dogs would have told her. They always dropped by when Mee was in heat. When she began bleeding this time, they showed up, but only for a few minutes.
They didn’t bark, they didn’t try to get into the patio where Mee was, they didn’t even stay around –
and they didn’t come back. Their noses told them that Mee wasn’t in heat.
Mee began bleeding a number of weeks before J finally took her to the vet, enough time for her infection to progress from “serious” to “life-threatening”.
Now that her dog is back home and almost completely healed, J has to keep in mind another concern. Mee is now spayed, and already fat. J has to reduce the amount of food she gives her dog each day.
She doesn’t quite understand the concept yet, that a neutered |dog requires fewer calories than an un-neutered dog does. To speed recovery, she’s been giving Mee |her favourite food, grilled chicken livers.
These are not the best food for a dog that needs to lose weight, and if Mee doesn’t lose weight, J will have lots of other health problems to worry about.
At times, your pet might tell you there’s a problem, but you still can’t do anything to help the situation.
I knew, as I have mentioned in previous columns, that Phantom, my elderly cat, was having problems with his mouth ever since he joined us over a year and a half ago.
He told me so. Sometimes, not often, he would brush his paw across his cheek, then shake his head. Yet whenever I took him to the vet to check his teeth and gums, she couldn’t find anything wrong.
Finally, when he began drooling, we knew he was in trouble, and that’s when we found that terrible tumour, which had just pushed through his gum.
We can’t remove it; it will simply grow back. We couldn’t operate anyway on an 18-year-old cat. We can only shrink it through medication, and use any method to reduce the pain the old man is suffering.
Your pets – sometimes they show you something is wrong; sometimes they don’t; sometimes even though they tell you, there’s nothing much you can do.
