Pet Parent be Like
Fat Cats Cost Fat Stacks
I’m not good at estimating things, but I’d say about 90% of the pets I see are overweight to obese. Owners don’t like to hear this, though. If they could just have a big eyed, furry thing to pet and feed forever, that would be their ideal life. The animal wants the food, it makes them “happy” and if baby is happy, owner is happy, but the animal doesn’t seem to really ENJOY the food typically and just wolfs it down and looks for more like “I can’t believe that’s all you’re going to give me” and the big eyes instill guilt, we feed, feel happy, then guilt for not giving more, and so the cycle continues. Unfortunately as they get older, or even some at a much younger age, the extra weight can cause so many more problems.
People tend to judge how much their pet should weigh based on their breed (or perceived breed) and their parents’ sizes. I often hear “well, how big should he be for his breed?” or “well, his daddy was HUGE – with a head *THIS* big and was 195lb!!” There are a few problems with this theory. 1: every breed has a wide range of what can be normal (height, thickness, etc) , 2: every individual gets different genetics and may not end up as large as their parents (or could be larger) – My parents were both 5’11” and I ended up 5’8″. 3: just because the parent was 195lb, that doesn’t tell me if that parent was an ideal body condition and not also obese.
In general, you should be able to feel your pet’s ribs, but not see them. So, especially with those super fluffy critters, you’ll have to put your hands on them to decide if they’re too fat/skinny. Have them stand up, then run your fingers down their ribs. You should be able to easily feel the ribs without pressing, but not feel any depressions between them, like the back of your hand. If you have to push through flesh to feel the bones like you would on your wrist, your pet needs to lose weight. If you can feel spaces between their ribs like your fingers, your pet needs to gain weight.
Here’s an equation to figure out how much your pet needs to eat in a day (not just their pet food, but you have to include EVERY calorie that goes in their mouths – food dropped, just a little snack while cooking, kids feeding them, treats every time they go outside and use the bathroom, the cat’s food when you leave it out for them to steal, etc, etc). Remember, a 100 calorie snack for an adult human could be 50% of a small animal’s daily needs. So, even just a little bite for you could be enormous for our pets. And don’t be fooled by the pet who is ALWAYS hungry. Unlike us, they have no concept of “being healthy” other than “EAT WHEN YOU CAN BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THERE WILL BE FOOD AGAIN!!!!” Remember, a dog/cat has about the intelligence of a three year old child, so we have to be their brains and think of their health for them.
Daily calorie needs for your pet = 70 x (Ideal body weight in kg)^0.75
*********DOG FOOD BAGS LIE!!!!! DON’T FOLLOW THOSE INSTRUCTIONS!!!!!**************
** weight in lb/2.2 = weight in kg
** Ideal weight = body weight – (body weight x %overweight)
- with % overweight = anywhere from 10-40% overweight (ask your vet)
- So, 42lb beagle that is OBESE is about 40% over weight, so ideal body weight = 42 – (42×0.4) = 25.2lb
- So, a 42lb beagle that should only weight 25lbs, 25/2.2 = 11.4kg
- calories = 70 x (11.4kg)^0.75 = 70(6.2) = 434 calories per day
- To make it a little easier for you, here’s a chart (This is for ADULT animals, not growing/lactating/pregnant – Also, this is IDEAL weight, not their current weight if they’re obese)
- Talk to your vet to get your pet’s ideal weight
Our pets do not live very long (10-15 years for most dogs; 15-20 years for most cats), so giving them the healthiest lifestyle keeps them happier for those years. Arthritis and diabetes are common sequelae to being overweight as well and breathing difficulty in the short squat dogs like French and English bulldogs. Osteoarthritis leads to many many euthanasias and dogs that are overweight are GOING to have more mobility issues and will start getting them much earlier in their lives. Mobility issue leads to being unable to get up from laying down, walk over hard floors, navigate stairs – making owners have to carry dogs to go outside to the bathroom (think apartment living), bed sores, other injuries from slipping and falling, infections around skin folds around rectum, penis, vulva. Diabetes treatment requires twice daily insulin injections, multiple vet visits to get insulin regulated, regimented note taking and nursing care, and, of course, more money. (Just think of all the money you could have saved by NOT feeding your dog all those extra treats AND diabetes/arthritis therapy!)
Cats that are overweight will start with arthritis, but you may not see it (see my last blog on pet pain) until you start noticing your cat urinating or defecating outside the litterbox. Inappropriate urinating and defecating is one of the leading causes of cat euthanasia – and it all could just be because it hurts to walk into the litterbox or get into position to poop. Obese cats will also develop diabetes ($$$$), stop being able to groom themselves, leading to mats in the hair, grumpy cats, and infections around their rear from feces and urine sitting on their skin.
The most loving and money saving thing you can do for your pets is to stay ahead of the problems – flea/tick/heartworm preventative, vaccines, and keeping them at a healthy weight are the absolute minimum for giving your pet the healthiest and longest life you can. You may feel like they love you more if you feed them, but they don’t really associate food with love. Over feeding them can border on cruelty and abuse. You are their caretaker. You control what they eat – 100% – you can show your love more than anything in the world by keeping them at a healthy weight. You can do this!
His leg fell off, but I don’t think he’s in PAIN! W.T.F.
I recently had a case where an animal had all the skin stripped off it’s paws which were now red, bleeding, and swollen. I comforted the owner after they asked me if I was going to close the wounds and informed them we would be unable to close due to all the flesh being torn from the pads, but not to worry, we would get the animal on antibiotics and pain meds until it heals. The owner looked at me like I was crazy and said “well, I don’t think he’s in any pain, except where your assistant took his temperature in his butt”.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time I’ve had an owner deny their pets’ pain. It wasn’t even, likely, the first time that day. I have made a Tiktok video about it:
So, let’s talk about pain for a second. Animals are different than us. Not in that they don’t feel pain, but that they are NOT going to show pain like we will. We live in a society where 1. we expect a fix for every ailment we have thanks to modern medicine and 2. others in our circle will take care of us if we are out of commission. Animals, on the other hand are 1. Not going to ask for help because they don’t even know help is an option (my eye fell out? oh, well, guess we’ll try to eat and not die from it) and 2. are fighting for survival, or, at least feel like they are, even with us. House cats, believe it or not, are actually prey for many animals – large birds, foxes, coyotes, wolves, etc. but aren’t the easiest prey, so showing pain could mean being more likely hunted or targeted by those predators. Dogs, going back to pack mentality, may be taken out of the pack if they show pain or at least taken down on the totem pole of hierarchy. If you’ve ever had multiple dogs in a household and seen what happens when one cries out or whimpers and the other dogs run up on him, not to see if he’s okay, but to hover over him intimidatingly and possibly attack depending on the personality.
So, animals have good reasons NOT to show pain. They don’t know if they show pain, you will help them. They may be thinking we’ll get rid of them if they do or they might not get fed, or who knows what they’re thinking. Animals will also, notoriously, get 99% better when they go out in public or come to the vet. We see it all the time, animals who are reportedly dying at home, show up to the clinic, running around, wagging their tail. I don’t automatically think the owner was lying, I just think the adrenaline and survival skills of the animal has kicked in and they animal doesn’t want to show weakness. Just like me and you when you’re not feeling well, but good enough to go to work and you pretend to be peppy and spry around your co-workers or clients. Why? I’m not sure. Am I afraid someone will send me home?? Please! Am I afraid people won’t like me if I’m not 100%? Maybe. But we all do it, so why not expect animals to do the same thing?
So, here’s a list of signs that your animal is sick or in pain. Some will seem simple and straight forward, but I wouldn’t be making this list if people didn’t have a hard time seeing it.
- Not using a body part. Limping but not whining? Still in pain. Squinting, or closing the eye. I’ve seen dogs walk into the clinic, tail wagging, with the obviously fractured leg just dangling in the wind and STILL not vocalizing.
- Change in behavior. Suddenly avoiding you or other animals in the household, more fearful or aggressive, not wanting to eat, play, not jumping up when you’re about to go for a walk. Going in and out of the house or litterbox several times (could indicate diarrhea or urinary issues)
- Change in posture. Hunching, lowered ears, head, tail, curled up tight in a ball, not wanting to lay down, pacing, trying to lay, then pacing again. Standing with chest on the ground and butt in the air – typical of stomach pain.
- Panting, pacing, trembling, shaking, wide “whale eye” where you can see the whites of their eyes like they’re worried.
- Overgrooming/licking an area. This is super common with cats who will groom their under bellies bald if they have abdominal or urinary pain. Also, allergy areas of the paws, a wound, swelling. Sometimes they will even aggressively bite at and rip hair out of a body part that is hurting or irritating them.
- Teeth grinding or bruxism – this horrible sound from their mouth can indicate stomach pain.
- Drooling, eyes tearing, or liquid generally seeping out when or where it’s not supposed to.
- Swelling, bleeding, redness, hot to the touch (make sure to compare both sides of the body to make sure it’s not just you – you’d be surprised how many perfectly normal fat pads over the hips I’ve diagnosed when the owner only noticed one side being big)
I’m sure there’s more signs that I’m not thinking of right now, but this is a good list for now. Basically, animals don’t show pain very much – always playing it cool – and if you ever notice anything different, take them to the vet and have them evaluate them. I’d much rather tell you you’re crazy, the animal is fine than have you wait until the leg is rotted off before you decide it might need attention.
**Side note** – a lot of orthopedic pain issues can be helped by having your animal at the ideal body weight – unlike this obese clinic cat who is likely contributing to orthopedic/musculoskeletal pain of the small child trying to hold him. #weloveyoudan
Here’s a picture of a very healthy, non-painful dog – happily just finished a 4 mile mountain trail run. Head, ears, tail up, back straight, wide based stance.
Also, for the love of all that is holy, DO NOT give your animal human pain medication unless under the direction of a veterinarian. Most of them cause significant and immediate liver and/or kidney failure. This goes for you, too, Dr. Human Orthopedic surgeon, NO Celebrex! Even if all your human patients are on it! No!
Goodbye to Merlin (Merman, Schmermles, Myrtle, Schmermilator) and I love you
I never in my life thought about owning a Saint Bernard. They just weren’t on my radar, just like Michigan was never there for me to live.
One day, while working at my first job in South Carolina, a local dairy farmer brought in a new born puppy. She owned a dairy and had a very small Saint Bernard breeding kennel on the side. Her bitch had just whelped and had killed all but two of the puppies and had mangled one of those puppies’ back legs. At first, it appeared as just a puncture on the out side of the hind leg. We cleaned it and sent home antibiotics.
The next day, the farmer brought the puppy back in. The leg wound was now bigger, draining pus, and the foot was stiff and cold. We gave the puppy a guarded to poor prognosis with infection set in and a dead leg in a newborn, frail baby. The farmer, with all of her responsibilities as a dairy woman, did not have the time to dedicate to this sickly puppy. She decided it would be best for him to euthanize as he was not getting better.
I looked down at this beautiful, perfect except for a mangled rear leg, and could not picture myself sticking his tiny heart with a needle and then tossing him in the freezer where we kept dead animals. Now, at this point, I was just exiting my first trimester of my very first pregnancy (with India). We had just moved to this town, not 5 months ago, we were renting, and already had 2 dogs, 2 cats, and 2 horses. I was absolutely not in the right place to even think about taking on a new dog, let alone one that would need intensive care for 5 weeks and would grow to over 100lb. I talked it over with my best friend working there with me, Kim, and she encouraged me to take on this (currently) 1lb project.
I talked to the farmer about surrendering him and letting us try to amputate the leg and save him. She was in tears. She was a tough woman, running a dairy farm, but she had a fantastic heart. She was so upset that she was going to put him to sleep, but was thankful that we would at least give him a chance. I had him signed over and was now the owner of a very sickly infant St. Bernard. What had I done? What was Tony going to say when I came home? I knew he would understand. He knows who he married, but he would likely shake his head a little.
I brought him home, honestly under the impression that even if he survived to, and then through surgery, that he would likely die sometime after from infection, or fading puppy syndrome. I had 0-0.5 hope of his survival (#naturalpessimist), but I had to try.
The next day, we were to do the surgery. I had to meet my boss at a dairy to continue to learn how to efficiently palpate cattle for pregnancy. I went over and over the surgery in my head. Finally, we were done palpating cows and I would drive to the clinic to cut on this three day old puppy. We put him under with just some valium and then masked with gas. There were three people gathered around this 1 lb patient. Kim, our assistant, the other Dr. at the clinic running/monitoring anesthesia, and me, carving on what felt like a chicken wing from KFC. I dissected down to the femur, at some point severing the femoral artery that was so small, it never bled. I used a heavy pair of surgical scissors called Mayo scissors to score a shallow cut around the bone, like a glass cutter, then the bone broke easily in half.
I, then filed the end of the bone so it wouldn’t be rough on the muscles, closed the muscles around the tip of the bone, and finally, closed the skin over the muscle. Whew! We were done! We took him off of gas, and put him on oxygen only and waited for him to wake up. And we waited. And waited. He wasn’t waking up. That’s it, I knew this was stupid, but at least we tried, right? Then, the doctor helping me got some injectable dextrose and just put a couple of drops in his mouth. He woke up! Thankfully, she was able to keep her calm and remembered that neonatal patients will get hypoglycemic under anesthesia.
We took the puppy home, now named “Doomed puppy” because of my pessimism and superstition all rolled into one. We had to bottle feed him. The little bottle that came with the formula had a nipple that was way too small for his mouth. We ended up having to get a soda bottle and put the smallest goat nipple we could find on it. We also had to stimulate him to pee and poop until he was a certain age. He slept in a cardboard box on a heating pad in our bathroom for the first few days of his life and came with me everyday to work. We had to set alarms to get up every few hours to feed him.
One weekend we were travelling back to Georgia to announce my pregnancy to the families. We would take our dogs with us when we travelled and had the two big dogs in the backseat with the box of puppy in the back as well. He was about 2lbs at this point. Along the way, we stopped at Subway to get dinner but didn’t want to leave the puppy in the car alone with the two dog aggressive dogs, so I picked him up and placed him in an inside pocket in my coat and carried him inside. The workers there never knew I had a Saint Bernard in my coat pocket.
Eventually, we settled on a name “Merlin” and he continued to live in our bathroom, he particularly loved the bath tub. Every night, when it was bed time, he would just shuffle into the bathroom and lop himself into the bathtub to sleep. Having only had three legs his whole life, we always just figured that he would have no trouble learning to walk with three legs. Just like four-legged dogs who get an amputation later in life seem to do just fine, and to “not miss a step,” we thought that he would have even less trouble learning the ways. We were wrong.
Having basically been born with just the three legs and having never learned to walk properly, he would just scramble. He would pull his body along with his front legs and kind of paddle with his one hind leg. Thanks to the advice from my friend, Kim, we sought a Veterinary specialist in rehabilitation in Columbia, SC. She was able to make some chiropractic adjustments, and fit him for a cart for us to borrow. He hated that cart. We would harness him up and he would freak out and run around the room, getting caught on furniture and knocking over everything. We were finally able to harness him up and take him on walks in the neighborhood. It took a lot of practice, and he grew quickly and eventually had to return the cart, but by then, he had learned better how to get up on that back leg.
He eventually got along on that back leg like it was nothing. We couldn’t take him on long hikes and I could only take him on a 1 mile “warm up walk” before my run so that he got to feel like he was part of the pack too, but he also loved to play tug-of-war – which is typically not recommended for pets because it can make them think everything is a game when you’re trying to take things from them – but this was his main method of exercising, and I could just tell him to drop it and it was over.
He loved vegetables, fruit, tissues, and baby socks. He would wait in the kitchen while I cooked, waiting eagerly for kale stems, carrot ends, strawberry leaves; would follow the kids around or sit next to me while strings of drool hung at his lips if we dared to eat an apple around him. He EXPECTED the core. He would run outside and help the horses eat watermelon rinds or try to find the scattered sweet potato skins I had just thrown out for the deer. If you left a paper towel or tissue within reach, he would stalk it because he knew he would get into trouble for eating it and the moment we weren’t paying attention, he would suck that thing down like it was a piece of cotton candy. Even when the kids were babies and we were in a complete state of chaos, if we forgot to close the baby wipes when we were done, you would catch him sucking each one down as it pulled up the next – like his own tissue Pez dispenser. His love of baby/kids socks got him in trouble too. We would constantly have to go out and buy more to make up for his dietary needs. Our kids were so trained not to leave their socks on the floor downstairs that if we went and visited another person’s house, our kids would come up to us and ask us where they could safely put their socks. Between the tissue diet and socks he consumed, once spring rolled around and we mowed the lawn for the first time the mower would spray our yard with confetti of tissue pieces and colorful sock remnants.
As Merlin got older, he would go through phases where he couldn’t walk as well anymore. Most of the time, he responded to pain medication, time, or a chiropractor adjustment. I took an x-ray of his hips to see the horror that I was afraid of. His only hind leg he had was suffering from horrible hip dysplasia. I knew, even though we were very diligent about keeping his weight down, at 120lb, it was still only a matter of time before he completely tore his cruciate ligaments in his only knee and then it would be done. He was definitely MY dog. Tony would tell me that if I wasn’t home, Merlin would just lay in the corner of the dining room all day, not moving even to go outside. He did NOT appreciate the kids and as he got older, he only became more cranky with them, especially when they got crazy silly.
This past fall, he started having trouble walking again. We knew, at almost 9 years old, anytime could be his last. He was no longer getting up on his back leg anymore and would just scramble along the wooden floors. We would assist him outside and, at first, he would get up on the leg to go to the bathroom. We had him on three different pain medications, joint supplements he had been on his whole life plus a few more, got him some fancy Dr. Buzby’s toe grips, a Help ’em up harness, but still he dragged that stump around. Eventually, he stopped eating as much and the stump became raw and bloody. We had smears of bloody trails across our floors where he had needed to be with me. I altered his harness to pad the stump, but it wouldn’t stay where it needed to. I brought home an “After surgery wear” from work and altered that to pad his stump. That seemed to work better.
I had been avoiding it. I was in denial. When he would use every last bit of energy in his painful body to get to where ever I was in the house, I just knew he depended on me, how could I let him down? But finally, I stayed outside to watch him go to the bathroom, because now he was soaking his after-surgery wear every time he peed. To my horror, and with tears running down my face, I saw him drag himself to a spot and just sit and pee all over himself. Then, he dragged himself to another spot and pooped while sitting, only swinging his rear away to keep the poop from sticking to him. I knew it was time.
The final day, he was so excited to get to go in the car with us, as that was a rare occurrence for him. We were feeding him Milkbones like he was starving and he just thought that was the best. My mother even met us at the clinic and brought him a porkchop wrapped in a paper towel. He chomped that down too, paper towel and all. He was just having the best day! Of course, it took me and Tony to get him out of the car and into the clinic to our euthanasia room. He required a sling to hold his hind end up. But he just dragged us in, found the few people working after-hours, his tail just flagging like the happiest pup. We finally got him to the euth room and he stumbled and collapsed on the floor. Tired, from all his happiness. I gave him the sedation, then cuddled his giant bear head in my lap as the final injection was given. He was only 3 days old when I decided it wasn’t his time to go to the freezer and even though I had given him 3,200 more days of pure love, it still felt like I had abandoned him as we gently lowered his body, finally, into the freezer.
Bye buddy.
