The Dog Zombie

A cat who is clearly not in a shelter. Last night I wrote the first draft of a document on appropriate housing for shelter animals fo...

My Bark article, Testing the Tests , is now available on the web for free. I did a lot of background reading for this story and I learned a...

There was almost no furniture in the entire house. This was unusual for hoarder houses, which are usually packed full of stuff or just of tr...

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about shelter consulting over the last few weeks. The thing is, shelters need help. There is a massive amo...

A few days ago I tweeted a link to a blog post by the ASPCA’s Dr. Emily Weiss questioning the shelter dogma that animals should not be give...

On the face of it, the recent changes to Texas state law appear to be a good idea, aimed at preventing non-veterinarians from practicing vet...

I got a great question from Christopher of Border Wars on my last post . He wrote: “From the data I’ve seen, shelter intakes are dropping i...

This past week I was at one of the largest shelters in the United States. At one point, I was standing by a door chatting with some of my co...

Kittens like to nurse on things. It is best to nurse on mom, but orphaned kittens will nurse on other things. A favorite option for many orp...

Last week I worked in a kitten nursery — a small building off of a larger shelter, full of underage kittens (mostly orphans, some with moms)...

The dog was on his back, sedated on a table. I was not wearing a surgical cap or a sterile gown. I held the first testicle between two fing...

I seem to have spent two months with no time to blog. What in the world was I doing? The last you heard from me, dear readers, I was in th...

The next question I get after “what do you do?” is always “what’s shelter medicine?” I have been playing around with different ways to sum u...

Austin Bouck at Animal Science Review recently posted about the benefits of group housing for cats in shelters . (Well, sort of recently. I ...

At my last report I had finished about two days of my internship and was still giddy with joy. During the rest of that week, I got to work o...

When I watched my first video on how to spay a dog, lo these many (two) years ago, I kept saying “what’s a pedicle?” Apparently it was very ...

I didn’t really feel like a vet until the second day of my veterinary internship in shelter medicine. I spent the first day being driven fro...

Yesterday I spent the day on a spay/neuter trailer. The shelter which owns the trailer sends it out to low-income areas to spay and neuter a...

I recently spent two weeks of elective time at a shelter medicine externship at a different vet school. Half the time was spent in academic ...