By Denny Phillips

Have you heard about the newest craze in dog exercise called Doga? It is becoming quite popular. Simply put, it is yoga for dogs. It may sound a little wacky and, no your dog does not have to assume the lotus position but it can be a fun way for you and your dog to exercise together.

It is important that your dog get the proper amount of exercise to keep him healthy, both physically and mentally. And, it has been proven that dogs who get in the appropriate amount of exercise are better behaved. Exercise can possibly even extend your dog’s life expectancy.

As you are probably aware, traditional yoga is supposed to stretch your muscles and help you relax. Doga works for dogs in the same way it works for humans. Of course, you as the dog’s counterpart are there to help him through the movements. But, it is basically geared to help your dog get in his daily exercise, improve his circulation, aid in the movement of his joints and help keep him relaxed.

The Doga session is not only good for your dog, but good for you as well. You can get your daily yoga workout  at the same time. And, by interacting with your dog and helping him through his movements, you form a better bond with your canine companion.

All types of dogs can benefit from Doga. Big or small, it doesn’t matter at all but you may have to be a bit more careful in manipulating smaller dogs because you don’t want to be too “ruff’ on them or hurt them. Doga can also be good for older dogs that may suffer from arthritis. The slow and careful manipulation of their joints could help improve their movement.

If your dog is social and likes to be in the company of other people and other dogs, Doga may be something you should look into. Doga classes are becoming popular all over the world today. Classes have been reported in the United States, Canada, London, England and even in Japan.

If you have trouble finding a Doga class in your area (it is a fairly new thing), try approaching your present yoga instructor to suggest it. You could also get together with other dog lovers that you know and try approaching a gym to encourage them to start a class.

Pet owners everywhere are taking up the fun challenge of Doga with a passion. It is an enjoyable way to exercise with your beloved dog. Get in on the fun!

As more people are seeking a natural approach to their own health, it is no surprise that many are doing the same for their dogs.  

Holistic care looks at the whole dog on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level.  It is thought that most illness and disease is a result of unresolved emotional issues. Just as Einstein believed all life was made of energy, holistic care focuses on healing your dog’s body and its energy system.

While holistic care is not meant to replace veterinary care, it can be a wonderful addition to it. While most dog owners are familiar with acupuncture and chiropractic adjustments, there are a number of simple and affordable methods that you may not be aware of.

Nutrition is vital to your dog’s health.  Many people do not realize an improper diet can result in health issues such as allergies and behavioral problems such as separation anxiety.  Supplements can also be supportive.  MSM and glucosamine are frequently used for mobility issues, often reducing or eliminating the need for pain relief.  Kinesiology, also called muscle testing, is a way to determine what food and supplements are best for your dog.

Canine massage can provide relaxation, relief from muscle soreness and comfort for dogs with arthritis and hip dysplasia. It is beneficial for performance, aging, and less active dogs.

Homeopathy is a method known for treating the cause of the condition, not just the symptoms. For the dog owner, homeopathic remedies are best used to resolve acute conditions like diarrhea, vomiting and insect bite or vaccination reactions.

Animal communication is something everyone can do; it is just a matter of awakening the intuitive abilities inside of you. By talking to your dog, you can find out how they are feeling, why they are acting a certain way, help resolve behavioral problems and develop a stronger relationship.

Reiki is a Japanese form of energy healing that is offered in hospitals such as MD Anderson. It can have amazing results in calming your dog, helping with illness and discomfort, and providing comfort to both of you when it is time for them to pass on.

Holistic care can help your dog live a happier, healthier and longer life.  When you take the time to connect with your dog’s body, mind and spirit, you can also experience a deeper bond like never before. And through this journey, you can profoundly affect your own life, too.  

Kim Shotola has worked with animals at the Houston Zoo for over 17 years. She has been a supervisor for 14 years, helping manage the care of over 1,000 domestic, livestock, wildlife and exotic animals in the Children’s Zoo. She is a holistic animal instructor and consultant and has a private practice that is not affiliated with the zoo.  To learn more about holistic animal care, please visit Kim’s website.  www.TheLightfootWay.com.

by Colleen Paige

I’ve been offering my clients pet savvy interior design for about ten years. The most common complaint repeatedly expressed to me is about the disdain they have for the copious amount of fur that is shed on furniture, like sofas and comforters, by their four-legged children. This is perhaps, akin to living with a teenager who has a severe aversion to picking up his dirty clothes – it’s completely natural and is not the perpetrator’s fault. However, with a bit of dedication, it can be completely eradicated. For the human solution, taking away the car keys will solve the issue in a heartbeat! For the four-legged solution, the following tips and tricks will bring more harmony and style to your animal house.

There are simple techniques to eliminate the issue of fur on furniture, even if you don’t have the budget for an interior designer. The sad thing is that so many pets in the shelter are there and facing their demise because they shed. How tragic that something so natural and so easily manageable can cause one to abandon their best friend.

Color Choices
Multi-colored fabrics with a pattern are always going to conceal multi-colored pet hair the best. Try to find a pattern where the primary colors are similar to your pet’s primary colors. For multi-colored pets, you’ll want to source out material that has a small pattern of the combination of their colors interspersed throughout. Well, that’s a no brainer.

Fabric Choices for Furniture, Throws, Duvets, Linens and Comforters
Regardless of concealing color patterns, your pet will still shed. But you don’t have to contemplate adorning everything in 50′s plastic (although in some genres, that’s actually cool again!) or buying new to match your fur child. All of the above, including sofa and chair covers, come in all sizes, materials and patterns these days. Fabrics to avoid that can actually pull out and hold on to your pet’s fur is micro-suede, denim, flannel, corduroy, velvet and wool-type fabrics. Fur is very attracted to this material and very difficult to remove, even with a sticky roller. The color rule applies to rugs as well.

Choose fabrics that are slicker to the touch, such as faux leather and blended polyester, acrylic and silk fabrics. These fabrics make fur practically slide right off.

Prevention is Key
Weekly brushing with the right tools (one of them being patience) can make your life, your pet and most areas of your home fur-free.

One important note: never dry clean rugs or furniture, as the chemicals used in the process can be hazardous to your pets and young children.

Colleen Paige is an animal behaviorist, author and pet savvy interior designer in Los Angeles, California. She is also the founder of National Dog Day and the creator of Canine Design, a new TV series aimed to educate pet owners on how to live more harmoniously with their furry kids.

Texas Hearing & Service Dogs is celebrating its twentieth year of training dogs to assist Texans living with deafness or mobility related disabilities by inviting even more people to apply for the dogs. 

Each dog is specially trained by THSD to help its partner live more independently. Hearing dogs alert their deaf partners to important sounds such as the oven timer, knock at the door, telephone/T.D.D., baby’s cry and smoke alarm. 

“Trooper wakes me up in the morning when the alarm goes off,” says Carolyn Wilson about her hearing dog, an alert Boston Terrier mix who was once abandoned in an animal shelter. “He tells me when the water is ready to make tea and when it’s time to take the cookies out of the oven. He reminds me when I forget to buckle my seat belt or forget to take my keys out of the ignition.”

Wilson, a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law never practiced in a courtroom because at the time none of the courtrooms were equipped with listening devices for the deaf. She now serves on the City of Austin’s Community Emergency Response Teams Advisory Board. Trooper attends every meeting at her side. “He keeps me informed about the sounds in our environment. He helps me stay safe,” she says.

Service dogs pick up dropped objects, open and close doors, nudge paralyzed arms and legs into position, push elevator buttons and perform other customized tasks. Over THSD’s twenty years, Service Dogs have done everything to pick up dropped keys and books to literally saving their partners’ lives. One service dog named Blue searched a remote park for nearly an hour and returned with help when his partner’s wheelchair had turned over during a hike down a hill. Another dog named Honor pressed a special emergency button that alerted local emergency services when her partner was knocked unconscious by a collapsed porch swing.

THSD adopts every dog in its program from an animal shelter or rescue organization. “We are saving dogs as well as helping people,” says THSD founder Sheri Soltes. “There are marvelous dogs in shelters. With our positive training methods, we turn strays into stars.” Best of all, THSD provides the dogs and training completely free of charge. Donations and special events, such as the annual Mighty Texas Dog Walk, help to fund the cost of training.

“We carefully match recipients with a hearing or service dog that fits their needs, lifestyle and preference,” explains Soltes. “They attend a five- day class at our training center in Dripping Springs. Then we move the dog into their home and conduct 13 weeks of personalized training with them in their home and community.” 

Graduates are permitted by law to bring their dogs with them to public places. Training includes lots of practice in stores and restaurants. In twenty years, THSD has never received a complaint about a hearing or service dog’s behavior in public.

It is easy to apply for a hearing or service dog through THSD. Everything you will need can be found online at www.servicedogs.org. Just click on “Apply for a Dog” at the top of the home page. You can even complete an application online. To receive an application in the mail, call 512.891.9090.

I first met Piggers, then known as Sugar Pie in May 2003. She was brought into my hospital as a four week-old puppy that was so anemic from malnutrition and intestinal parasites that she was struggling to breathe. She was tiny; her whole body fit in the palm of my hand, and she was literally dying as I examined her. She needed a blood transfusion, oxygen therapy, and intravenous fluid therapy immediately to survive. Her owners who had brought her to me could not afford the extended care that she needed. They had just purchased her at a local flea market the previous day, and decided to put her to sleep. With that decision, this little puppy, who because of neglect, was minutes away from losing her life. I carried her to the treatment room, where the euthanasia solution had been drawn into a syringe, and was waiting for me to end this little puppy’s struggle to live. As I walked her back there, I will never forget pausing, looking at that little ball of fur in my hand. I watched her mouth gape open with every breath, trying to draw oxygen into her body.

I realized then that this little puppy had never been given a chance to live. It was my responsibility to try to give her that chance. I asked her owners if they would release her to my care, and that I would do my best to make her better, and find her a good home. They understood that she might not survive despite our best efforts, but they too wanted to give her a chance to live, so they signed her over to me. I gave her the transfusion and she spent the next two days on oxygen and IV fluids. At night, I took her home with me to give her the around-the-clock care she needed in order to survive. My staff tried to fit her with a better name with each day that she spent with us. Little Bit, Honey and Sweetie Pie were all names that I would see on her cage cards, but none of the names fit. I drew the line when one morning my receptionist had labeled her cage with Fatty Patty Pants. But by now, that little puppy was feeling better and she would dive into her food bowl when we went to feed her. So, she became Miss Piggy, and soon was lovingly called Piggers. Little did I know the journey I was about to start or the immensity of the friendship I had just begun. From the very first day that Piggers and I met, we were inseparable.

Shortly after Piggers turned two, I noticed a small growth on her neck. Up to this point she had been relatively healthy. She was always a little on the skinny side as many puppies are and would have occasional skin infection flare-ups. When I first noticed the growth, I was not too worried. It looked innocent enough, didn’t have the appearance of anything to be worried about and since she was so young, I told myself it was probably nothing. August 2005 was the beginning of what would become not only the most devastating experience of my life, but also a journey of cherished and shared experiences with my dog.  This all happened because of the cancer that would soon be diagnosed. While removing a skin mass was something that, as a veterinarian I have performed a thousand times, I did not hesitate to call Gulf Coast Veterinary Specialists in Houston to schedule an appointment with surgeon, Dr. Heidi Hottinger. I wanted to focus on being Piggers’ mom and not her doctor.

Piggers, never one to be easy, was playing the night before surgery and tore a ligament in her knee. So, the next day, she had two surgeries: one to repair her knee and the other to biopsy the skin mass. A couple of days passed while we waited for the biopsy results as Piggers began to heal. The day those results came in, my whole world changed. The biopsy revealed that the innocent looking growth on my dog was a high grade malignant melanoma, and the prognosis was guarded. Essentially, I was just told that my little two year-old dog had only three, maybe six months to live.

As we were staging her disease in preparation for chemotherapy to delay the spread of the cancer, a tumor was found already growing in her lung. Within only a matter of a few weeks from the initial finding of the skin mass, the cancer had already spread. I will never forget that day as it was the day when it really sunk in that I was going to lose my best friend. I just didn’t know when. And so began our battle with cancer; a path that would take us on numerous trips to New York City for cancer vaccine treatments, through two life-saving thoracotomies to remove diseased lung lobes and through five rounds of chemotherapy.

Life as a dog owner changed dramatically with that diagnosis, and things that are taken for granted when you have a healthy pet were forever altered. Since Piggers was always a little too thin, and too busy playing to be bothered with something as unexciting as eating, I had Dr. Hottinger put a feeding tube in her so that we could provide the optimal nutrition she would need to fight her cancer. That meant that Piggers now would need to wear clothes to cover her tube so that she could go about her busy schedule of playtime without inadvertently pulling out the tube. As Piggers’ mom, I suddenly found myself doing my dog’s clothes when it was laundry day.

She was fed three times a day with a liquid diet through the feeding tube. She could drink water on her own, but she soon became very used to her feedings and would come to me if she felt her tube needed readjusting. I think she enjoyed the convenience of getting her belly full without having to expend any energy that could otherwise be used to run and play. Through everything, Piggers greeted each day with a smile, a fighting spirit and love of life.

She lived to play, and did just that the entire time she was sick. To meet her, you would never know she was in the fight of her life. The only clue you would have were the telltale t-shirts and panties, as we called them, that covered her feeding tube. Most people just thought I dressed my dog in cute outfits.  Other than that, you would never know the fragile state of her health. She never once let her cancer define who she was or how she lived every day she was given.

Piggers amazed her doctors with how well she did at every point in her treatment. In late September 2005, Piggers had her first thoracotomy to remove the lung tumor. I remember being very hesitant to put her through such an invasive surgery. My thought was why hurt her if she is going to die anyway? But thanks to a long talk with her surgeon, Dr. Hottinger, I decided to try and Piggers handled that surgery well. I saw her only a few hours after surgery and she was already sitting up, happy to see her mom.

It was decided after she had recovered from surgery that we would go to New York to see Dr. Phil Bergman who was doing a clinical trial testing on an experimental melanoma DNA vaccine. It had shown very promising results. He agreed to treat Piggers with the vaccine, and we ended up making four subsequent trips to the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan to booster the vaccine.

Because Piggers was a little too big to fly without being placed in cargo, we made those trips together by car. Each trip was sixteen hundred miles, one way. And we did it a total of six times during the course of her illness.

In February 2006, during a routine checkup, a second lung tumor was discovered. Piggers spiked a high fever that would not respond to antibiotics. Again, Dr. Hottinger took Piggers to surgery, but this time the tumor had invaded the diaphragm and wrapped around major blood vessels by her heart. Because of the expert care of her surgeon, the tumor was able to be removed but its aggressive nature told us that if we were going to do chemo, we had to do it now. The second surgery was followed by five rounds of chemotherapy given by her oncologist, Dr. Janet Carreras, also of Gulf Coast Veterinary Specialists.

Five months later Piggers finished her chemotherapy, a milestone that none of us believed Piggers would live to see. In July 2006, Piggers was due for another vaccine booster, so off we went to New York. Soon after returning from that trip, I received a call from the Animal Medical Center telling me that they had chosen to honor Piggers as one of their Living Legends and we were invited to a party in Manhattan in her honor.

The Animal Medical Center is one of the country’s leading veterinary referral hospitals, and they see over 50,000 patients a year. When Piggers was chosen as one of their success stories, it was such an honor that there was no question in my mind about taking another 3,200 mile journey. Piggers was the life of the party.  She greeted everyone there with her smile and invited anyone who was interested to scratch her hind end.

She wore her I Love NY t-shirt and after the party we did a little sight-seeing in New York City. She loved that day because she got to be the center of attention, something she lived for. But that would be our last trip to New York.

When we returned home, Piggers’ doctors and I needed to make a decision about how to proceed with her cancer treatments. Since she had essentially outlived all the treatments we had planned, we decided to start a second vaccine trial with a melanoma vaccine developed at the University of Wisconsin. She received seven of the nine boosters involved with that trial when another lung tumor was found in November 2006. Only two weeks before, Piggers’ chest x-rays were normal, but the last tumor was growing at an alarming rate. Piggers still showed no signs of being sick, despite already having had fifty percent of her lungs removed from previous surgeries and a massive tumor in her remaining lung tissue. Despite Piggers’ valiant effort, I knew that as fast as the tumor was growing, she had only a couple of weeks to live. Surgery was not an option as it would leave her with too little functional lung space. Radiation and more chemo were still possible treatment options, but her cancer was growing too fast for anything to be truly effective. 

I made the decision on November 17th to let Piggers live her last few days without having to endure any more treatments. On November 29th 2006, Piggers lost her fight with melanoma at the age of three. She lived sixteen months from the time of diagnosis; a good year beyond anyone’s expectations. If it were not for the expert care she received from her team of specialists, Piggers would not have lived nearly as long or as well as she did, even with a veterinarian as her mom.

Long before I lost Piggers, I decided that the best way to honor her was to start a foundation that would help families in need to afford specialty level care. I want to help give them the gift of time with their pets that Piggers’ doctors gave me. That gift of time is something that I will never forget. It allowed Piggers and me the time to experience together once in a lifetime memories that I will carry with me forever. It bonded Piggers and me together in a way that is difficult for me to even put into words. Our journey throughout her illness changed me as a doctor and as a person, and I have a scruffy little dog named Piggers to thank for making me who I am today.

Piggers’ Pals Foundation is a non-profit organization  designed to assist families in need seek specialty level care for their pets. To learn more about the Piggers’ Pals or to make a donation, visit www.piggerspals.org.

Aromatherapy is commonly used by many people. Essential oils are extracted from the flowers, leaves, bark, roots, stems, seeds or fruit of a plant. The oils are then either inhaled or diluted and rubbed into the skin. Veterinary remedies date back to the 18th century. In addition to holistic vets, this method is utilized by holistic animal practitioners, animal massage therapists, and pet owners.

Essential oils can help prevent and treat illness in dogs due to their antiseptic and antimicrobial properties. Aromatherapy can help with emotional issues such as anxiety, nervousness, stress, and those that are hormone related. The oils can help with physical issues such as skin problems, joint conditions, digestive problems, respiratory conditions, circulatory problems, and parasites. Some commonly used essential oils are:

• Lavender has a calming effect and can
help with joint conditions, respiratory problems, and skin conditions.

• Rose has a strengthening emotional effect and can help with inflammation and skin conditions.

• Myrrh has a relaxing quality and can help with congestion, lethargy, inflammation, and skin conditions.
• Lemon grass can help with ligament and joint injuries and is used as an insect and flea repellant.

• Valor is a special blend that provides emotional and spiritual balance and helps with musculoskeletal issues.

Aromatherapy can be offered several different ways:

• Opening the bottle and allowing your
dog to smell the oil.
• Placing several drops of oils in a small
spray bottle filled with water and misting.
• Using a diffuser.
• Appling directly to your dog’s body by
diluting with a carrier such as almond oil.

Muscle testing is an ideal way to determine which oils are right for your dog. Precautions should be taken to make sure that you are using therapeutic grade oils. Some oils should not be used on your dog if they are going to be in the sun.

Aromatherapy is a wonderful compliment to your dog’s health care and can provide many benefits.