Sharing your life with a deaf dog

Owning a deaf dog can be both a rewarding and educating experience. Owning a dog that has good hearing and sight can often lead us into being a little lazy, when it comes to establishing effective patterns of communication between us and our pet. For the most part we struggle through with a few voice commands and maybe the occasional hand signal, that often change depending on the situation. Fortunately, in a lot of situations our dogs learn to navigate their way around our impromptu communication style and, begin to ‘catch on’ to what it is we want from them. Read more »

Dog Skin Problems: How to Treat Dog Skin Rashes

Say you have an annoying itch. What you’ll probably do is goto the nearest pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for the most powerful cortisone or antihistamine that their store carries. Then you apply that medication like there’s no tomorrow!

Having an excruciating back ache or a smashing headache is a nuisance but if you have a skin rash you feel very, very itchy and it’s like you’re in living hell and your nails aren’t doing justice to what you feel. Read more »

Sad news this week about one of the older dogs in our town, who has a place in the hearts of most of the local people. Lola is a Newfie and she lives in a traditional grocer’s shop, where she lazes for most of the day in the delivery van. The sliding door is left open and Lola collects cuddles from almost everyone who passes by. At the end of last year Lola had a growth in her neck but that was cured. Now she has another malignant growth and it is not responding to treatment. There is no logic to the occurrence of cancer, apart from Mesothelioma cancer. She is nearly eight years old – a good age for a Newfie – but I am afraid there will be some sad news quite soon.

I always hoped that my dog, Kevin, would walk down the aisle at my wedding, but in the end this was not possible. We lost Kevin five months ago and past week the wedding took place on a fantastic sunny day in Sussex. Fortunately, we scattered Kev’s ashes near the church so we were able to visit the site and remember him before the ceremony. Here is a nice picture of the spot, beneath a holly tree. We have planted wild flower seeds for a permanent memento of our lovely dog. We did manage to have some dogs at the service, and I will be posting some pictures of my ‘dog bridesmaids’.

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I am sorry to have to write this but Kevin is very ill at present. His chronic ear infection has worsened suddenly over the past five days and we took him to the vet. We know already that the deep infection would require a very involved operation, cutting into the skull and we ruled that out long ago. Kevin has an irregular heartbeat that has worsened as time progressed, and he has now developed kidney problems. He drinks a huge amount, meaning that he has to go outside to pee every two hours during the day.
What has happened recently is that the infection has appearedas a swelling outside Kevin’s ear, just below the ear lobe. It really looks like a separate infection outside the ear, but our vet says this is an extension of the deep ear infection that has continued for so long. For Kev, this resulted in a loss of balance so he was walking (staggering) along and falling over – it is heartbreaking!