Bruno's Blog – a complete animal at work

Tomorrow – that’s Monday 28th September – is World Rabies Day, and as vets we are being asked to ‘raise our client’s awareness’ of the implications of rabies when discussing their pet’s future travel arrangments.

Not difficult. Rabies is a hideous disease. Apparently worldwide it kills about 150 people EVERY DAY, of which over 100 are children. That’s about one every 10 minutes, day in and day out.

My advice? It’s not rocket science: stay well away from unknown dogs in rabies endemic areas. You can be infected with rabies by something as trivial as a lick over an area of broken skin from an infected animal – it doesn’t take a deep bite, contrary to common belief.

We just don’t know how lucky we are in the UK, both a general members of the public and I suppose particularly as vets. Responsible parents have to teach their kids about contact with dogs: all the stuff about don’t pull their tails/ears/chops, don’t tease them or give them reason to be upset. Take great care with dogs you don’t know, let them come to you and if they growl at you, go back to tiddlewinks/football/playstation: it’s safer.

And if you do get a nip, at least they don’t have rabies.

We remain firm supporters of the Pet Travel Scheme that allows pets in and out of the country with the appropriate paperwork, but also find that many dog owners when it comes to it fancy a break from twice daily dog walks as much as they do from the daily grind at the office and still pop the pooch into the kennels whilst they check out the poolside action.

Which is probably a good thing on the disease front.

And many of the dogs that come back through our clinic from the kennels we use look as if they’ve more fun than their owners – at least they haven’t been arguing all holiday…

OK, by popular demand, we’re back. The blog returns.

The truth of the matter is that we picked up a software glitch in the blog doo-dah and it wouldn’t work anymore. I then got distracted with other work stuff (you know, running a vet practice, running an internet dispensary, running a wife, family, house, car, garden, negotiating a daughter through GCSE’s) and suddenly it was holiday time. And I remained distracted for much longer than I’d intended.

Actually it turns out I’d cut-and-pasted some text from a word document into the blog and that that is something that you must not do, for it risks importing Word formatting into the blog doo-dah and the blog doo-dah clearly does not like it, and goes on strike.

And then I lost heart.

But that was then and this is now: the tail end of Pet Smile Month.

Frankly, it’s never really done it for me – we tried promoting dental care through taking part in the national Pet Smile Month for a few years, but the uptake from our clients was laughably poor. They’re smart enough to realise that it’s all a bit of a ruse: offer free dental health checks (fantastic) on the strength of which the clinic picks up a load of extra dental care cases.

You know what? If we believe in the importance of good dental care – which we do, passionately – we should be promoting it and banging on about it all the time.

Oh, and feeding our pets properly. Not gunk, not pate all the time, not over-cooked sticky carbohydrate-rich biscuity things all the time.

Raw food. Raw meaty bones. Veg. A good mixed nutritionally varied diet. Wins every time