Remember to keep your dog cool in hot temperatures!

Around here right now it HOT! Bleh! And we’ve been seeing heat-stroke dogs at the emergency clinic lately because of it—peeing blood, vomiting blood, and pooing blood. Not a good thing. In fact, it's really awful!  Don’t let this happen to your dog!

Just a reminder that dogs can’t tolerate high temperatures the way humans can (and we can’t always tolerate the heat well either!). Dogs have minimal sweat glands; instead, they pant to help reduce their body temperature, but panting only works so well. Therefore, it’s not a good idea to leave your dog outside for long periods of time in these high temperatures. I only let my dogs out for maybe a half an hour at a time, and never during the hottest time of the day (which is actually later in the afternoon, not mid-day; here’s a good explanation of why). Access to water is more important than usual as well.

Also remember that leaving your dog in the car even for ten minutes at these temperatures is incredibly dangerous. Studies have shown that a car can heat up almost 20 degrees in only ten minutes. And over 40 degrees in half an hour. And cracking a window doesn’t help.

If your dog has been outside for a while (or in a hot car) and is suddenly lethargic, vomiting, has diarrhea, and/or generally looks like crap, it might be suffering from heat stroke, which is incredibly serious and life-threatening. The best thing you can do is hop in your car with the air conditioning blasting and hurry to the closest emergency vet clinic. If you’re very far from a vet clinic, you can also try running cool* water all over your dog—make sure it gets down to the skin and doesn’t just run off the fur.  You’ll still want to get your dog to see a veterinarian as soon as possible, however, because heat stroke damages the cells inside the body and your dog will most likely need to be treated.

* Why cool water and not cold?
A veterinarian that I work with told me that a common misnomer is that you should try to cool off your dog with cold water.  In fact, you should use cool water. 
If you use cold water (ice cold water or ice), the blood vessels under the skin will constrict and get thinner (this is called "vasoconstriction").  This restricts the passage of blood to these surface vessels, thereby keeping more blood and therefore more heat in the core of the dog's body--this is a bad thing for a dog experiencing a heat stroke! 
Cool water will work to reduce the temperature a dog because its not cold enough to cause vasoconstriction, but is a cooler temperature than the dog, so it will be able to carry some of the dog's heat away as it washes over its skin.

Bone chewing: Remembing why its important to supervise your dog.

While I was sitting in my room writing the previous post, something else happened that reminded me of another doggy lesson: it’s always a good idea to supervise your dog when they’re playing with and chewing on toys!
Halo was engaging in one of her favorite activities, chewing on a bone, when I heard a CRACK! I turned around to find that she had snapped a huge, sharp chip off her bone! I immediately took the bone pieces away, and seeing as the bone is now too sharp for her to safely chew on, it is now destined for the trash.

Bone chips can cause serious problems if swallowed. The pieces can get stuck in a dog’s throat or windpipe or anywhere along the digestive tract; if they don’t get stuck, they can scrape the linings of the digestive tract and/or be painful and hard to pass. Halo unfortunately had this happen to her not long ago after ingesting small bone chunks from a large, smoked knuckle bone. We learned too late that Halo had chewed the bone in half and had, unknowingly to us, consumed relatively large pieces of the bone. She got sick a day or so later and had to strain to pass the bone chunks. She was lucky that the bone bits didn’t cause more damage. From that experience, we learned that Halo is a little too good at chewing on bones and that closer supervision is needed when she’s enjoying a good chew. It’s also clear from both the knuckle bone incident and today’s cracked bone that Halo should only be allowed to chew very thick bones or antlers so that she can’t break off more than a tiny bit at a time.  Her jaws are just too powerful!