Tag Archives: dog food

Why is my dog’s fur color changing?

A pug with fur color change due to the canine melanoma vaccine
Skin and coat disorders are common reasons dogs make a trip to the veterinarian’s office. This makes sense since skin is by far your pet’s most visible organ, and skin disease is one of the most common diseases in dogs, according to pet insurance data. Fur color changes may also indicate an underlying issue with your canine companion. I’ll discuss some common reasons for skin color changes in today’s blogpost.

The Dangers of Homecooked and Raw Diets for Pets

A dog with a bowl of raw food
A recent study investigated the diets of pets with a cancer diagnosis. The results were interesting. 71% of dogs seen by board-certified oncologists ate commercially prepared pet food, compared to about 90% of randomly surveyed healthy pets. Instead of eating commercially prepared food, 11% of dogs with cancer were fed homecooked or raw homemade diets. These numbers beg the question, “Are homecooked diets safe for pets?”

Canine Liver Disease and Elevated Copper Levels: What Dog Owners Need to Know

A Bedlington Terrier
There’s been a connection between canine liver disease and elevated levels of copper seen in a liver biopsy since the late 1970’s when veterinarians from the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, in collaboration with researchers from Albert Einstein School of Medicine, identified copper storage disease in Bedlington terrriers. Twenty-eight years later, researchers identified a gene mutation in COMMD1, a gene controlling copper metabolism, as the cause of the copper storage disease in Bedlington terriers. However, the link between copper and liver disease in dogs extends beyond this gene mutation, and veterinary researchers continue to study the connection. The image below shows a graphic representation of a National Library of Medicine database search for publications that meet the search criteria “canine AND copper hepatopathy”. (Hepatopathy is the medical term for liver disease.) Several of the publication peaks seen here can help explain the linkage between liver disease and copper.