A month or so ago I offered up a post on the wide variety of veterinarians newly building their second homes on the Internet. In that post I sought to build up the veterinary blogosphere, but I should have been more inclusive. Veterinarians like Dr. Phil Zeltzman are maintaining sophisticated sites that responsibly and clearly address major issues…but they’re not exactly “blogs.”

Dr. Zeltzman...

by Marcy LaHart, JD

[Ms. LaHart is an attorney who practices animal and environmental law in South Florida.]

Like Dr. Khuly, my holiday was sullied by the ugly aftermath of puppies spawned by the pet store/puppy mill industry. On Christmas day I got an email from a woman that had gone to “Crazy About Pets” in Margate, Florida with her girlfriend a few days before Christmas. Her girlfriend...

“A rabies shot costs $30? I bet you buy that vaccine from the manufacturer for $3. So you want to charge me a 1000% markup. Seriously?”

This outburst was brought to you by one smart-cookie client from last week. She’d worked for a veterinarian in the past so she’d always received her vaccines at cost. She new what a lot of you don’t know:

Vaccines themselves are cheap!

But vaccines never...

A shocking news story out of Northeastern Pennsylvania: A basement-dwelling groomer offers “Gothic kittens” for sale on eBay. The uniquely “Gothic” quality? A pair of pierced ears, a pierced neck and a pierced tail.

What the seller didn’t know is that not only is it illegal to sell live animals on eBay (hooray for eBay!) it’s apparently illegal to pierce cats in Pennsylvania.

No, it’s not...

Every year I like to offer a rundown of my holiday nightmare cases. Usually, these are the pups purchased in pet stores. With their…

…unrelenting coughs, watery eyes, sniffly noses, undescended testicles, whopping umbilical hernias, honking heart murmurs, popping knees, crunching hips, stunted sizes, abnormal dentition and full-on pneumonia…

…these pups make me cringe with their crises and...

It was an unseasonably warm and drizzly Christmas morning in Miami. With no chimney to speak of, this household had hung its stockings on the window cranks with care. And no long-winter’s nap for me night before last. Just a fitful five hours that took me back to childhood Christmas Eves when sleep was not the luxury it is today.

This time, however, it wasn’t the excitement of staying up late...

Until last week, my air conditioner had been broken for a month. No big deal this time of year in Miami. I just opened the windows. But the cause of the malfunction and the effect of a return in central air circulation have been eye-opening—in a way that, strangely, involves my pets.

Turns out the goats love following an amused meter man as he makes the rounds of my house. They love poking...

I imagine most of you won’t find this topic amusing but I can’t help presenting it here by way of soliciting your impressions. Here’s the deal: Over on VIN (mostly for vets only), there’s a thread about a vet who “spayed” her first male cat.

Well, not exactly…she just started to, making an abdominal incision and seeking out a set of tubes that weren’t there…before realizing it was a boy cat...

Pet food companies are employing increasingly-effective tactics to wed you to their brand. The newest? Recruiting your altruistic animal impulses. And I have to admit it’s a great strategy. How can you resist an ad that minimizes the product and plays up the dire need to find homes for shelter pets?

Spied in the Wall Street Journal’s back-page blurb in Media & Marketing this morning: “Dog...

I hate people sometimes. Strong words for a peaceful Sunday morning, right? There I was, sitting at Starbucks, recovering from catering my mother’s lavish annual holiday party (75 peeps!), just cooling my toes in a cappuccino…when the phone rings:

Unknown number. S---! Should I answer it?...why not?

Is this Dr. Khuly?! Dr. Khuly my cat is dead. Dead! This is the third cat I’ve taken to your...

Your kitten doesn’t greet you when you come home from work one day. Instead, she’s hiding behind the toilet engrossed in a grim task: playing with the remnants of a bottle of spilled Tylenol gelcaps. Damn!—you thought you picked up every last one. Meanwhile, an unseen stash was hiding in the corner.

At least five gelcaps have been bitten to shreds. Their contents are oozing on the floor and...

by Marcy LaHart, JD

[This article is brougt to you by Marcy Lahart, a South Florida lawyer who dedicates her practice to cases where she advocates on behalf of animals. She is an adjunct professor of law at the University of Miami, where she teaches a course on animal law. At Ms. LaHart's request I will be "teaching" one of her course's seminars this spring, hopefully helping law students...

Did you know that sometimes veterinarians spay in different ways? Some of us take out the ovaries and the uterus. Others take the ovaries alone.

The debate among veterinarians on this point has often been heated. European vets can’t for the life of them figure why American vets take it all out. Vice versa’s typically the case, too. Why NOT prevent all those pesky potential uterine issues...

Yesterday dawned early for me. 5 AM found me flinging borrowed garments into a bag, feeding sleepy goats along with bemused dogs, and waking an ornery child from a deep slumber. Time to go!

My 6:30 AM cattle call 45 minuets away meant the Starbucks run would have to be crammed in there somewhere. Drop off kid. Drop off dogs. Coffee. On my way.

The destination: A park up in Miami Gardens...

Last week our hospital received a terse letter from a client complaining about her $600 dentistry bill. “Outrageous,” she wrote. The owner had left in a rush without picking up her estimate, waving it off with an “I’m sure anything you need to be done will be fine with me. I trust you.”

So much for trust. Our fault, of course, for allowing her the privilege of running away without an...

For stressed-out dogs and rambunctious pups, there’s a remedy distilled from their mother’s milk—well, not really her milk, just the pup-soothing secretions from the sebaceous glands near her nipples.

DAP (aka, “dog appeasing pheromone”) is the result of this distillation—just don’t ask me how they get it…I really don’t want to know.

Supposedly—however questionable the method of obtaining...

Ever surf the Web looking for credible information on your pets? If you’re reading this I know you’re working on it. What say you, then, to the research that intends to warn you off blogs like this, lest they be chock-full of “unconstructive” information?

Two recent papers, one of which appeared in this month’s JAVMA (Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association) effectively urge...

As if Paris’s penchant for pocket-pooches wasn’t already problematic enough, the breed is bound to suffer in the wake of Disney’s release of Beverly Hills Chihuahua. In case you’re not aware, here’s the official site for the flick.

With more CGI dogs than 101 Dalmatians, Disney’s Chihuahua love story is already a holiday success (though, technically, it was released in October). So what does...

The answer in the case of most species is obvious: No. Not when compared to the lifespan of their wild cousins. How could they? The animals are kept in zoos for reasons that have little to do with their welfare or lifespan as individuals.

Unless their habitats have been completely lost, the ideal place for any given animal is his natural home…not a zoo. There’s no argument there.

Though the...

It’s time for the inevitable: shopping! Because I refuse to frequent traditional retail establishments during Thanksgiving and New Year’s (for years now), I always either shop online or make my own gifts. (The supermarket and the craft store are as far as I’ll get to a mall.)

This year I’m treating my family, friends and staff to my used books (they always appreciate this, despite their...

If you know dogs this news will come as no surprise: Dogs are jealous creatures. Toy envy, treat coveting and kibble greed are no strangers to us dog-watchers. But now, researchers in Vienna have confirmed the not-so-surprising phenomenon:

Yes, dogs will fail to obey commands when distracted by the “emotion” conferred by observing another dog get a better deal. 

Sausage and bread…you get...

When it’s time for your pet’s euthanasia most of you want a veterinarian who will show the right degree of compassion, know just what to say, give you a big hug or the room you need, and treat your pet with reverence and humanity—almost as if he were her own.

That’s hard to do. But most of us try hard to do it right—to the best of our abilities.

When you’re trying to make decisions on the...

As a college student I spent a couple of summers working the reception desk at the practice I (still!) work for. My bosses thought it would be a good idea for a future veterinarian to learn every aspect of a veterinary hospital’s workings (and because, truth be told, they had a hard time with reception staff turnover during this time).

At first, I was frustrated at being confined to “the...

In vet school we were required to participate in the large animal field service as a requirement for graduation. Lots of it was bumping around at full-tilt over rural Pennsylvania hills and dales in a huge old Chevy crusted in compartments and hatches for our equipment’s safekeeping.

Were it not for the cell phones and artificial insemination discussions that accompanied our trips, you might...

Your older cat’s sudden bout of vomiting led your vet to tentatively conclude that his kidneys were failing. Indeed, his renal values were significantly elevated and abdominal X-rays were fairly normal. He was hospitalized. Your regular vet goes out of town and leaves the case to her associate.

When significant hydration failed to resolve the vomiting your vet’s associate solved the case by...

Some of you know the drill well: A new lumpy-bumpy pops up, seemingly overnight. You make the appointment, trek to the vet hospital and have your vet stick a needle in it. She then checks the cells she’s extracted under a microscope and sometimes decides to send another slide to the pathologist for examination. She then adds a description of the mass to a chart she keeps that details your...

When you take your pet to the veterinarian for a “simple” spay and the incision requires multiple follow-up visits as a result of its obvious superficial infection, should you pay for follow-ups?

When your vet “misses” a diagnosis and you have to go see the [expensive] internal medicine specialist only to figure out it’s something simple your regular vet should have caught in the first...

There’s something new happening in the world of veterinary medicine and this time I think I’ve got my finger on its pulse. Over the past month I’ve received several emails from veterinarians and animal health groups and—get this—they want to blog.

Cool, right?

As of this month, Dolittler’s been officially blogging for three years. My first post, which I’ll always recall as fondly as I do...

I may never get some of you to agree with me on this but there you have it. I don’t now and won’t ever offer discounts to my clients for either owning many pets or bringing in more than one pet at a time.

I know that many of you rely on your veterinarians’ multiple pet discounts by way of saving significant amounts on your pet bills. I would never begrudge you your right to seek such...

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Raise your hand if you saw Best in Show. Remember the couple with the Weimeraner? Picture them…with a cat instead of a dog…and you’re starting to get the picture. They’re my clients. Let’s call them “the Bickers.”

For those of you who didn’t happen to see this excellent film (which parodies the dog show world as it exults and examines the human-animal bond), you’d better go rent it right...

Just two months ago Miami-Dade County (where I reside) approved an ordinance that would ban the chronic use of tethering (chaining or otherwise confining a dog via tether) as a way of “housing” dogs. But it didn’t happen without a fight, one which the welfare-minded residents of neighboring Broward County are now up against.

In spite of some reasonable arguments in support of the occasional,...