Distemper Outbreak in Toronto’s Wildlife

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Raccoon nests like this one inside homes can spread Canine Distemper

Raccoon nests inside homes can spread Canine Distemper

An outbreak of distemper has killed off hundreds of Toronto’s raccoons and skunks – and has put dogs at risk.

From the Toronto Star –

If you see a raccoon lying on a sidewalk in the middle of the day, call Toronto Animal Services – and keep your dog on a tight leash.

The animal is likely sick and dying, and could infect your pet with a lethal strain of distemper, an epidemic that has killed hundreds of raccoons and skunks in the GTA since May.

“It’s not transferable to humans but there is definitely a high risk to unvaccinated cats and dogs,” said Eletta Purdy, manager of Toronto Animal Services. “It’s not rabies but it kills quickly.”

Distemper is a highly contagious, highly lethal virus. The same virus affects dogs, skunks, ferrets, weasels, raccoons and possibly opossums.

It’s hugely irresponsible to not use the readily available, virtually risk free distemper vaccination to protect your pets from distemper. Prior to the invention of the canine distemper vaccine in the 1960’s, distemper ravaged thousands of kennels world wide, wiping out entire lines. A trip to the dog show could result in the death of all of a breeder’s puppies, and sometimes their older dogs, as well.

Advocates of no vaccinations often argue that it is only puppies with weak immune systems who develop viruses like distemper. They point to raw feeding and homeopathic remedies as a method to prevent and cure distemper. Raccoons and skunks are hardly surviving on a diet of take out food, and yet they still are highly susceptible to distemper.

The other argument made by no vaccine advocates is that their puppies only end up contracting distemper when  they come into contact with other puppies which have received the distemper vaccine, and are ‘shedding’ the virus. Ignoring the fact that modern distemper vaccines are made from killed forms of the virus, it’s an incontrovertible fact that any puppy not living in a bubble stands a good chance of encountering a raccoon, a fox or a skunk, even in the most urban environment. Your dog doesn’t even have to have a face to face run in with a wild animal to become infected with distemper – it can be spread via feces of infected animals just as easily (and who among us hasn’t seen our dogs snuffling up something gross and unknown on our daily walks?).

Please, get your dogs and puppies vaccinated. It’s such a simple preventative, for such a horrible disease.

Westminster Handler Gives Ultimate Gift

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Westminster handler gives owner ultimate gift

Westminster handler gives owner ultimate gift

It’s Westminster Week (and congrats to Canadian bred dog Ch Robobull Fabelhaft I’m On Fire, who took Best of Breed in French Bulldogs). Westminster week is a big, big deal for dog show people in North America, and we’ve all gotten rather reluctantly used to the spotlight that this inevitably shines on our sport.

Stories about dogs in diamond collars, handlers who fly first class with their ‘clients’ sitting on the seat next to them, and articles about how much money it can cost to make it to the Gardens are rampant, and leave all of us feeling (and usually looking) a little bit silly.

In amongst it all, one story illustrates the real reason why most of do this, weekend after weekend – the friendships we make. If donating a kidney to one of your owners doesn’t illustrate that, I don’t know what does.

From the New York Daily News –

Sandy McCabe would love for dog handler Wade Koistinen to lead her fluffy black-and-white Havanese to victory in Madison Square Garden.

But for McCabe, even a Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show would pale next to what Koistinen has already given her – one of his kidneys.

“I’m just happy to be alive for this,” McCabe said Friday at the Pennsylvania Hotel, surrounded by borzois, bloodhounds and scores of other dogs and owners, all checking in before the show begins on Monday.

McCabe, 49, who breeds Havanese with her husband, Kevin, in rural Iowa, has diabetes and was facing renal failure last summer before her friend Koistinen told her he would help.

“I could just see her getting sicker and sicker. I had to,” said Koistinen, 51, holding McCabe’s entry in the show, Rumor, an outgoing little 4-year-old whose full name is Ch. Heartland’s Rumor Has It.

“I couldn’t walk more than 10 feet,” said McCabe, who was told that it would be four to six years before she climbed to the top of a national waiting list for kidneys. None of her family members was healthy enough to donate one.

But Koistinen, who lives in Kansas City, volunteered. “He stepped forward and said, ‘I will give my kidney,'” McCabe said.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/health/2010/02/13/2010-02-13_handler_wade_koistinen_gives_kidney_to_ailing_show_dog_owner_sandy_mccabe.html

Rescue People are a Special Kind of People

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The average, normal person has been refusing to leave their house during the storms which have been battering parts of Canada and the USA. Not rescue people, however – for rescue people, helping a dog trumps all kinds of bad weather. In some cases, this can also lead to some dangerous situations –

From Denver’s News Channel Seven

A Indiana man who got trapped in deep snow in Saguache County, Colo., survived by drinking Mountain Dew and eating snow.

Jason Pede, 31, was driving from Dulce, N.M. to Aspen, Colo., to deliver a rescue dog.

He told his wife Thursday morning he was following a plow truck, but she didn’t hear from him again.Pede had a cell phone, satellite radio and GPS, but when his Lincoln Navigator got stuck in the snow on a country road off Highway 114 northwest of Saguache, Colo., the electronic devices didn’t help.

Pede stayed in his vehicle, burning some items to warm, but no one found him.”When I finally ran out of fuel, I took it upon myself to walk the seven miles from where I was at to the roadway,” said Pede. “That was my only way of not dying, I guess.”

Great, but how’s the dog?

The Australian Shepherd Pede was taking to Aspen was found in his SUV and taken to a vet for treatment.

Video below the cut.

Read more →

Happy Groundhog Day

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Sean and I were hoping to make it up to Wiarton, Ontario, to celebrate Groundhog Day, but work has once again gotten in the way, so we’re enjoying it from afar.

Apparently this year Peta protestors have shown up in Wiarton, suggesting that Willy should be replaced with a robotic groundhog (the same suggestion they made for Punxsutawney Phil, the Pennsylvania Groundhog).

I don’t see that happening any time soon, but here’s a great commercial take off on the best “Robot Groundhog” movie of all time, Caddyshack.

All I wanted was some coffee

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I am pretty sure that I’ve mentioned before that we live in the country. This is not, mind you, some sort of mild mannered ‘country’, the buculic sort you get when live 30 minutes outside of a major metropolitan area. This is real country, honest to God, middle of no place, country – the kind where the closest thing I can get to high speed internet comes via satellite.

The upside of satellite internet is that it’s faster than dial up. The downside is… well, just about everything else. Cost, download speed, upload speed, data transfer caps (ie; why I can no longer have a live puppy cam), and weather related slow downs. It’s the weather part that got to me this weekend, in main part due to an unrelenting snowfall that started on Thursday, when I left for work in the morning, and hasn’t stopped since. This accumulation resulted in our internet service being out all weekend long, much to my despair.

On the way in to work this morning, the best thing I had to look forward to was actually having internet access again (real high speed access, no less!). I also enjoyed a last minute argument with Sean, as I was heading out the door, on one of our favorite topics – “Why do you have to spend so much money on coffee?”. This is the argument that only a non coffee drinker can ever dream up, and usually sounds something like “I don’t see why you can’t just get up in the morning and make coffee, instead of stopping on the way to buy it”. I then point out that operating complicated machinery like the coffee maker is beyond the grasp of anyone who is:

a) getting up at 6:00 am

and

b) is doing so without benefit of coffee

This is, of course, a catch 22, but non coffee drinkers aren’t wired the same way as we normal people, and so the whining just continues until I finally either throw a toaster at Sean’s head, or agree that I’ll make coffee at work. Today, I’d have been better off to go with the toaster.

On arrival (after a 40 minute drive over what is basically just a highway made out of hard packed snow), I grab some water and go to put new coffee in the basket, only to discover that whoever made coffee last apparently did so in some pre historic time period, when cleaning hadn’t yet been invented, because the basket of grinds has congealed into solid chunk of brown potting soil, covered with a fine webbing of mold and cobwebs.  Yum YUM!

Time for a full cleaning, it seems – just what I was most looking forward to, first thing in the morning.

I tear the coffee maker apart, wipe it down, and run three pots of hot water and vinegar through it, to disinfect the coffee maker and get rid of all the scaly, gunky build up. Four or five rinse pots later, and I finally am ready to make a pot of coffee. I run to grab cream from the cooler, and add it to my cup of coffee, only to learn that the creamer has ALSO solidified into a solid hunk of goo.

Cursing the Gods of all things caffeine related, I grab cup and cream and head for the washroom, to dump it all out. That’s when I knocked the shelf off of the wall over the bathroom sink, tumbling paper towels, hand wash and two rolls of toilet paper into the sink full of water and congealed cream. I jumped, and managed to dump half the coffee down my pantsleg, where the chunks of cream cling to the fabric, glistening like half made cheese.

Fast forward twenty minutes, and I’ve got the bathroom pretty much back into shape, and most of the cheese curds off of my pants leg. That’s when the phone rings – it’s a cat lady (it’s always a cat lady, when it comes to Krazy Kwestion Time). She wants to know how much taurine is in sardines.

I need to point something out here – we make raw pet food, but we don’t sell sardines, or any kind of food with sardines in it. I point this out to the cat lady, and she points out that we make pet food, so should know all about all of the stuff that goes in pet food, including sardines, which are fish, and we do put salmon in our pet food, which is also a fish, and so therefore it’s all quite relevant. I fight back the urge to sob, and politely suggest she call the sardine manufacturer. She tells me, not so politely, that I haven’t been any help at all. I concede she’s probably got a point.

I can’t face anything else without coffee, so I decide to suck it up and drink a cup made with powdered ‘non dairy creamer’. This is when I learn that four or five rinses aren’t enough to get the vinegar taste out of the coffee maker.

At this point, I’m torn between putting my head down on the desk and sobbing, or just sucking it up and going out to get some from Tim Hortons. I choose the latter, but decide that I’d better dump out the coffee pot first, to stave off a repeat of the great Coffee Machine Science Experiment.

That’s when I manage to get the edge of the 3/4 full pot of coffee stuck under the edge of the basket, thereby flinging the entire pot of liquid all over my desk, the filing cabinet, the floor, my purse and my sweater.

I am so dumbfounded by this that I freeze in place for about thirty seconds, and then there’s really nothing I can do beyond shouting out “Sean, you will DIE when I get home, I swear to freakin’ GOD”. I did contemplate just getting in the car, driving straight home, and killing him with an axe, but then I remembered that I needed him to snowblow the driveway, so I’ve decided to let him live.

For now.

Oh, and I still haven’t had any coffee.