Fear Free Happy Homes
Reading Time: 3 minutes Old dogs are the best dogs. They know the rules, they’re not full of crazy energy, and they love nothing better than a good nap. The downside, though, is that all that makes it easy to slip into the habit of not spending as much time with them. Your dog may no longer need long […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes Margaret Slaby loves animals, so for a time she worked in animal care at a shelter in Monterey County, California. But after two and a half years, she had to call it quits. “I saw a lot of older cats didn’t make it out of the shelter simply because they were older, and it just […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dangling ornaments. Rich food. Brightly blooming plants. Parties. No matter what your species—human, canine or feline—there’s a lot to love about the holidays. But in the wrong hands, er, paws, those same things can cause everything from a bellyache to a bite to a trip to the emergency room. Here are three ways to avoid […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes Research tells us that play is a stress-buster in cats, because it enables them to express their natural hunting behaviors. More playtime has been found to correlate with fewer behavior problems, too. We also know that cats are more likely to play with novel toys. That’s because play is pretend hunting, and once you’ve killed […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Cattens: They’re not quite kittens, not quite cats. They’re tweens through teens. Adolescents. Can go from “Mommm-muh! Don’t! Won’t!” to “Mommmy?!” in five minutes. Absolute challenges in the bum. I love them at that awkward time. Sometimes, it’s fun. Often, sweet. As we did ourselves, they’re going through changes. Watching your Noodles develop into the […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes When Robert Hampton recently moved into the Brookdale Memory Care Center in Dallas, his wife, Marilyn, knew exactly what he needed to boost his spirits and to encourage him to be social with other residents. She brought in four friendly cats from a local pet rescue group into her husband’s room and said, “Pick one.” […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes I couldn’t wait to take Oscar, my new Dalmatian puppy, outside for his first walk around our block. Clipping the leash onto his collar went well but taking a step out the front door to enjoy nature was another story. I never knew that paws had brakes, but he sure applied them in a flash […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes “Social referencing” is a fancy term for a familiar phenomenon: when uncertain about a new situation, you check to see how everyone else is reacting. Are they scared, happy, calm, anxious? We look to others for clues in case they have previous experience that we don’t. Other social animals do this as well, and it’s […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Are you old enough to remember buying those little red-eared slider turtles at pet stores when you were a kid? Back in the day, in the 1950s and ‘60s into the early 70s, these turtles were commonly kept as pets. Typically, though, they suffered from inadequate diets and unhygienic habitats and became known for transmitting […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes If you’ve ever seen a litter of kittens zooming around in play, you know they bite and wrestle, jump on each other’s backs, and throw each other on the ground. They play rough. Flinging humans around is not an option, but young cats may nibble or bite our fingers, feet, or other body parts. They […]