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Health: How much water should my pet be drinking?

May 14, 2013 By Sunny Lim

We are constantly reminded to drink 8 glasses of water a day and eat only till we’re 70% full. But what do we do instead? Drink 4 glasses and eat till we’re 110%. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the same situation for our pets.

While it’s easy to see if your pet is overweight, not everybody knows if they are getting enough hydration.

Water is so essential to every being’s physiological functions that it literally take a book to describe them all in detail. In fact, when scientists are looking for possible lifeforms on other planets, water would be on of the condition they’d look for first.

Combined with commercial diets, lack of hydration leads to urinary tract infections (extremely common with cats), kidney and liver problems. Ask any vet the percentage of senior dogs suffering from any of them resulting from not drinking enough water.

But on the other hand, excessive drinking can be a signal to a variety of problems as well, including liver and kidney disease, diabetes and hormonal disorders.

So how much is just right?

Ideally, both cats and dogs should be getting 60ml of water per kilogram of bodyweight. But even vets would say it’s okay if 70-80% of the recommended amount is achieved, give and take moisture obtained from wet food. I don’t think we’re even that strict with ourselves. (*On a side note, I recently adopted the habit of drinking at least 3 litres of water and I do feel more energetic!)

How to measure?

Calculate how much water your pet should be consuming. (e.g. A 5kg Maltese should be drinking approximately 60ml x 5kg = 300ml of liquid daily)
Measure and provide the recommended amount.
Measure the amount left over 24 hours later.
Repeat Step 2.
Always measure and refill at the same time of the day so that you’ll have a more accurate gauge of how much water your pets are consuming.

How to check for proper hydration?

So even though your pet is optimally hydrated, there are times (e.g. When its ill, having diarrhea or vomiting, lactating, long hours outdoor in the sun etc.) when you’d need to check if your pet is dehydrated. First, you can do so by pulling the skin above the shoulder blades and a well hydrated skin will snap back quickly into place. Secondly, you can also check their gums. If it’s tacky and dry, it’s poorly hydrated.

How to ensure they don’t drink too much or too little?

Drinking too little:

Positive reinforcement: Praise your pet and give’em treats every time your pet takes a drink. It worked for my dog real quick.
Beef it up: Add pork or beef stock or what ever stock you’re cooking into their water. However, I suggest that you only do this occasionally. The same reason why so many people are addicted to soft drinks no?
If they’re being fed dried food, try adding a liberal amount of water into their food.

Drinking too much:

Feed them using a bottle instead, because water is dispensed a little at a time. But because there’s usually a lot of dripping when drinking from a bottle, so you’d have to take that into account when calculating how much water is being consumed.
If feeding from a doggie bottle doesn’t seem to decrease the amount consumed, try using a big rabbit drinking bottle. The nozzle has a smaller diameter so even lesser water is being dispensed.
If there’s always someone at home, you can also try rationing the water, dividing the recommended amount into several portions and giving them one portion every few hours. You’d have to use this method if your pet doesn’t know how to drink from a bottle.

Pet Grooming: Should I shave my dog if it has skin problems?

May 6, 2013 By Sunny Lim

If your dog ever suffered from any skin problems, you’d realize that sometimes it takes forever to cure. Even vets need to do some trial and error and neither do they have any magic bullet that’ll stop the problem from resurfacing months later. This is because as mentioned in my earlier post on chronic skin problems, skin problems can be caused by anything. As a result, not only is it torturing to the poor animals going through all that itch, it’s heartbreaking for us to see them this way and frustrating trying to find out the cause.

What seems right might not necessarily be

In our quest for a solution, we are often made to believe that shaving down the dog for the easy application of creams and to observe the condition was a good idea. Although it may sound logical and a practice widely propagated by vets and groomers, but just imagine for a moment you had a rash somewhere and you ran a clipper across it. It’s the same as how scratching makes a rash worse, or how shaving usually irritates our skin, clipping usually irritates skin and if you were to shave the whole dog down, imagine the itch from their nose all the way to their tail!

Self mutilation

And what would they do when they have that insatiable need to kill off that itch? They scratch, chew and lick on the itch until the skin becomes red, raw and wounded, But still it itches and scratching and chewing are the only ways they know how. So the vicious cycle continues until the point of self mutilation and we have no choice but to don on the elizabethan collar, also infamously known as the cone-of-shame on them.

Don’t cause uncessary problems for yourself

Even dogs with perfectly normal skin, shaving too close sometimes causes redness and irritation especially on sensitive areas like paws, throat, groin, anal region and under the belly.

That’s why I don’t recommend customers to have their pets’ feet shaven bald for whatever reasons, be it because of their pets’ licking their own paws or because of the discolored paws from the licking. Usually shaving only makes matters worse and it’s more important to find the cause of the behavior rather than aggrevating the problem.

If you really have to

However, if you insist that clipping is to be done, please instruct the groomer to leave at least a centimeter of their coat. During grooming process, the shorter the cut, the smaller the blade would be used – the problem with that is the edge of the blade in contact with your pets’ skin would be sharper and heats up faster, two of the most common irritant during pet grooming.

Besides, the coat acts as a protectve layer and it’ll buffer the skin against any external irritatants they’re being exposed to everyday (e.g. chemicals, materials, heat etc. which they’re allergic to). Furthermore, the coat also cushions the skin when the dog chew on or scratches themselves.

And since most vets prescribe shampoos instead of topical creams, the medication would have no problem working down to the skin.

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Have questions on pet grooming? Write them down on the comments below and I’ll be glad to answer them!

Diseases: How to quickly cure an ear mite infestation

April 10, 2013 By Sunny Lim

When your pet have been scratching their ears or shaking their head relentlessly, it may not be because they can’t get to the itch (Or maybe that’s the reason. I would go nuts if my fingers became stumps and couldn’t reach where the itch is.) but rather, it may be a case of ear mite infestation, dermatitis, fungal or bacterial infection. Imagine an itch that NEVER goes away. Today I’ll talk a little on the more common ear problem: Ear mite infestations and how you can get rid of it quickly.

What are ear mites?

Ear mites are biting insects that are almost naked to the human eye which lives on the bodies of animals, even humans, and feeds by sucking blood in the ear canal. They are most active and tends to multiply faster in warm and humid places especially when the immune system of the host is impaired. The result of the feeding would cause dark brown ear wax, severe itching and inflammation or redness of the ear. Left unchecked, it may lead to nasty ear infections.

How to test for ear mites

1. Smear some ear wax on a black surface and spot for white specks, the size of a pin head, moving around.
2. You can also try smearing some ear wax on a paper towel and apply a few drops of hydrogen peroxide on to it. If some of it smudges and turns reddish brown, it’s a sign of dried blood, indicating that ear mites are feeding.

Unfortunate, but it ain’t all that bad

What differs from animals and humans is that get ear mites infestations rather easily, especially if the ears are not kept dry or when they come in physical contact with other animals with ear mites. The worse part is that ear mites don’t go away by themselves, torturing your pets with constant itching and secondary infections.

However from personal experience, it’s a problem easily treated at the onset of spotting the symptoms.

So when you find that your pets ears are getting dirty and a tad red from inflammation, do try some of these tips to see if it clears up:

Ear mites don’t just stay inside the ear. Hence you may discover that even though the ear might clear up after a few days of treatment, you’ll find that the redness and brown debris would sometimes soon find it’s way back. If that’s the case, you might want to try treating the rest of the body with an anti-parasitic spray or spot on treatment. Look for ingredients like moxidectin, selamectin or ivermectin, but if you already have flea and ticks spray at home, you can try that as well.
Get a bottle of ear mite treatment or a.k.a ear canker drops for the shop. After cleaning your pet’s ears, apply it twice daily and the ear should clear up in 7-14 days. Some ear cleaning solution like Earriffic has properties to treat ear mites and they are a great compliment to ear canker drops.
The next thing you should have in your house is a bottle of ear powder. Pet groomers use it to help them remove hairs inside dogs’ ears (which should be an important part of your weekly grooming schedule at home), but apart from that, ear powder keeps your pets’ ears dry, which prevents bacterial growth. Also, most ear powder contains boric acid which acts as an antiseptic and insecticide, working together to treat ear mite infestations. Use it after baths or daily when the ear drops has dried.
If you have multiple pets at home, treat all of them, because ear mites spreads easily through physical contact.

When to seek medical attention

If your pets’ ears shows no sign of improvement after 2 weeks.
The condition worsens after 2 weeks.
Green or yellow discharge/pus in the ear canal, a sign indicating a serious infection.

Prevention

Be it bacterial infection or ear mite infestation it’s caused by excess moisture in the ear and poor immune system. As a preventive measure, always clean your pets’ ears with a ear cleaner after their bath and/or dry their ears thoroughly, especially floppy eared breeds. If they refuse to let you dry their ears with a hair dryer, use ear powder instead. It’s okay to apply liberally as they will shake off the excess.

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