Separation Anxiety: The Great Imitator, Part 3 By Meredith Stepita, DVM, DACVB Another common symptom of separation anxiety is urination and/or defecation in the house. First, all medical causes (e.g., intestinal parasites, urinary tract infections, etc) need be ruled out by visiting your veterinarian. Then, other behavioral causes should be considered. When...
Separation Anxiety: The Great Imitator, Part 2 By Meredith Stepita, DVM, DACVB One of the first natural remedies most people try when their dog is destructive to the house is confining the dog to a crate. Unfortunately, most of my patients with separation anxiety DO NOT improve when placed in a crate....
Separation Anxiety: The Great Imitator, Part 1 By Meredith Stepita, DVM, DACVB Clients often tell me that their dog has separation anxiety. When I ask them what exactly their dog is doing, the answer varies widely. This is because there are many different causes of behaviors that mimic the signs consistent with...
Why It’s Hard Being Tiny and Cute by Jennifer Summerfield, DVM Today, I want to talk about little dogs. I was at a client’s home a few weeks ago, doing a behavior consultation for their adorable two-year-old Maltese mix. “Chloe” had a tendency to get over-aroused and begin barking,...
Worried about using food luring during training? by Kelly Ballantyne, DVM, DACVB The science is pretty clear at this point that using positive reinforcement (i.e. giving an animal something s/he likes to increase the chance they’ll repeat a behavior) is the most effective and humane means of training. In...
Dogs and cats are social animals who can learn easily to respond to many of our words, gestures, and body language cues throughout any given day. In some cases, our pets learn our words so well that we end up having to spell them out when communicating with other...
Q: I have a 3 1/2-year-old male silky terrier who is very intelligent and lovable. He has a large, fenced-in area in our back yard to run free, which he does during the day. My problem is that when he is in the house and someone opens the front...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/decoding-your-pet/201710/abnormal-behaviors-arent-always-psychological (From Psychology Today’s Decoding your Pet series, brought to you by the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists)
How refreshing it is to feel the warm breeze and see the pops of color appearing around town as we (finally!) move into spring. For those of us who like to fancy ourselves green-thumbed, one of the brightest aspects of spring is the chance to get back into the...
Molly and Polly were two Pugs I worked with several years ago. Among other problems, I was called in to address an issue the owners found especially distasteful – the dogs ate their own feces. When crated, the dogs would defecate and then eat whatever they had deposited. Outside,...
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