Age, arthritis, and injuries can interfere with your dog’s enjoyment of beds, sofas, and rides in the car. Dog ramps can help inactive dogs enjoy their favorite places again.
Your dog can’t move around the way he used to. He might have trouble with stairs or his favorite window seat, and you feel his disappointment. Fortunately, a whole industry supports canine mobility with ramps and stairs that can help him feel younger again.
What are dog ramps and why use them?
Ramps are flat sloping boards that replace stairs with a gradual incline that’s easy to walk up or down. Most dog ramps are made of wood, plastic, or metal, and their surfaces include carpet, fabric, artificial grass, and nonskid materials.
When positioned between the floor and furniture or between the ground and your car’s door, a dog ramp can:
Reduce joint strain and arthritis pain.
Assist older dogs who can no longer jump into a car or onto a sofa or grooming table.
Prevent injury to you or whomever helps the dog climb up or down.
Reduce stress or anxiety associated with mobility tasks.
Help developing puppies stay safe by preventing hard landings.
Help dogs of all ages recover from illness, accidents, injuries, or surgery.
Dog ramps come in all kinds of materials, sizes, and price ranges. Here are some considerations.
If you plan to use the ramp indoors and out, look for durable materials that survive weather changes.
An adjustable ramp can be used in different situations or with different vehicles.
A folding or collapsible ramp will be easy to transport.
Be sure the ramp will fit in your vehicle if you plan to travel with it.
Nonskid surfaces, safety rails, and sturdy construction help prevent accidents.
The ramp should be an appropriate size for your dog and it should support her weight.
Be sure the ramp’s slope is comfortable for your dog. Small dogs and dogs with mobility problems often need a gentle or easy slope.
Check to be sure you can lift, extend, adjust, or move the ramp easily.
Look for a ramp that is easy to clean so it will stay fresh and look attractive.
What is the best dog ramp for my car?
Think about where you’re likely to go with your dog in the vehicle you’re most likely to use. Bi-fold and tri-fold collapsible ramps with skid- or slip-resistant surfaces are popular options, but check the size and weight of the ramp along with assembly instructions and slope to be sure it’s a good match for you and your car as well as your dog.
What is the best ramp for my bed?
Pet stairs and ramps make it easy for dogs to climb onto your bed or other furniture. Check the weight capacity for stairs, as different models support 20 pounds to more than 150. For convenience, look for a ramp or stairs that can be left in place, and for aesthetic appreciation, choose one that goes well with your furniture.
Ramps are unfamiliar to most dogs, so introduce your ramp in a quiet area free of distractions and practice with rewards and praise.
As you walk in the door from work, your dog leaps with joy, letting out resounding barks of approval and happiness. But then she lets out a concerning yelp of pain. You look down to see a torn toenail that needs immediate attention. What do you do? Is it an emergency? Can you help?
When your dog is hurt or in pain, you jump into triage mode. Scenarios like torn toenails or bone fragments lodged in the mouth are common dangers dogs may face every day. Some you can remedy yourself; others require medical attention. Can you determine which is which?
As a pet owner, you’re committed to keeping your best friend safe. Learning what some of the most common dangers dogs face daily inside and outside of the home can help ensure you create a safe environment for your pet.
With the help of Whole Dog Journal’s digital guide, Dog Dangers, you can gain valuable insight into common hazards your dog faces every day, including what to look out for, what to avoid, and what to do if your dog hurts himself. You’ll also get tips on important details like creating a first aid kit for your dog and keeping him safe while swimming, so you can eliminate dangers from your dog’s environment before they harm him.
Avoid the most common situations sending dogs into the emergency room by learning more about what they are
How to protect your pets during the holidays by getting helpful tips on reducing stress and helping them avoid harmful foods and commonly ingested object
Induce vomiting safely when it’s necessary when harmful substances have been ingested
Identify common household items and foods that are dangerous to dogs so you can create a safer home environment
This e-book is a must-have addition to your pet care library, giving you valuable tips to protect your dog at home and while out having fun. Give yourself peace of mind and your dog the safest environment possible by downloading your copy of Dog Dangers today.
Subscribe Today for the very best in dog education!
The boy is happy, but is the puppy? Give the pup the choice to stay or go – then you’ll know. In this case, we helped this sweet boy to put some support under the pups rear, and eliminate the 4-paw dangle, and the puppy chose to snuggle in and stay.
When you see a little puppy, the most natural thing in the world is to run over and swoop her into your arms for a nice big cuddle!
I beg you: Don’t do that. It may feel wonderful to you, but the odds are you just created a moment of fear for that puppy.
PUPPIES GROWL OUT OF FEAR
Style matters, and the seemingly simple pick-up approach above includes three unfortunate choices: The surprise, the swoop, the squeeze. Each of those elements creates discomfort in a being who is new to our human world. (Nobody on Planet Dog picks anybody else up!) To complete the picture of terror, there’s often optional element #4: The Squeal.
Sometimes, people contact me in a bit of a panic because the puppy they got last week is growling at them, and it’s getting worse every day. A quick home visit usually reveals that these nice folks are in the surprise-swoop-squeeze camp. They are unintentionally terrifying their pup, and the pup is learning to fend off that moment with a growl.
While that’s a bummer, it’s also great news – because it means we can probably fix this in a jiffy by creating a new pick-up process that will build the missing trust.
RULE #1: NO SURPRISING!
It’s scary for puppies when they are picked up completely by surprise. One minute they’re just hanging out – maybe even sound asleep – and the next they’re up in the air! Sure, some pups will roll with it, but for many others it’s alarming.
You can avoid the surprise factor by altering your approach. No running! No zooming! Just stroll over so pup has a chance to see you’re on your way. Then crouch down, and take a moment to say hi with a gentle stroke. All along, provide a nice low-volume voice-over for extra reassurance and preparation: “Hi sweet pup. How about I come say hello?” That advance warning system means the puppy has a chance to catch up to the action.
Extra help: For a pup who has already been growling about handling, a cue word is a nice thing to add. A consistent heads-up in the form of a cheery, “1-2-3 time for a pick-up!” can be a game-changer. It helps pup learn to be ready when that’s about to happen and to totally relax when it’s not.
RULE #2: NO SWOOPING!
Even if you eliminate the element of surprise, you still may hear a growl if your pup feels unsafe in the air. That’s why the second rule of the perfect pick-up is this: No swoop-and-dangle allowed. Your new pup doesn’t want the thrill of an amusement park ride.
Help her feel safe with you by using a slow, cradling motion that keeps her body supported 100% of the time: One hand underneath, the other softly against her chest and shoulder. Bonus points for continuing your quiet voiceover: “Aw, there we go, we’re just going to move over here, you’re my sweetie girl . . .” Don’t stand up too quickly – give pup the old, creaky elevator experience rather than the one that whisks you ridiculously fast to the top floor.
Extra help: If you’re doing remedial work, it can help to have a chew, a toy, or a piece of jerky in your hand as you say, “1-2-3 time for a pick-up!” This way you can distract pup from her worries and create a positive association with the feeling of being handled in this way.
RULE #3: NO SQUEEZE-AND-TRAP!
Once pup is in your arms as you’re standing, you can extend her lesson in trust by slowly, gently putting her right back down. For some puppies, the worst part of a pick-up is the dreaded squeeze-n-trap! Humans love to trap puppies in what they call a loving hug. Alas, the puppy might call it terrifying jail time.
Nobody – not one human, not one dog – wants their body to be held against their will. And yet somehow we think puppies are supposed to sit endlessly in our laps, or cherish being carried around by us, so we make them do that regardless of their reaction. Kids are the ones who find this hardest to resist, but I’m amazed how many adults also refuse to recognize a puppy’s squirming as a legitimate plea for bodily autonomy.
To add to the train wreck, these over-held pups are often the ones who grow into dogs who hate being handled! Which is sad in all kinds of ways, because it’s the folks who most want cuddlers who tend to turn their dogs into resisters.
Here’s what I tell kids (and, ahem, a few adults): Do you want to be your puppy’s favorite? Then, especially at first, let that puppy do the choosing! Rather than demanding the puppy’s attention, entice it instead. Get down on the floor, get a squeaky toy, roll around in a puppy-like way – and soon enough that puppy will start choosing you to play with. And then, miracle of miracles, when she’s tired she’ll wander over and choose your lap to sleep in. Now you’re just one step away from that pup happily asking to be picked up and cuddled.
The perfect puppy hold. Stable support underneath, but with a relaxed hold. Happy puppy feels secure but not trapped. For kids in particular, sitting on the ground is the best way to hold puppies without scaring them.
ALWAYS LOOK AT YOUR DOG’S BODY LANGUAGE
If you eliminate the surprise-swoop-squeeze from your routine, your pup will soon be calm about being picked up. To see if you’re at that point yet, look for the signals that pup is happy about this consent-based handling. Is she regularly approaching you? Turning her head toward you instead of away? Relaxing her body against yours? No longer struggling in your arms? Perfect. Now you can skip the warning cue, and the treat in your hand as you lift.
But the rest? The no-surprise approach? The soothing voiceover? The un-intimidating crouch? The slow, supported lift? Don’t drop those. It’s habits like those that eventually make people describe you as the one who is “just magic with dogs!”
Nope. It’s not magic, just empathy. Use it, and enjoy the rewards.
The proliferation of foods that are supposedly formulated for the “unique needs” of extremely specific and small categories of dogs has spread to the prescription dog food market. While the number of choices can add to your veterinarian’s burden – she’s the one who has to choose an appropriately therapeutic diet for your dog – the fact that there are now so many options means that there is, at last, more options available (some of which with more appealing ingredients).
The general concept of veterinary or prescription diets is sound; it’s well-accepted by all nutrition experts that nutrient levels and ingredients can be manipulated in various ways in order to have beneficial effects on animals (including humans) with specific health conditions. We’ve known this ever since the 1930s, when veterinarian Mark Morris innovated the first diet for dogs who were suffering from kidney failure (see “The Morris Family and the Dawn of Veterinary Diets”).
Unfortunately, nearly a century later, the concept is in danger of being a victim of its success. In the past 15 years or so, there has been a tidal wave of prescription foods being brought to market. Pet food makers have been enjoying seemingly endless success by marketing foods to the owners of dogs of ever more specific descriptions – there’s a food being pitched for adult Yorkshire Terriers! there’s one for Pug puppies! – and this trend has spread to the veterinary foods.
There are so many products that even veterinarians are often confused about which food to recommend to their clients.
The development and marketing of these products got so out of hand, that in 2016, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) created a guidance document for its staff, intended to educate them (and, sort of subversively put pet food makers on notice) about the laws that apply to these products.
Prescription Diets for Dogs Defined
There are a few differences between a prescription diet and an over-the-counter food.
Prescription diets are defined as those that are labeled and/or marketed as intended for use to diagnose, cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent diseases and are labeled and/or marketed to provide all or most of the animal’s total daily nutrient requirements by serving as the pet’s sole diet. They are meant to be marketed by and used only under the direction of a licensed veterinarian, who bears the responsibility of ensuring that the pet receiving the diet has been properly diagnosed as suffering from a disease or other health condition for which the food would constitute an appropriate treatment. A veterinarian is also expected to provide periodic assessment of how the animal has reacted to the diet and to discontinue the product when warranted.
Consumers are not supposed to be able to purchase prescription diets without a prescription, due to the potential for misusing the product and/or misunderstanding its role in the treatment of the pet’s condition.
There’s one quirky aspect of the rules regarding the labels of prescription foods: They are not allowed to include any representation that the product contained therein can be used to treat or prevent disease. Discussion of that technical information and the specific factors of the food that are therapeutic or beneficial to pets with the diagnosed condition are supposed to be limited to veterinarians only. That’s why manufacturers of these foods maintain separate websites – one for veterinarians and a separate one for pet owners – that describe their products.
Our Peeves About Prescription Dog Foods
Though we love and believe in the concept of truly therapeutic foods, we have a few peeves with prescription foods, starting with the practice of making the technical information about the products inaccessible to owners. We believe that interested owners can and should be trusted with information about how the prescription diet is supposed to affect their dogs. We also think that giving owners access to this information would also help them discern the differences – if there truly are any – between the prescription foods and non-prescription foods whose labels may also wink and hint at certain nonspecific health benefits. Over-the-counter food labels probably read as more therapeutic than prescription food labels!
Our biggest pet peeve, though, has to do with the ingredients that tend to appear in prescription diets. These foods are full of by-products!
In a way, this is a legacy of the original inventors of prescription diets, the father and son veterinarians who developed all the original diets for Hill’s Pet Nutrition. It’s unclear whether there were any nutritionally adequate dog or cat foods on the market before Dr. Mark Morris, Sr., formulated his first products. Dr. Morris graduated from veterinary school as the Great Depression dawned. There were shortages of food for humans, so you could be certain that what was left over for making into pet food was not the most appealing material. But Dr. Morris had something that few (if any) pet food makers at the time had going for him: a scientific mind, honed at the best veterinary college of its day, and knowledge about the nutritional requirements of animals. He, and his son after him, focused on meeting those requirements – proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals – from whatever foodstuffs were at their disposal, at the right price. Nutrients, not ingredients, became the Science Diet way – and the company’s formulators defend it to this day (though the marketing people have pushed for greater inclusions of ingredients that are more appealing to consumers (“humanization” is the industry parlance).
We don’t think there needs to be a wall between these schools of nutritional philosophy. Of course the nutrients in a food are the most important thing – but why can’t they originate from less-processed ingredients?
We developed WDJ’s dog food selection criteria with the quality of ingredients as the most important factor. In prescription dog food, the factors that are responsible for the therapeutic action of the food are of the utmost importance; we can look the other way when we see powdered cellulose as a fiber source or corn gluten meal as a protein source when we know that there are other functional attributes of those ingredients that have qualified them for inclusion. (Though when lay people can’t access the rationale for the inclusion of those ingredients, it’s frustrating!)
Fortunately, change is coming – and the newly crowded veterinary-diet market affords consumers more options, even for highly specialized products.
The Morris Family and the Dawn of Veterinary Diets
The concept of pet foods formulated to benefit dogs with specific health problems was innovated by Mark L. Morris, Sr., a veterinarian who started his first practice in 1928 in Edison, New Jersey, after graduating from Cornell University. At a time when most veterinarians treated mainly livestock and working farm animals, Dr. Morris focused his veterinary practice, the Raritan Hospital for Animals, on the care of companion animals.
At that time, the nascent pet food industry produced two types of foods for dogs: baked biscuits and canned foods that consisted almost exclusively of horsemeat. Most people fed table scraps to their pet dogs; only more affluent, urban or suburban owners augmented their dogs’ diet of leftovers with a commercial dog food.
These products were anything but “complete and balanced” – living conditions caused by the Great Depression meant that only the least-nutritive foodstuffs were going into pet food. Dr. Morris noticed that his veterinary practice saw an unusually high number of dogs with kidney disease, and he speculated that this had something to do with their diets, comprised mostly of poor-quality protein. He started conducting research on pet nutrition; he believed that he could better treat his patients by using proper nutrition from a balanced diet.
Dr. Morris worked with Dr. Jim Allison at Rutgers University’s biochemistry department to develop techniques for diagnosing diseases in small animals and to develop and test recipes for better dog and cat diets; he started selling his first pet food formulas in 1939.
That was the same year that he met Morris Frank, a young man who had lost an eye in an accident as a young child and lost vision in the other in a boxing match as a teenager. Frank traveled to Europe in 1928 to acquire his German Shepherd guide dog, Buddy; shortly after he brought Buddy back to the U.S., Frank started America’s first guide dog school in New Jersey. In 1939, he and Buddy were “The Seeing Eye” guide dog school’s national ambassadors – though Buddy was by then an old dog suffering from kidney disease. Frank sought out Dr. Morris, desperate for anything that might help Buddy.
Dr. Morris formulated a special diet for Buddy, canning it in glass jars in his kitchen with the help of his wife, Louise. Legend has it that the dog’s health improved and soon, this formula – dubbed Raritan Ration B – was in great demand. Frank sent Dr. Morris a canning machine and a commission for thousands of orders. By 1948, with the popularity of the food growing – and no doubt, wearying of operating the canning machine – Dr. Morris took his formula to a Topeka, Kansas, canning company, the Hill Packing Company (named after its founder, Burton Hill), which had been canning dog food (as well as horse meat for human consumption!) since 1930.
The business relationship thrived and by 1948 became a partnership, Hill’s Pet Nutrition. Raritan Ration B was given a new name, “Canine k/d” (for “kidney diet”). Dr. Morris continued to create new formulas for diets that addressed pet health problems and Hill’s produced, packaged, and marketed them. In 1951, Dr. Morris moved his laboratory to Topeka, where new products are developed and tested at the Hill’s Global Pet Nutrition Center to this day.
Mark Morris, Sr., was instrumental in the founding of the American Animal Hospital Association. He also established the Morris Animal Foundation and served as president of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Mark and Louise Morris had two children, Mark Jr. and Ruth. Mark Jr. earned a doctorate’s degree in veterinary medicine in 1958. After serving in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps, he completed a Ph.D. in veterinary pathology and biochemistry. Later, he joined Hill’s Pet Nutrition, where he expanded the company’s offerings. In 1968, he oversaw the development of a new line of dog and cat foods called Science Diet, formulated with preventative health in mind. Mark Jr. was a founding member of the American College of Veterinary Nutrition and co-authored Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, the definitive textbook for companion-animal nutrition.
Hill’s Pet Nutrition has been purchased by large corporations twice: Riviana Foods bought the company in 1968, and in turn was purchased by Colgate-Palmolive in 1976. Hill’s is currently ranked fourth on the list of the largest pet food companies in the world, with $2.5 billion worth of sales annually.
Recommendations for Prescription Dog Food Use
We can’t (won’t) tell you which company’s prescription diets to choose for your dog; only a veterinarian can do that! But we encourage you to dig in for (and prepare to pay for) an extended conversation with your veterinarian about any prescription diets she may recommend for your dog. We’d suggest the following discussion points if your veterinarian recommends a prescription diet for your dog:
The first thing to ascertain is whether your vet can describe what, specifically, the product offers to your dog. What are the specific attributes that are therapeutic for your dog’s condition? It’s not enough to just point owners toward a “kidney diet” any time there is a dog of any age with almost any sort of abnormal urine test result.
Ask follow-up questions. If, in the example above, your vet suggests that her recommended “kidney diet” has lower-protein, and that your dog should be on a lower-protein food, ask her what amount of protein she thinks is suitable for your dog. Many kidney diets have protein levels that are very low, far too low for a young or middle-aged dog in the early stages of kidney disease – so low, in fact, that dogs who are fed these diets for a long time start losing muscle mass as their bodies attempt to function without enough dietary protein. It’s easy to find foods at any level of protein she thinks is appropriate, with higher-quality sources of protein than are typically used in prescription diets.
Buy a small amount of the food for the first time. Many prescription diets are not very palatable.
If your dog won’t eat it, don’t fall for the “He’ll eat it if he gets hungry enough” speech. If your dog is not well, going hungry will not improve matters. As soon as possible, ask your vet for a more palatable alternative.
Alternative Dog Food
Starting below, we’ve listed all the prescription dog foods currently on the market in a searchable database. We’ve included the complete ingredients list, as well as the protein and fat content, of each of the foods on this list. We strongly suggest that you compare the ingredients of all the products that are formulated for whatever condition your dog is being treated for. Then ask your veterinarian if she could investigate the technical information for your preferred product and perhaps prescribe it for your dog, too.
There are innumerable exotic diseases and bizarre injuries that can potentially afflict any individual dog, but, sadly, the vast majority of dogs in this country today will suffer from one of a few very prosaic disorders. And many dogs suffer from every single one of the maladies discussed below! Even sadder: All of these life-impairing conditions are 100 percent preventable – easily preventable!
1. Obesity
There are so many overweight pets in this country that there is at least one organization whose sole purpose is to quantify them and help their owners reduce the problem. The Association for Pet Obesity Prevention (APOP) estimates that more than 50 percent of the dogs in this country (and almost 60 percent of cats!) are overweight or obese.
Obese dogs are prone to a number of health problems that are directly related to their weight, including strongly increased incidence of osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, heart and respiratory disease, cranial cruciate ligament injuries, kidney disease, many forms of cancer, and a decreased life expectancy. Though many people assume otherwise, there is actually no clear evidence that obesity causes diabetes in dogs. However, obesity can contribute to insulin resistance, making it more difficult to regulate overweight dogs with diabetes. Obesity is also a risk factor for pancreatitis, which can lead to diabetes.
Fat dogs get caught in the same vicious cycle that fat humans do: the extra weight they carry makes it harder for them to exercise by putting extra strain on their joints, muscles, tendons, and ligaments, and discouraging them from exercising as much or as long. A fat dog has to work harder than his slim counterpart on the same hike, just as you would have to work harder if you were carrying a backpack with an extra 20 percent or more of your body weight in it. Given the extra workload, a fat dog may ache more than the slim dog the day after a long walk, and be less enthusiastic about going on the next walk. And the less exercise he gets, the fatter he may become.
The first step is recognizing the problem.
Keeping your dog thin will do more than anything else you can do to support his vibrant good health over his lifetime – and may even extend his life!
There are many reasons that dogs get fat – and the first is owner non-recognition of their dogs’ obesity! I’ve hurt the feelings of several friends and family members when I’ve tried to educate them about their dogs’ condition. I try to be kind and tactful – and I suspect their veterinarians do, too, because almost invariably, people will tell me, “My vet has never said anything about it!”
It shouldn’t take a friend or a veterinarian to “diagnose” a fat dog. Your dog is likely overweight if, when viewed from above, she has no appreciable waist; or if you can’t very easily feel your dog’s ribs. Running your hand across her ribcage should feel rather like palpating the back of your hand, with bones covered with only a thin layer of skin and muscle. If it feels more like it does when you palpate the palm of your hand just below your fingers, she’s likely overweight; if it feels more like the meaty part of your palm at the base of your thumb, she’s probably obese!
But perhaps you know your dog is a little heavier than she ought to be – you just hate to take away anything that makes her happy. Please remember that she will decidedly not be happy when she’s suffering from osteoarthritis at age 5, or exercise-intolerant at age 7. Our dogs’ lives are short enough! Condemning them to even shorter lives, full of pain and (at the very least) discomfort for the latter half of their lives is not very kind at all.
Ideally, you help your dog stay fit and trim with an appropriate diet and the right amount of daily exercise. If your dog is already fat, make it a priority to help her lose weight and gain fitness. If you (slowly) increase the lengths of the walks you take her on, you just may find that you lose some weight as well! For most of us, that would be a very good thing, indeed!
For more on helping your dog lose weight, please see:
I’m certain I’ve never met a single dog owner that liked maintaining her dog’s dental hygiene – unless her dog had perfectly clean teeth without any efforts from the owner whatsoever. Whether you brush your dog’s teeth and/or pay for your dog to have her teeth cleaned at the veterinarian’s office, it’s an unhappy chore.
It’s worth the time, effort, and money needed to maintain the holy trinity of canine dental health: clean teeth; tight, pink gums; and breath that doesn’t knock you over!
Some dogs do go through life, from puppyhood to old age, without forming a bit of dental calculus (also known as tartar). But most dogs have significant dental issues by the time they are middle-aged; one study identified periodontitis (inflammation of the tissue around the teeth, often causing shrinkage of the gums and loosening of the teeth) in a whopping 82 percent of dogs aged 6 to 8 years!
What’s the problem with that? Periodontal disease can lead to histopathologic changes in the kidneys, liver, and myocardium, and has been linked to cardiac diseases in dogs.
Also, unless a dog is anesthetized fully for a dental cleaning, things like cracked or broken teeth may go undiagnosed for a long time, leaving your dog in daily pain, especially when eating or trying to play with toys. And a dog who is forced to endure chronic dental pain may be (understandably) cranky with his human and canine family members. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about dogs who had developed aggressive behavior that went away almost immediately after a cracked tooth was finally detected and removed.)
It only makes sense to keep an eye on your dog’s teeth – including those hard-to-see molars in the back – and take appropriate action to keep them clean and healthy. When you schedule your dog’s annual wellness exam (you do take your dog in for an annual exam, don’t you?), make sure your veterinarian takes more than a one- or two-second peek at your dog’s teeth. (You can facilitate this by training your dog to allow you to lift his lips for increasingly longer moments, until his teeth can be visually inspected pretty thoroughly.) And plan on taking whatever steps are necessary to maintain his dental health, from daily brushing and the regular use of dental rinses or gels that help control dental tartar, to a professional dental cleaning under anesthesia at your veterinarian’s clinic.
For more on maintaining your dog’s teeth, please see:
Nice nails! This dog’s nails are trimmed close to but not touching the “quick” – and the quick itself hasn’t had an opportunity to grow far from the toe.
This problem may not seem as dramatic as the first two, but while it’s true that long toenails only rarely cripple a dog and don’t cause systemic disease, they can significantly decrease a dog’s quality of life by making his every step uncomfortable. (Plus, this can contribute to or aggravate a weight problem, as a dog whose feet hurt more and more from over-long nails becomes reluctant to exercise.)
Super-long nails are usually easy to spot, but dogs who have long hair on their legs and feet may be hiding painfully long nails – and perhaps even lesions on their toes from where long, curving nails have created pressure sores on adjacent toes.
But if they are not yet at an obvious, curving, “Call the SPCA” length, how do you know if your dog’s nails are too long? The best test is to listen closely as he walks across a tile or hardwood floor: If you can hear his nails go “Tick, tick, tick, tick,” as he walks, they are too long! (I’m guessing 90 percent of you just went, “Ugh!”)
If your dog’s nails are thick and long, don’t despair – but don’t avoid this important, basic responsibility, either. If you are easily able to cut your dog’s nails, trim a tiny bit off each nail weekly. If it’s a struggle for you (for any reason, whether your dog’s behavior or your own squeamishness), look for a groomer who will help you schedule trimming visits frequently enough to restore your dog’s feet to health over the next few months.
For more on trimming your dog’s nails, please see:
Excerpted from Jane Killion’s book When Pigs Fly! Training Success with Impossible Dogs Courtesy: Whole Dog Daily
Automatic attention is the mother of all behaviors and one of the first things you should teach your dog. There is no point in teaching your dog how to do things if he is going to ignore you when you ask him to do them. If your dog is off in a mentally distant land and you repeatedly call his name, you are just like static in the background to him. The only thing you will have accomplished is to devalue his name. Even if you got yourself one of the excellent dog training books out there and followed the instructions in it exactly, you would probably find that your Pigs Fly dog still doesn’t perform when you want him to. That is often because he is not paying attention to you. Teaching a dog a verbal cue to pay attention implies that it is OK for him not to pay attention unless she gets the verbal cue. Instead, if your dog is with you, he should be conditioned to watch you like a hawk all the time because he never knows when you might do something interesting or fun. If you call your dog to you, or take him out on a leash, you should become the center of his universe and his eyes should be pretty much glued to you whenever you are together. How will you get that attention? By free shaping it, of course. You have already laid the foundation for attention in your powering up the clicker exercise, now you just need to make sure you have that same attention everywhere you go, no matter what is going on.
For more advice on training impossible (and not-so-impossible) dogs,
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Dogs who have back problems – or who are at risk of joint or tendon injuries – will benefit from being taught and encouraged to use a ramp for getting on and off sofas, beds, and any other raised surface. © Irina Meshcheryakova | Dreamstime.com
