Mike’s Doghouse

Mike got neutered today. At 8 mos, it’s the longest we have ever waited to get a dog spayed/neutered. We (and the vet) wanted to wait to see how his bladder was doing. While I won’t bet the farm that Mike is 100% house trained, I do feel his bladder problems are slowing resolving to the point that if he has to go, he has enough time to take himself outside.

Mike wasn’t allowed breakfast this morning. He was in his sleeping crate (which is on the floor on my side of the bed) and was quite irritated. We call him Mr. Squeaky for a reason and boy was he squeaking! He has a nice, deep bark but he still has that high pitched “HEY! You! The one with the thumbs!” kind of noise.

Anyway, I’m going soon to pick him up. We had it done at the vet’s office vs Humane Alliance, a low-cost spay/neuter clinic. The vet wanted to take x-rays of his hips while he was asleep (no official word yet on the hip x-ray results). The cost will be staggering, I’m sure. But Mike is worth it.

We’ve taken almost all of our other critters (an ‘off the top of my head’ count came to 7) to Humane Alliance for spay/neuters. We’ve never had a complication. In visiting their website today, I found their statistics page. Some interesting numbers!

And, no, I am not going to get Mike fitted for neuticles.

Mike’s not been limping since the day after the vet. He sometimes seems to be walking weird, but no limp. We’ve noticed he is growing again, this time starting to fill out in places, like his face. That’s what I like about mutts. Some days they look like one breed, the next day they look like another. Mike’s face seems to change between German Shepherd and Rottweiler. There’s no telling which way it will finally settle although I’m thinking it will be somewhere in the middle. A Rottie with stand up ears, probably. Or a GSD with a short Rottie muzzle.

Speaking of Rotties, Joella is doing good. She’s limping slightly but that’s to be expected.

Maybe Mike is having sympathy pains. They both have injured right legs.

I took Mike to the vet today. Yesterday, while we were gone, he did something to his back right leg. He wasn’t bearing any weight on it at first, then slowly was using it at times, mostly when standing still. He was uncomfortable but we were certain it wasn’t a break. He let me manipulate the foot and ankle/hock but wasn’t thrilled when I extended his hip. This morning he was bearing weight on it almost all the time but he walked like he was sitting on the saddle too long. So off to the vet we went.

He let Dr. K manipulate the hip although he didn’t like it. He didn’t cry out so we both agreed it wasn’t a break (such as a “green stick” fracture). She feels it might be a soft tissue (muscle/tendon) injury. We also decided it was time to neuter him so next Thursday (7th) he will get that done finally. While he is out, they’ll do x-rays on his hips and that knee. He is too young to diagnose hip dysplasia but there is a slight chance there may be something else structurally wrong. The chance is very slight but since this is the third or so time he has injured that same leg, we are doing the x-rays just to make sure. If nothing else, we have a baseline set of images for later.

Mike and I will have to miss the second class of Basic Manners II tonight, dangit.

Oh, and just so you don’t think I was mean for not taking him to the emergency clinic last night: if a dog will put weight on a leg, it usually isn’t broken. Sometimes they will for a greenstick fracture, but not often. When we first saw he wasn’t bearing weight at all, we touched him all over and watched him walk while discussing the time and where we could take him. He began putting weight on the leg when standing still and we decided to wait and see. The emergency clinic here is ghastly expensive and I knew I could at the worst drop Mike off this morning for our vet to check when they could. We examined him later again after everything had calmed down. Again, we felt he had pulled a muscle or sprained something. If he had been walking fine this morning, I probably wouldn’t have taken him in but with that odd, saddle sore like walk he had, we decided it would be best to have him checked.

Mike is making the switch from Puppy Food to Big Boy Food. Now that he is (ack!) almost 8 mos, it was time to put him on adult food. He was eating Wellness Just For Puppy and as soon as that bag is empty, he’ll start Wellness Super 5 Mix adult. Our other dogs eat Taste of the Wild. (I discussed protein amounts in another post)

I read a wonderfully well written blog by a vet. Dolittler is wonderful in that it is candid, honest, and revealing both personally and professionally. Sometimes the posts are painful (euthanasia) other times they are a hoot (hen turned out to be a rooster). Today’s post, titled Counting calories in fat dog weight loss and the role of “intelligence”, brings up this delicate subject of calories and pets. We humans don’t often consider calories when it comes to our pets. We gleefully dole out the kibble and assume it is all well and good. Some of us read the labels to find out how much to feed, most don’t.

I admit it: We’ve never paid much attention to the calories. One, they are hard to find on the bags. Two, if a dog gets chunky, we feed less until it’s not so chunky, then maintain that feeding amount. This means one dog will get two full scoops, another may get one and another scoop with a wee bit off the top (yeah, we are oh so precision oriented). Jake, our Damnation Dalmatian, had a big weight problem. She could visibly gain weight just from one treat too many that week. It took us a while to figure out her base amount of food then could add or subtract from that depending on what else was going on. We also raise everyone’s food amount in the summer (more active) and lower it in the winter (slug-o-rama). If Lorna and Sam are going on a hike, we feed him a little more at both meals and she takes high quality treats along.

But how much calories does a dog need? Dolittler gives the following equation (bolding of text is my doing):

Base calories/day (resting energy requirement) =
30 x (your dog’s weight in kg) + 70

Example: So if you have a 10 kg (22 pound) dog, he needs to eat 370 calories a day.

Since this is based on adult dogs, I’ll use Joella as my example. Jo is about 80 lbs. Using my little converter program, that’s equal to 36.28739 kg. Then, using my little calculator program, that means she needs about 1159 calories per day.

But then it gets a little more complicated. That’s because the “resting energy requirement” is only a measure of the amount of energy (in calories) he needs to keep his basic functions going comfortably. So if he’s a busy dog who runs around a lot in your big yard, he’ll need a lot more. And if he’s a neutered couch potato who’s seriously obese he may need no more than his basic bodily functions require to actually lose some weight.

Joella’s not overly active but she’s not a slug either. I went and got out the empty bags (we stuff them into one then take it out when that bag is full) and made notes of the amounts to feed and the calories.

Jo’s weight tends to waver between 78 and 83 so we’ll go by the “60 – 80 lbs” recommendations. She gets two meals a day, 3 scoops each. Our scoop is .5 cup so she gets 3 cups a day. She’s getting the low end of the required amount (Taste of the Wild’s High Prairie = 1110) which comes in just under the calculated amount for her resting energy requirement. Not bad! Since she is recovering from her leg surgery and will be a slug-puppy for a few weeks, I now know I don’t need to cut back on her food any to keep her weight steady. I also know that we’ll need to watch her treat intake during this.

Back to Mike. I’m going to guess he is about 45 lbs which is 20.41166 kg. Times that by 30 and add 70 and he should be getting about 682 calories per day IF he were an adult. The Wellness Adult says to add 25% for pups which puts it at about the right amount using Dolittler’s equation but still low going by their feeding chart of the puppy food. What this tells me is that when we do the switch, we’ll need to make sure he is getting enough calories. Currently, he’s sleek, maybe a little on the thin side, but with growing full breed pups, that can change at any given moment. On the surface, the Wellness Adult food has a weird calorie amount. But using Joella again, her 3 cups is on the upper end of the amount for her weight group so it evens out.

If you’ve followed along, you know that Mike is to be trained to be a Service Dog. He is to “replace” Joella, my current SD who is 8.5 yrs old. Joella is having some difficulty with her back legs and Tuesday (April 21st) she will be having surgery on one of her ankles.

Since Joella will be needing all of my mental attention, Mike’s SD training is on hold for a few weeks. It is Spring and he is happy to be outside playing right now so it will all work out. Starting over won’t bother either of us in the least. He and I start Basic Manners II the day we bring Jo home so we’ll still be working on that.

We’re thrilled Joella won’t be needing the more extensive knee surgery we all thought she’d have. We were concerned we’d not be able to keep Mike calm around her. He likes to sit on Jo which would not have been a good idea. Even with this surgery, we’ll still be keeping him quiet, but not as much as with the other surgery. It may be a good chance to work on SPOT outside of the kitchen, eh?

Good question. I’d done some research earlier. The rule of thumb is that what they weigh at 6 mos is half what they’ll way as an adult. If that holds true, then Mike will be about 80lbs or so.

He hasn’t added any adult bulk. He’s tall, almost as tall as Joella and Sam now. But he is thin and wiry. The last time he was at the vet’s, he barely reached 40lbs. We look at him sometimes and wonder if he is every going to add muscle mass and bulk or will he be a small dog after all.

Here’s Jo and Mike back in mid January:

And here they are from the other evening:

He is almost as tall and almost as long as she is but really does not have that bulk of an adult rottweiler. However, I went to look through Jo’s vet record and saw that in January, 2002, at just 1yr and 19wks old, she was just under 70 lbs. She is about 82lbs now at 8yrs old and had a maximum weight of 90lbs in 2005 when she was 4.5 yrs old. Going by this, we can assume that Mike is not going to start really filling out until he is at least a year. That is typical of Rottweilers and other large breeds. They don’t reach their true adult size until two, sometimes three years of age.

This has been covered in several posts (house training) so I won’t give much background other than links throughout this post. ‘Kay?

On Saturday, Mike had to stay in his crate about 9 hrs because I was gone and Lorna had to work. Lorna took out the divider panel from the big crate so he had more room. She also gave him plenty of chew toys. When she got home, he ran straight outside, played for just a few seconds, the proceeded to pee a river.

AND Mike hiked his leg to do it! My boy is growing up so fast! sniff

There was no pee in the crate and no pee artwork on the way out the door. This is a HUGE advancement for Mike. He’s been on the urge incontinence med for a while now and sometimes we think there is improvement, and other times we don’t see any difference. His artwork has decreased, yes, but only when he has no access to water. Jo and I were at the vet’s last week for her yearly checkup and Dr. Knepshield and I briefly discussed Mike’s bladder problems. She feels that if he is still growing, still healthy, then keeping his water amount limited obviously isn’t harming him any. If keeping his water limited is what it takes to help him get over this, then it will be fine to keep doing it.

We’ve also started letting him out the back door vs taking him out front on the leash. He seems to like this more and always does his business while out there. As soon as he does both, I let him play a bit then we all come back in. His desire to eat stuff (sticks, walnut hulls, wet bark from the maple tree, etc) means he can’t be out unsupervised. I have noticed, though, that the more we are letting him out, the less he seems to be eating. We still have to watch him closely though. The dog ramp will be fixed soon which will make it easier to get him out there more often. I don’t want him just let out without being watched as I want him to be reinforced for doing his business.

I regularly read a vet’s blog called Dolittler (how could I resist that title?). Dr. Pat Khuly lives in Florida and shares not just the high-tech bits of being a veterinarian, she also shares tips, tricks, and bits from her own life.

Anyway, today’s post was about Hershey’s Cocoa Shell Mulch. Made from cocoa bean shells, the mulch is sold in gardening stores. It is a good concept in sustainability by using a by-product that otherwise would be filling a landfill. As with all other chocolate products, it contains Theobromine, the lethal ingredient that kills dogs. But the bag says it is not lethal to dogs that eat it. Tell that to the Labrador Retriever that just died in Florida.

More breaking news on dog-toxic Cocoa Mulch chips

…Just as surely as drinking a gallon of deep, dark hot chocolate would, “Cocoa Mulch” killed a local Lab mix named Calypso this past weekend. Calypso’s owners had purchased the mulch at their neighborhood Target. Advertised to help keep cats at bay, they must’ve thought it seemed like a good deal. A tragic mistake.

In case you’re wondering, Cocoa Mulch is a by-product of the chocolate industry. Hershey’s markets the husks of spent cocoa beans as mulch, claiming the following with respect to pet safety:

“It is true that studies have shown that 50% of the dogs that eat Cocoa Mulch can suffer physical harm to a variety of degrees (depending on each individual dog). However, 98% of all dogs won’t eat it.”

As the owner of a dog who will eat anything, I thought it prudent to tell others about this product.

Since Mike will eat anything within his reach outdoors, and since Spring is right around the corner, I decided it was time to brush up on what plants were poisonous to dogs. Plus, Lorna got me a pot of yellow tulips that I put outside today (the poor things were leaning way over trying to reach the sunny window) and the petals all blew off. Which, of course, Mike picked up and tried to eat.

According to the Humane Society of United States (HSUS) and their Common Poisonous Plant list, the poisonous part of a tulip is the bulb. It is also the poisonous part of the narcissus/daffodil. According to the ASPCA and their searchable list, all parts of a tulip are toxic with the bulbs having the heaviest concentration of the toxin. He also eats walnut hulls (not toxic to dogs) he finds out in the dog lot. He loves fruits, including apples (the seeds and stems are toxic to dogs) and bananas (not toxic to dogs).

I already know to not let him near my Carolina jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens) vine. Every part of it is deadly poison to dogs and to children. It is still in its pot near the ramp, waiting to be planted as soon as the ground thaws enough. We’ll be putting it away from the usual dog places. It is an evergreen so there’s little risk of dead leaves being blown around.

Linkages:

HSUS Common Poisonous Plants list
ASPCA’s Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants (searchable!) – also their “people foods that are toxic to dogs” list
Toxic Plants to Dogs list (Pet Poison Helpline site)

At least, we think we have a diagnosis.

Mike’s vet, Dr. Knepshield, called Tuesday. His urine culture results were negative so no weird infection going on. Combined that news with the well-within-norm blood work up, the cause of Mike’s urinary problem narrowed down significantly.

The vet thinks Mike has what is called “urge incontinence”. It is more common in female dogs but can happen in males. In her research, she came across another male pup with almost exactly the same symptoms. That pup was helped via a human medication. Basically, Mike doesn’t mess his crate at night because he’s not moving around and he doesn’t have access to water. But, once he drinks water (and he drinks a lot of it), his brain and bladder don’t communicate very well. He can empty it easily enough, but he can’t KEEP from emptying it. His bladder doesn’t let the brain know it is full, resulting in leaking and flooding upon standing. Add to it that he can’t seem to hold it long enough to even finish standing up, he probably has “bladder sphincter” issues.

I picked up the medication today and he got his first dose at dinner. If this is indeed the problem, we should see a slow stopping of the piddling (aka artwork on the floor). If that happens, we’ll start reintroducing the water until he can consume and hold. We don’t know how long he will be on it. The vet’s office has never used this medication before. We’ll be learning together.

Here I get a pup to train as a Service Dog and we can’t get beyond house training!

Linkages:
urge incontinence
oxybutynin chloride (Ditropan) 5mg 1/2 tab 2x day

Oh, and a photo to appease the masses:

(click for larger image)