Tag Archives: foreign bodies

One of the best things about summer is the food. If you’re like me, going to the farmer’s market for seasonal food, like fresh fruit and corn on the cob, is a joy. Add those summer treats to your backyard picnic of hot dogs, burgers and shish kebabs and you have a memorable summer evening. However, what many families don’t realize is the threat these culinary delights pose to their dogs, in part, because they are difficult to identify quickly using routine x-rays.

June is Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, and we’re highlighting our feline friends throughout the month with a series of feline-focused posts. For the first post of June 2024, I’m going to highlight some specific household hazards for cats.

Leap Year rolls around every four years. For those born on February 29, they age (numerically) 75% slower than the rest of us because their birthday happens only every four years. The chances of having a “leapling” pet are about one in 1,461. Since the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center sees 50,000+ patient visits each year, I thought there must be some leapling patients in our system and, sure enough, when I queried our medical records, there were a number of them. To celebrate Leap Year 2024, here are their stories in order of their birth!

As a veterinarian, the ever-popular 18th century English Christmas carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” inevitably reminds me of all the potential holiday hazards for your pet. Since we are in the thick of the holiday season, I’ll use that song as inspiration to summarize the risks that holiday celebrations pose to our true loves, our pets.

Many of my readers might be surprised by the title of this blogpost. Usually, the question is posed in reverse, i.e. “Does my pet pose a risk to my baby?” True, pets do pose some risks to children, but the benefits of pets in teaching responsibility to children, providing companionship and preventing allergies are well known. In most cases, you can mitigate the risks to children from cats and dog bites. So, in today’s blogpost, I will focus on the flipside of this question and discuss the risks your baby or toddler poses to your pets and how to make your child-friendly household pet-friendly as well.