Dog Names Names for dogs are tough. So I thought I would give you a list of names to look at. Most are names with a hard syllable you can use to yell. About two thousand names follow, read them all and pick the best.
All pet owners recog nize the signs; the itching, the scratch-
ing, the biting, the licking. While fleas can be an annoyance for any pet, for some they can trigger a much bigger problem.
Flea allergy dermatitis is the most common allergy for dogs and cats and can cause itchy skin disease along with hair loss, skin discoloration, red bumps and scabs.
“The flea bite, or saliva, is ac-tually what causes the irritation, not the flea itself,” explains Dr. Adam Patterson, clinical assistant professor of dermatology at the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences. “While not all animals bitten by fleas will be allergic, the ones that are hypersensitive can be affected by just a few bites.”
Some symptoms that your pet might have flea allergy dermatitis are that they will lick, chew, bite or scratch their hind quarters.
“For the most part the symp-toms will present on the rump, back of thighs and tail head,” says Patterson. “The animal doesn’t have to bitten in these places, it’s just where you will notice the itch, bumps and hair loss, etc.”
If your pet is allergic to fleas and you haven’t already put them on a flea control regimen you should contact your veterinarian and get them on one immediately.
“Many people are what I call in ‘flea-nile.’ They don’t want to believe that there pet has fleas because they don’t want to deal with it. It is, however, important to have your animals on flea con-trol and keep them on year-round flea control, especially if they are allergic,” states Patterson. “There are a plethora of safe flea control options, both topical and oral, that can be discussed with your veteri-narian. Some products also protect against ticks.”
Patterson does note that there is no such thing as flea repellent and nothing kills fleas instanta-neously. Flea control products only kill adult fleas that come in contact with the pet so if you don’t keep your pet on the medication you have not solved the problem.
“Only five percent of fleas you see at any given time are the adult fleas on your pet. Ninety-five percent of the flea burden is the unseen eggs, larvae, and cocoons that are in your carpet, upholstery, outside environment, etc.,” notes Patterson. “It can take two weeks to six months for all of these eggs to hatch, so if you don’t keep all of the fur-bearing animals in your home on flea control you are giv-ing them an opportunity to come right back.”
If you are only seeing a few fleas on your pets, it is fine to just treat the animals in your house with flea control products, but if there is an infestation then you will
possibly have to treat your house and your yard as well.
“Again, there are many prod-ucts to treat your house and yard with, but this should be something you discuss with your veterinarian. Some products may be harmful to some animals in your household so they will recommend the best ones for you,” suggests Patterson.
While symptoms of flea allergy dermatitis such as itchy red bumps and scabs can be bothersome to pets, other problems can also arise from flea and tick bites.
“Some pets, especially small puppies and kittens, can actually suffer from anemia if a lot of fleas are sucking their blood,” explains Patterson. “They can also lead to tapeworms and transmit sev-eral blood-born diseases to your pets.”
Because of the scratching and biting associated with flea bites, pets might develop bacterial skin infections as a result and may re-quire antibiotics.
“As with anything, if you no-tice any signs of skin disease, infec-tion, lethargy, or loss of appetite in your pet you should always take them to the veterinarian,” advised Patterson. “The good news with fleas and ticks is that there are very good preventatives you can use. If you are consistent and vigilant you shouldn’t have to worry about complications from these pests.”
Pet Talk is a service of the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Texas A&M University. Stories can be viewed on the Web at http://tamunews.tamu.edu/.
Flea Allergy Dermatitis
Skin Diseases
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My watch indicated legal shooting time as the eastern
horizon blushed its first brush stroke of pale orange. As if on cue, a squadron of mallards ap-peared in an uneven knot and headed for our field decoys. The ducks swung around the four of us as we lay shivering in our coffin blinds. They lined up downwind, cupping their whistling spitfire wings, and riding an invisible escalator down into the decoys. “Take ‘em, “ Mike Schell, our guide, breathed.
My gun was already point-ed. The lead drake tumbled at my opening shot. I turned and began chopping through the rest of the flock. From that point one can only guess at who shot what, but the three ducks I aimed at tumbled after my shots.
As the smoke cleared, seven big mallards had bounced off the tilled, hard, North Dakota ground. We barely had time to reload before more ducks zeroed in on our decoys, and Mike was calling shots again. For two solid hours we had legal waterfowl in the air.
Snow geese spiced up the hunt. Within a half hour of shooting time they were lifting off a distant lake behind us and heading on a low quavering rope toward the massive de-coy spread we’d set in the inky predawn.
This put us in an inter-esting position. The ducks were coming in from in front, the geese from behind. Our guide asked us to pass up easy shots at mallards to let the geese come. I watched mallards in easy range from over my shoulder as we waited for the geese to get in range. When they did, we blew through the geese. A nice double on pr is t ine snow geese which had taken a line far to my side was the high point of my personal hunt.
While I was
on an eventually successful wild goose chase, running down the second half of that double, the guys from Penn-sylvania had opportunities to dump geese from a flock of Canadas, and a second flock of mostly Blue geese. Both hunters were first time waterfowlers who had won a contest through Delta Waterfowl Association to come and hunt out of Wood-land Resort in Devils Lake. The resort had donated the hunt as a means of giving back to the sport.
My good retriever Elwood had been left behind at the re-quest of the guides, who doubt-less had seen more than a few customers “great” duck dogs
Ted and his son and a few birds
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ruin hunts with bad behavior. Mine would have been help-ful on the inevitable chases, and I lamented not having him around. Later that very day, the Mike Schell informed me that he had purchased a Chocolate retriever pup to do the retriev-ing for the 2003 season.
This was as close to water-fowl heaven as I ever expect to get. As I drove lonely highway 2 west from Fargo to Devils Lake the previous day, I was constantly viewing the vari-ous and sundry puddles and ponds which give this “pot-hole region” its moniker. But my head was on a swivel. At least half of these waters had big flocks of dabbling ducks on them! I cursed softly at not having Elwood along, because had I a dog, I most certainly would have taken advantage of North Dakota’s hunter friendly trespass and highway prox-imity shooting regulations. When I arrived at the resort and mentioned this to the folks there, they chuckled. I didn’t understand what was funny until two days later, when I had to quit shooting ducks very early. My two day limit and my possession limit was already in the bag.
“If you want to chase ducks off puddles it’s O.K. by me, “ One of the guides had told me. “But you’ll get all you need when we go out decoying.” He was right.
This was the hunt of a life-time for an Illinois native re-located to Wisconsin. Where
I live and hunt, a good day of hunting might be a pair of mallards and a Canada goose. I was unprepared for the liberal limits of ducks coupled with 3 a day limits of Canada geese AND 20 a day limits on Snow or Blue geese which are enjoyed by North Dakota hunters. Lim-its are one thing, but actually having to count downed birds to make sure that those expan-sive limits are not exceeded is an experience I never expected to have.
If you want to try a trip like mine, you need to prepare early. North Dakota limits nonresi-dent waterfowl licenses to a set number; 20,000 in 2002. Your best bet is to apply and pay for your license early through the North Dakota Fish and Game web site.
Top guides like the ones working out of Woodland Resort are also busy every day of waterfowl season. You’ll need to act ear-ly if you want to hire one. Without giv-ing away any of the guides trade secrets, I ’ l l say that even in North Dakota, there are fields that the ducks and geese use and fields that they don’t use. I rec-
ommend that if you endeavor to make this trip, a quality guide can get you onto the right fields.
While I’m sure all the resort guides are great, Mike Schell particularly impressed me. He is not only a top notch guide who does his homework and insures that his group gets into ducks, he is one of the nicest, easiest going guys you’ll meet in the field. He takes care of the little things, like bringing along a spare pump gun in case a cli-ent’s overworked shell shucker jams or breaks. His wife packs daily lunches which are out-standing, and taste particularly great when eaten after a suc-cessful hunt.
Ted Jarosh hails from Milwau-kee, WI
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Five years ago this weekend, Hurricane Katrina slammed into
southern Louisiana and Mis-sissippi, devastating the City of New Orleans, killing hun-dreds of people and setting the stage for an outrage that still angers American gun rights advocates.
In the days after Katrina hammered New Orleans and adjacent St. Tammany Parrish, an order was issued that only police would be allowed to have guns. Law enforcement personnel from various other states, as far away as New York and California, along with National Guard troops came in to help restore order. In the process, many citizens’ firearms were seized, sometimes at gun-
Five Years Later, No Accountability for Post-
Katrina Gun GrabBy Dave Workman
point, and invariably with the use of intimidation.
Into this mess stepped the Second Amendment Founda-tion and National Rifle Asso-ciation – and nobody else – to put a stop to the seizures, and a federal court judge quickly took action. The incident that crystallized this fiasco was the confrontation between New Orleans resident Patricia Konie and a group of California High-way Patrol officers that was captured on camera by a San Francisco film crew.
Konie did not want to leave her home and her pets, she was in an area left high and compar-atively dry, she had plenty of food and water, and she had an old Colt double-action revolver,
which she showed to the cops to demonstrate that she would be safe. What happened next left the firearms community fu-riously insisting that Konie was safe from everyone but the cops who body-slammed her to the floor of her own kitchen, then led her out of her home, both arms held by officers. Her gun was never recovered.
Bellevue’s Alan Gottlieb, executive vice president and founder of SAF, was astonished when New Orleans police offi-cials announced, “No one will be armed, we’re going to take all the weapons.” His reaction at the time: “They can’t do that!”
An ABC news report noted that often after their guns were seized, residents were allowed to remain in their homes, even though the whole escapade was premised on the notion that citi-zens were being “encouraged” to evacuate.
Five years, and to this day, nobody has been held account-able for that gun seizure order. Gordon Hutchinson and Todd Masson collaborated on a book, The Great New Orleans Gun Grab – Descent Into Anarchy, which detailed the confiscation effort.
The other day, Gottlieb re-called that the cooperative lawsuit was a sensible move because both organizations immediately took action inde-pendent of one another, and when each learned what the other was up to, it seemed the logical decision to join forces
New Orleans Gun Grab
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and resources. NRA News dis-patched a film crew to the city, and reporter Ginny Simone’s documentary should be re-quired viewing for anyone who ever uttered “It can’t happen here.”
Attorneys Stephen Halbrook in Virginia and Dan Holliday in Baton Rouge were retained to mount the legal battle, coordi-nating with NRA’s Legislative Counsel Christopher Conte, all of whom performed brilliantly. Faced with that kind of legal muscle and the fury of two na-tional gun rights organizations, one might think the city would have said “Oops,” and offered a mea culpa. Instead, the city de-nied for months that any guns had been confiscated, even though by then, investigators hired by SAF and NRA, along with Simone’s news crew, had documented the seizures. And there was that incriminating ABC News video.
It was only as Halbrook and Holliday were preparing to file a contempt motion with the court that the city’s attorney acknowledged that there were “some guns” being held. Hol-liday and Halbrook both later estimated to this reporter – in separate conversations – that more than 1,000 guns were stored rather shoddily inside cargo containers, where they had been allowed to irreparably deteriorate.
After the city acknowledged it had the guns, former Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration continued to make it difficult
for people to reclaim their firearms. The court eventual-ly did order the city’s attorney to pay some of SAF and NRA’s legal costs out o f h i s o w n pocket.
S o , re a d -ers may won-der what any of this has to do with Wash-ingtonSta te . We don’t have h u r r i c a n e s . Anybody re-member the Columbus Day Storm of 1962? How about the December 2006 storm that clob-bered the Puget Sound region? For years, the state has been warned that one day we will experience a major earthquake. Don’t forget Mount Rainier.
After Katrina, the NRA mounted efforts in several states to pass legislation forbid-ding the kind of warrantless gun seizures ordered in New Orleans. Presently, SAF is su-ing in North Carolina to nullify an emergency powers act that allows the governor or local officials to suspend gun rights outside of someone’s home in a declared emergency.
NRA and SAF have teamed up occasionally since Katrina, and have yet to lose one of those cases. They beat the 2005 hand-
gun ban in San Francisco. They beat the Seattle parks gun ban, which the city has stubbornly appealed. Both groups sued Chi-cago over the handgun ban, with the Supreme Court ultimately choosing SAF’s McDonald case for review, but allowing NRA’s attorney ten minutes to argue during the McDonald orals this past March.
Yet there remains that one “loose end” in the Katrina case: Who issued the confiscation order? The gun seizures were initiated without warrant or probable cause. They were con-ducted under color of law. That sort of thing should never have happened on American soil. It better never happen again.
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Vaccines are products designed to trigger protective immune
responses in pets and prepare them to fight future infections from disease-causing agents.
Vaccines can lessen the se-verity of future diseases and certain vaccines can prevent infection altogether. Today, a variety of vaccines are available for use by veterinarians. Some vaccines are administered via injections using a syringe and needle, and others are admin-istered into the animal’s nose or directly into the skin (trans-dermally). Other methods of administration are currently under development.
Is it important to vaccinate?
Yes! Pets should be vac-cinated to protect them from many highly contagious and deadly diseases. Experts agree that widespread use of vac-cines within the last century has prevented death and dis-ease in millions of animals. If an unvaccinated pet develops one of these diseases, treatment can become very expensive and many of these diseases can be fatal despite treatment. Even though some formerly com-mon diseases have now become uncommon, vaccination is still highly recommended because these serious disease agents continue to be present in the environment.
It is also important to re-member that pets can be vac-cinated for some Zoonotic (pronounced ZOE-oh-not-ick) diseases, which are diseases that can be spread from animals to people. For example, rabies is a serious, often fatal, disease that can spread from infected animals to people. By vaccinat-ing your pets for rabies, you are protecting your family as well as your pet.Does vaccination ensure
protection?For most pets, vaccina-
tion is effective in preventing future disease. Occasionally, a vaccinated pet may not de-velop adequate immunity and, although rare, it is possible for these pets to become ill if exposed to the disease. These gaps in protection should be as short as possible to provide optimal protection against dis-ease for the first few months of life. It is important to remem-ber that although breakdowns in protection do occur, most appropriately vaccinated pets are able to successfully fight off disease—reinforcing the importance of vaccines in your pet’s preventive health care program.
Are there risks?Any treatment carries some
risk, but these risks should be weighed against the benefits of protecting your pet from potentially fatal diseases. Most pets respond well to vaccines. The most common adverse responses are mild and short-term, including fever, sluggish-
What Are Vaccines?By the American Veterinary Medical
Association
Vet Corner
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ness, and reduced appetite. Pets may also experience temporary pain or subtle swelling at the site of vaccination. Although most adverse reactions will resolve within a day or two, any excessive or continued pain, swelling, or listlessness should be discussed with your veterinarian.
Rarely, more serious ad-verse reactions can occur. Al-lergic reactions appear within minutes or hours of a vaccina-tion and may include repeated vomiting or diarrhea, whole body itching, swelling of the face or legs, difficulty breath-ing or collapse. Contact your veterinarian immediately if any of these symptoms are seen. In very rare instances, death could occur from an allergic reaction. There are other uncommon but serious adverse reactions, including injection site tumors (sarcomas) in cats, which can develop weeks or months after a vaccination. The best advice is to always tell your veterinarian about any abnormalities you notice after your pet has been vaccinated.
Why do puppies and kittens require a series of
vaccinations?Very young puppies and
kittens are highly susceptible to infectious diseases because their immune systems are not fully mature. While nursing, their mother’s milk contains antibodies (special proteins) that provide some immunity to diseases; however, these maternal antibodies do not last
long, and there may be gaps in protection as the milk antibod-ies decrease and the puppies’ or kittens’ immune system isn’t yet capable of fighting off infec-tion. In many instances, the first dose of a vaccine serves to prime the pet’s immune system against the virus or bacteria while subsequent doses help to fur-ther stimulate the immune system to produce the anti-bodies needed to protect a pet from specific diseases. To keep these gaps in protection as small as possible and to provide op-timal protection against disease in the first few months of life, a series of vaccinations are sched-uled, usually 3-4 weeks apart. For most puppies and kittens, the final vaccination in the series is administered at about 4 months of age; however, in some situations, a veterinarian may alter this schedule based on an individual animal’s risk factors. Remember that an in-complete series of vaccinations may lead to incomplete protec-tion, making puppies and kit-tens vulnerable to infection.
Which vaccinations should my pet receive?
Not all pets should be vac-cinated with all available vac-cines. “Core” vaccines are rec-ommended for most pets in a particular area because they
protect from diseases most common in that area. “Non-Core” vaccines are reserved for individual pets with unique needs. Your veterinarian will consider your pet’s risk of ex-
posure to a variety of preventable diseases in order to customize a vaccination program for optimal protection throughout your pet’s life. Talk with your vet-erinarian about your pet’s lifestyle includ-ing its expected travel to other geographic locations and/or con-tact with other ani-mals (such as exposure at kennels, obedience classes, shows, and dog parks) since these factors impact your pet’s risk of exposure
to certain diseases. For older pets, make sure your veterinar-ian is aware of any previous adverse reactions to vaccines.
How often should my pet be vaccinated?
For many years, a set of an-nual vaccinations was consid-ered normal and necessary for dogs and cats. There is increas-
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ing evidence to support that immunity trig-gered by some vaccines provides protection beyond one year while the immunity trig-gered by other vaccines may fail to protect for a full year. Consequently, one vaccination schedule will not work well for all pets. Your veterinarian will determine a vaccination schedule most appropriate for your pet.
What are antibody titers, and do they replace vaccinations?
Antibody titers are blood tests that mea-sure the amount of antibodies in the blood. Following exposure to a disease-causing organism (such as a virus) or a vaccine, the body generates antibodies that help to de-stroy the organism and prevent or minimize illness if the body is exposed to the same organism again.
Antibody titers do not replace vaccination programs, but in some instances may help your veterinarian determine if your pet has a reasonable expectation of protection against disease. However, there are only a limited number of disease-causing organisms for which antibody titers can suggest your pet’s level of protection, and those antibody tests have limitations. Consequently, a higher an-tibody titer does not necessarily mean your pet will be protected if exposed to the disease, and a lower titer may not mean your pet’s protection is lacking.
A final thoughtMany factors are taken into consideration
when establishing a pet’s vaccination plan. Your veterinarian will tailor a program of vaccinations and patient health care that will help your pet maintain a lifetime of infectious disease protection.
This information has been prepared as a service by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Redistribution is acceptable, but the document’s original content and format must be maintained, and its source must be prominently identified.
