Bruno's Blog – a complete animal at work

A study just published in the august journal the Veterinary Record looked at levels of parasites in cattle in organic farms as opposed to a similar group of ‘ordinary’ farms. This comes against a background of the rising level of liver fluke infestation that is causing some concern.

The non-organic farms routinely used anthelminthics – parasite-killing drugs – as part of their management regime for all their animals, whether they appeared affected by parasites or not.

Organic farms are not allowed to use such medication unless an animal is actually ill with parasites. Instead they have to rely on more traditional methods such as grazing their cattle on reseeded pasture, moving their stock regularly onto new clean pasture, grazing calves with sheep or a combination of all three.

The result?

Both groups had similarly low levels of parasites, indicating that control strategies on both groups  were effective.

Where many had suspected that the wholesome animal-welfare-friendly image of organic farming might in fact be hiding more serious health issues for cattle, for this study at least, their fears appear groundless.

Organic really is good for us and the animals on these farms.

It gets slightly worse for the animals on all systems of course when, despite our concerns about their welfare, we kill them and eat them.

For years now there’s been such competition for places at the veterinary schools that they have had a tough time choosing who to select as future students.

From amongst the piles of A-level over-achievers, the heads of schools, the ones that have spent years of their lives doing Saturday work at the local vets, travelled to the far ends of the earth to do worthy voluntary work in orphanages or sailed single-handedly to Sydney and back whilst writing award-winning poetry, they have always tended to choose those with high IQs.

And as we have touched on previously, many of those that survive vet school are a pretty miserable lot. In fact we are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than the average Joe in the street.

Quite an achievement for such a sought-after profession, I’d have thought.

It is now suggested that your ability to achieve ’success’ or happiness in life is more related to your emotional intelligence or competence (EQ) than on your intelligence (IQ).

And it’s beginning to look as if the veterinary school selection process might be inadvertently selecting extremely bright students some of whose emotional ability is less well developed….

Interestingly enough, there are other specific groups of people that also have high IQs but low EQs.

Amongst those affected with mild autism, for example, are many with Asperger’s syndrome. These people may well get top A levels, honours degrees and so on but they have little ability to cope with their own or others emotional issues. They find it difficult to relate to others or indeed to have any level of emotional mastery.

So next time you go to your vet looking for some emotional hand-holding at a difficult time in the life of your pet, consider the idea that beneath the cool surgeon’s amour, your vet might be struggling as much or even more than you are to cope with the vicissitudes of life, death and all between.

 

 

It caught us all on the hop all those years ago in 1979 when a severe and often fatally acute gastro-enteritis appeared in epidemic form across the world.

At the start no one really knew what it was all about, just that increasing numbers of dogs were being brought in half collapsed, vomiting and passing blood stained diarrhoea. It was not a pretty sight, and the smell…

Veterinary practices were filled with dogs on intravenous fluid drips shivering and hiding in every corner. Many of them died. Distraught owners consulted harrasssed vets who were not really sure what they were dealing with. Eventually it was confirmed as a highly contagious virus, related to the panleucopenia virus that had been known about for years in cats.

Yes, this is another story of a virus jumping from one species to another. On this occasion almost simultaneously in 5 continents. Watch out for human strain bird flu, everyone.

A vaccine became available and over the next 25 years parvo virus became part of our routine for vaccination, and the disease became less and less common until many of us were saying that it was really not a problem in our area.

Not so any more. Vets in the UK are all seeing rising numbers of cases of this distressing and often fatal disease. Most recently at our practice we came across a sweet little puppy that had been vaccinated (elsewhere) but had failed to respond to the vaccine. It picked up the disease in  central London park and died.

We are now urging our clients to make sure their dog’s parvo virus vaccines are up to date, and for those with dogs under a year of age, we are advising them to have them blood tested to make sure that they have responded well to their puppy vaccines – we unfortunately have clear evidence that at least some of them do not.

Call your vets now - find out what the local situation is.

“Equine flu has caused very severe disease in dogs in America in recent years and spreads through the population very quickly” says Julie Ross at the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket.

As if we needed a new health scare. Vets are already reeling from the steady stream of reports of bluetongue, bird flu, foot and mouth, you name it.

It turns out that there have been a couple of cases of equine influenza in dogs in the UK since it was first identified at the beginning of this century, but these have not so far spread into the dog population at large. Vets in America think it will only be a matter of time before we have this to contend with.

There have been a number of unexpected deaths in racing greyhounds recently. These have been sudden deaths, also associated with very low white blood cell counts in a pattern that made the consulting vets suspicious of peracute viral infections, but so far equine flu has been ruled out, despite their early suspicions.

We’ll keep you posted