E-Vet Clinic - Dog Health Care

Well I am back from vacation, so back to posting! Here is a cool interactive chart I found on Chocolate Toxicity in dogs!

Chocolate Chart

Chocolate is toxic to dogs because it contains theobromine, a compound similar to caffeine. It causes very similar side effects however in the dog much more pronounced such as vomiting, seizures, rapid heart rate and arrythmias and can even induce death in dogs. Now different types of chocolate contain different amounts of theobromine. So this chart shows how much a dog can eat of a specific type of chocolate depending on its weight before becoming a problem.

Very cool thing - Thanks National Geographic!

Here is a great story about a life threatening event that this one courageous dog endured!

After dog falls through ice, a bone-chilling rescue 

What this shows me is that a dog has an uncanny ability to survive, a human trying to swim in a frozen pond for an hour would certainly not fair so well! Excellent story way to go Rocket-Man I am happy you made it.

All I want for Chirstmas is my two front teeth, my two front teeth, my two front teeth…

Here is Alex coming home from school when his Mom shot this picture. He lost three teeth this past week, this last one, his other front tooth, makes him sing the Christmas song but makes him look like a jack-o-lantern!

You are now going to have to be sure to support the health your dog’s brain. Why? Well how cool is this - Using new methods of study 4 dogs have demonstrated cognitive reasoning skills. Meaning they actually could see a picture and group it together with similar pictures.

Before it was quite difficult to do this because there was always a human involved and it is possible that the human through body language could help the dog in its decision making. A study done at the University of Vienna has used a computer touch screen to remove human influence and the results are in that a dog can actually think and group pictures together. Here is the study —> Visual categorization of natural stimuli by domestic dogs

Here are the results -

All subjects learned to discriminate between the two sets and showed successful transfer to novel pictures. Interestingly, presentation of pictures providing contradictive information (novel dog pictures mounted on familiar landscape pictures) did not disrupt performance, which suggests that the dogs made use of a category-based response rule with classification being coupled to category-relevant features (of the dog) rather than to item-specific features (of the background).

Here is how they did it and what this actually means…LOL. They took 4 dogs and 40 pictures using a computer touch screen. The pictures were of 20 dogs and 20 landscapes. The dogs were given treats if they picked the dog picture on the touch screen. They then put in new pictures and the dogs were able to transfer what they had learned to the new set of pictures. Then they tried to confuse the dogs by placing the picture of the dogs in the landscapes and compare them to just the landscapes and the dogs were still able to pick out the dog picture. What this means is that the dogs categorized the pictures of dogs as something and could recognized it whether it was by itself or attached to another picture.

So now we have research proof that dogs do think - like we did not know that especially those of use who own border collies! So be sure to give your dogs plenty of fish oil with the omegas to help brain cognition and brain health. For the health of your dog and its now confirmed brain power nutrition is key.