Bruno's Blog – a complete animal at work

We got into a certain amount of trouble with the authorities recently.

It was pointed out to us that we cannot tell our customers about some of the beneficial effects of using some of the supplements that we supply. And we were required – as a point of law – to to stop doing so.

I’m talking here about the use of Omega 3 fatty acids in the management of painful or inflammatory diseases, a practice which is well established in the human field and something that we have been doing with great success at our clinic for a decade or more.

You see, we like and have been using products like Viacutan and Efavet for years.  They have been around for ever and are promoted for their beneficial effects on skin and hence are commonly used in the management of flea allergies, atopy (eczema) and other sore, itchy skin conditions. And that is what the product licences state.

We investigated the use of nutraceuticals (which is where Vetscriptions all started, long before it became possible to supply prescription medicines online) and discovered that Essential Fatty Acids – the omega 3, 6 and 9 fatty acids – could be helpful in not only skin disease but also heart disease, gut problems, arthritis, kidney disease, problems of immunity etc, so we started to use them more and more.

Privately and in our clinic, we highly recommend products such as Coatex, Complederm, Dermoscent, Omegaderm, Gomega and most recently the wonderful Yumega, all for a wide variety of health problems.

But we can’t tell you about it on our website because it’s not in the product literature.

Imagine my surprise then, on reading today a paper published in the journal of that august body, the American Veterinary Medical Association entitled ‘Effects of a diet supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids on carprofen administration in dogs’.

In real English, the findings were that dogs being treated for arthritis with drugs like Rimadyl, Carprogesic, Carprieve and Carprodyl were consistently able to have lower doses if they were on an Omega-3 oil supplement, thereby minimising  any adverse effects associated with the long term use of carprofen.

Sound like oil supplements are a good idea, and of course you can get them all at vetscriptions….

Now here’s a funny thing.

We know that epilepsy and seizures in pets are a big worry for pet owners, because we see what you are looking for when you visit our site at Vetscriptions.co.uk, we send out the information sheets as you request them and dispense the medicines that you order to treat your pets who have seizures.

Anyway, I was reading an article on epilepsy recently( as if I had nothing better to do at the end of a hard day).

I waded through the information on the various causes and their diagnosis. I then steeled myself for the section on treatment. These pieces have a tendency to be a pretty riveting read, as you might imagine. And I bravely circled the paragraphs on phenobarbitone  (the veterinary formulation is Epiphen) on Potassium bromide (Epilease, KBr etc), their side effects and how to monitor dosage and any complications.

Our scribe talked about some of the new and hideously expensive medicines available for the 20-40% of cases that do not respond to the above.

He then moved onto the ‘alternative therapies’: hypoallergenic diets and raw food feeding, acupuncture, vagal nerve stimulation (a fascinating treatment option if it really works) and finally….the placebo effect.

The placebo effect is where the patient feels there to have been an improvement in their symptoms when they have been given an otherwise ineffective treatment, such as a sugar pill instead of the appropriate medication. In human medicine it is well recognised but poorly understood, and is generally assumed to be down to the effect of the patients’ belief that they will get better when they take a medicine.

Now get this: a paper published recently in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine has shown that a decrease in seizure activity was seen in more than half of the dogs given a placebo when compared with the pre-trial seizure frequency.

Almost 30% of these dogs underwent a 50% or greater reduction in seizure frequency when instead of anti-epileptic medication, they were given an ‘ineffective’ placebo.

Now I know that some of us like to imagine fondly that we might have healing hands, but does anyone have any suggestions as to what is going on here?

At a time when the years of loyal serice to the capital by Battersea Dogs Home are being celebrated by having a set of stamps issued in their honour, you can’t have avoided noticing that there is increasing debate about the future of the Dangerous Dogs Act.

I’m old enough to remember the start of the much-decried knee-jerk legislation. I worked in London at one of the RSPCA hospitals at the time and we certainly saw lots of Bull Terriers. Lovely dogs, almost all of them.

But we looked on in astonishment to find that it was no longer legal to keep a Dogo Argentino, a Fila Braziliera or a Japanese Tosa  in the UK.

What were we to do? How could we live in the ghastly new world order? Did anyone, anywhere in the UK have any idea what any of these dogs might look like?

So it was lunacy right from the start.

And now as then, the news is regularly littered with stories about children being savaged by Rottweilers.

‘I’ve got Rotties’ the vox pop man on the news bulletin said ‘ Lovely dogs. Big bears. But what were they doing leaving them with the kids?’

The question I might ask is what on earth is the point of having a dog that you can’t leave with children? Having a dog is meant to be fun, enjoyable and relaxing. It is meant to enhance your life, not add to the risks and put those that you know and love in mortal danger just because they looked at the dog the wrong way or pulled it’s tail in fun.

There are increasing calls for the law to be changed, and it’s about time.

Make it obligatory to microchip all dogs, and make the registered owner liable in every way for their dog’s behaviour, with serious punitive consequences for the owner for any infringement of a simple canine code of conduct.

It’s really not that difficult.

Why didn’t this hit the headlines before?

Back in 2003 a bunch of researchers at Nestle in Switzerland published a paper that showed that feeding probiotics, specifically Enterococcus faecium as found in all the Protexin range, Promax,  Norm-Prozorb and Avipro Plus can lead to higher levels of circulating vaccine-specific antibodies.

In real English, that means that giving a probiotic by mouth around and after the time of vaccination is likely to increase the animal’s response to the vaccine.

This is good news, and EVERYBODY SHOULD BE DOING IT!

A better response to a vaccine should in theory mean that you can then increase the interval between vaccines, which would also in our view be a very good thing.

At the clinic, we have been big users of probiotics for years – gut support at times of stress, whenever we use antibiotics and in all cases of diarrhoea.  These uses are fairly commonplace, but we had started using them at vaccination time a couple of years ago simply because we perceived that to be a time of physiological stress. Injecting modified disease-causing organisms into the body by an entirely unnatural route would seem to qualify as a stressful event, and therefore an appropriate time for additional support.

Now we know that we were right for another reason – more probiotics, higher levels of vaccine antibodies.

We also are keen on blood sampling for antibody levels before vaccination to check whether our patients actually need vaccinating or not, but maybe that’s another story..

All the dogs were there of course. Luca was holding Seagull, paws upwards, in his arms and rocking him a little. Seagull’s bare pink and black spotted stomach heaved with heat and emotion, his eyes were closed with privilege and bliss, his lightly-fringed black lips parted to give a glimpse of fine white teeth. The other dogs, with the exception of Lawrence, watched with respect, humble envy and awe.

from The Sacred & Profane Love Machine,

Iris Murdoch, 1974

Recently, financial commentators have been doing much talking about the economic plight of pigs, but not, it seems, of the oinking type. PIGS in the contemporary political & economic parlance of their smug northern European neighbours, refers to Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.

In fairer times these same countries were equally disparangingly referred to as ‘Club Med’, but right now, PIGS are deep in the economic Pooh, and not of the Winnie variety. The imminent financial collapse of Portugal and Greece is so serious that it is likely to have all sorts of repercussions as we struggle to extricate ourselves from the spectre of further recession.

Meanwhile, pigs of the other (porcine) persuasion appear to be on an ‘up’ as domestic pet pig numbers rise in the UK. I well remember the incredulity that greeted the arrival of the Vietnamese pot bellied pig as a potential domestic companion. And then the further surprise when their proud owners watched them go on to reach their final adult weight.

Now we also have to cope with the Kune Kune from New Zealand. If you happen to speak Farsi – and I realise that since our Iranian and Afghani readership is likely to be fairly limited, this point has minimal interest to you – the idea of a pet pig whose official name is Kune Kune would cause you some hilarity, even matching that caused by the arrival in Iran of a Greek ambassador named Kyriakos. Suffice it to say that both have a decidedly perineal tone.

But I digress. Pet pigs appear to be causing something of a headache for pet vets who are asked to treat them, since cats and dogs they clearly are not.

So what do you need to watch out for if you are a pet pig owner?

Sunburn and insect bites, overgrown toenails, dry skin and mange top the list.

All of which seem to take us back perilously close to the possible consequences of a careless young person’s holiday as might take place in the aforementioned Club Med/PIGS countries, perhaps.

On a slightly less frivolous note, you can’t just take your pet pig for a walk (you need a licence) and you can’t feed them any food that contains meat products (used to be called pigswill, but now forbidden in an attempt to try to prevent another outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth disease). You also need to vaccinate them against erysipelas & leptospirosis and treat them for worms.

Just think, if those same restrictions also applied to young people going on Mediterranean holidays, there’d be a few people rethinking their summer plans…

OK it’s survey time again.

This time the question was ‘How many cats and dogs are there in the UK?’

Shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out, I hear you say.

1. Ask the vets. But plenty of pets never get to see a vet, so they don’t know.

2. Ask the pet food manufacturers. They know how much pet food gets bought so they should know, but it turns out they aren’t sure how much of it is actually eaten by pets (and presumably, therefore, how much gets eaten by….?). And anyway they’re not sure what proportion of pets eat commercial pet food, so they can’t figure it out either, although recent figures they published (2008) suggested 7.2 million cats and 7.3 million dogs.

Option #3: get sponsorship and ring some people up to ask them. All you have to do is randomly select numbers from the Electoral Roll, 13,795 of them to be precise,  then do something to the stats so that you can get it published in a reputable journal (the Veterinary Record, no less). I can then ask stuff like:

“But what is the power of this study?”

And the lunatic who has just finished calling up 13,795 people and crunched the numbers will be able to reply:

“Well, son, the study had 80 per cent power to detect odds ratios (ORs) of 1.5 or greater, based on a 0.05 probability of a type 1 error (95 per cent confidence) and assuming that 10 per cent of controls were exposed to risk factors (Epi-Info 6; CDC).”

I kid you not. And someone, somewhere will one day be grateful that I have the patience or lack of any meaningful life whatsoever to read it for you.

Anyway, the answer to the question is:

10,332,955 cats and 10,522,186 dogs.

Approximately, that is. Curiously, they also found that people with university degrees are more likely to own a cat than a dog.

No explanation there, but you always read it first at Vetscriptions….

Way back in 5000 BC, the Scythian horsemen of central Asia used a simple form of bitless bridle to control their horses. Crude possibly, but nonetheless without a bit.

A mere 7000 years later, the head of equine surgery at the prestigious Tufts University veterinary school in Massachusetts has been looking into some of the many vices and negative behaviours afflicting horses, including bolting, bucking and rearing. His conclusion is that many of these are just a normal reaction of the horse to it’s feelings of fear and pain due to the presence of a bit in their mouth.

Additionally, his research suggests that a bitted bridle can have serious ill effects on a horse’s ability to breathe properly, particularly during the high demands of competition.

This relative lack of oxygen could be a significant factor in some of the catastrophic musculoskeletal injuries that can be so dangerous for both horse and rider, and he is now convinced that the bit might be a significant cause of up to 40 separate conditions such as exercise induced pulmonary haemorrhage, epiglottal entrapment and displacement of the soft palate.

He has been looking into and developing an unconventional bitless bridle that uses a crossover beneath the horse’s chin to apply pressure to the side of the head rather than the delicate structures of the mouth (see www.bitlessbridle.com).

Recent trials suggested that horses ridden with this bridle not only adapt quickly but show very significant increases in performance. But Professor Cook has had trouble getting anyone to listen.

“I am 78 and may be getting on a little, but I haven’t finished yet.”

Just when I had finally given up hope of ever finding anything interesting or relevant ever again in our august professional journal, no less than 3 items caught my eye in just one edition.

At the risk of boring you…

Fish oils for arthritis, from the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association:

In a study of 127 dogs with confirmed arthritis over a 6 month period, half were supplemented with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids (fish oils) in their food and the other half just had the food. After six weeks, the owners – who didn’t know which groups their dogs were in – confirmed that the omega-3 treated dogs showed an improved ability to rise from a resting position and play, and by 12 and 24 weeks had an improved ability to walk, compared with the untreated dogs.

Many of the products marketed for skin problems (for example Gomega, Boracutin, Vet Solutions Aller G-3, Invigorate) contain high levels of Omega-3 fatty acids. So now it’s official – you can use these to help manage your dog’s arthritis.

Flea treatments for cats

Please do NOT try to treat your cats with over-the-counter small dog/puppy flea treatments containing permethrin. The products may look similar and you may think that since a cat may be much the same size as a small dog it might be OK, but it ISN’T. Cats are not small dogs. Permethrin can be extremely toxic to cats, so be careful. READ THE LABEL. Or better still, buy a completely safe product like Frontline.

Pergolide for donkeys

A correction on the dose regime for the human medicine Pergolide in the treatment of hyperadrenocorticism or Cushings disease in donkeys. And by chance, pergolide is available from…..vetscriptions

And finally (because that’s enough flagrant product endorsement)

One last item from the Veterinary Journal on the evaluation of udder shape. It is apparently important to be able to make distinctions between the shapes normal, large pendulous, overall small, small but pendulous and large between the hindquarters. There was me thinking that my farm vet colleagues spent their time crawling around in the mud worrying about minerals and lame sheep, when in fact it turns out that we all think about the same stuff…

Just spotted in the Telegraph vet’s Q & A this week – he posed the questions, but before being given a chance to answer them himself, another wag made some suggestions…

1. Why has my dog been coughing since Christmas?

Dog should under no circumstances be allowed to smoke. Even just the odd one at Christmas.

2. My cat has gum disease and the vet said all his teeth should be removed. Would you recommend this?

Again Cats should not be given Sweets, even at Christmas. IF you have all of his teeth out, this will stop him eating sweets. Unless of course he’s partial to the odd gum drop.

3. I have a Siberian husky who keeps running out after we open the door and also whines like a puppy. How do I train him not to do this?

Huskies like the snow. this is probably why it has started making a break for it.

4. Can my King Charles live with a severe heart murmur?

Does it have a severe heart murmur and is it still alive? IF the answer to both is yes then that has answered your question.

5. Is it normal that my 4-year-old Jack Russell is always shaking and shivering?

It has been very cold recently. Ever thought of buying is a coat ? You should try walking through 4 inches of snow when your legs are 6 inches long.