By Dr. R.T. (Bill) Goldston, DVM -Veterinary Gerontologist

As a general rule dog foods do not need to be supplemented if the food is a high quality commercial dog food, specifically prepared for the dogs life stage e.g. pediatric, adult, senior.  HOWEVER, with most senior dogs, due to aging changes that influence food absorption and digestion from the stomach, intestines, liver and pancreas; it is best to supplement their diets with higher levels of vitamins, minerals, omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, etc. Many water soluble vitamins and fatty acid supplements that are pre-added to senior foods may lose potency.

Additionally, if your senior pet has a particular organ dysfunction as, liver disease, kidney disease, etc., additional supplements may be required.  Your veterinarian can guide you in making decisions on which specific supplements should be given.

By Patty Khuly, DVM, www.Doolittler.com for SeniorPetProducts.com

Among my first memories is one of my first cat, Marsha. She was a Siamese foundling adult already who ambled into our house with a frayed collar and made herself at home. While my mother was pregnant with the prenatal me, she would lie on the bulging belly, purring, in a way that irrevocably endeared her to the entire household.

When I finally emerged and was placed in a bassinet next to my parent’s bed, Marsha would cuddle me possessively, returning again and again each time she was discharged from her post.

A few days after my return from the hospital she surprised everyone with a litter of kittens, delivered overnight while she cuddled me in our little crib. (My mother swears she never looked pregnant, merely happily well fed.) Every time Marsha and her kittens were removed from our dedicated space, she would find a feline way to reunite us all again.

Family lore dictates that my career in veterinary medicine was predetermined neonatally by Marsha’s ubiquitous presence.

In spite of our early years together, when I think of Marsha I first recall her to memory as a geriatric cat, primarily (I think) because she spent so many years as an older girl. She lived seventeen years beyond her initial appearance and only rarely suffered any health concerns worthy of a vet’s attention.

Sometimes cats are like that. They seem indestructible. They emerge from the bushes in the back yard and integrate themselves into our human homes only to surprise us with their amazing ability to live beyond the 13-15 year lifespan of the average house cat. Who knows why some manage so well? The nine-lives feline mythology didn’t come from nowhere.

But if my memory serves, Marsha suffered the typical geriatric issues any modern cat does. And though her lifespan would unlikely have been altered by veterinary ministrations (she died of incurable abdominal cancer), given the benefit of hindsight and an education in veterinary medicine, I know we could have done more to make her geriatric years more comfortable.

Cats like Marsha may seem to go on forever without concern for the typical ailments that accompany our own human lives but, just like us, their senior years are riddled with the typical ailments of any geriatric: Their joints hurt, they become disoriented, they lose weight, their vision dims, their hearing subsides and they begin to depend increasingly more on others. In short, they’re just like us. But the feline difference lies in their unique ability to conceal what ails them.

That’s when their barely suppressed instincts begin to inform them of what all wild animals know well: behavioral evidence of weakness, pain and/or disease is not compatible with survival. Our house cats are not so removed from their non-domesticated cousins that they’ve forgotten how to conceal most signs of physiological distress, which includes the eventual outcomes that accompany the aging process.

When my clients arrive with extremely ill elderly cats whose first ever symptom worthy of concern they claim to have witnessed only very recently I believe them. Cats are masters of subterfuge, and it’s incredibly common for owners to miss the very subtle signs of aging and/or age-related illness their cats will display if they know how to spot them.

That’s why the approach to feline aging is twofold:

1. Learning to identify the common, if subtle, signs of aging and/or illness, which cats are unlikely to evidence overtly, and

2. Approaching the aging of cats in measured steps – well in advance of their golden years. Prevention is, after all, the key to outsmarting nature.

Though the signs of feline decline may be slight and its progress apparently restrained in many an otherwise-invincible house cat, identifying disease early – and working hard to prevent it in the first place – is the key to minimizing the discomfort our cats inevitably suffer as they age.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that Marsha’s increasingly slow, hunched gait was evidence of arthritis and not the inevitable “slowing down” we accept so readily in our aged cats. Her altered vision was likely the result of operable cataracts. Her horrible breath was the harbinger of lost teeth and probable pain.

It was another era, I know. Back then we considered feline dentistry and other geriatric niceties an ill use of family resources, but everything’s changed now. Our cats are our family and we know that anything we can do to prevent, identify and treat them is worthy of our attention.

By Leslie Gallagher McMahon, certified canine rehabilitation technician, owner of Two Hands Four Paws, a canine therapy/wellness center in Los Angeles.

I came to the world of canine “rehabilitation” (we cannot use the term physical therapy for animals it is a protected term for humans only and then of course when I tell people that I do canine rehab they always comment that they never knew dogs had addiction problems, LOL!) by an unusual route. I grew up on a farm in Northern California and spent my entire childhood riding horses, showing sheep, grooming rabbits, pulling the neighbors chickens out of my Labrador’s mouth, staring for what seemed like hours into the cows eyes (if you’ve ever looked closely at a cow’s eye the iris looks like a piece of All Bran), cleaning the barn and collecting every animal I could get my hands on.

The day I got my learners permit, I drove to the humane society and picked out a beautiful young German Shepherd and brought her home with me. It never occurred to me that my parents might take issue with this. They had a desperately unhappy marriage and to avoid the ugliness I spent every waking minute out in the barn with all my animals. In hindsight I realize that those animals saved my life. I could not have survived my childhood without them.  I spent many a night sleeping in the barn, oblivious to the rats and mice who lived there as well.

I always thought that I would be a veterinarian as UC Davis was so nearby. What I didn’t count on was my complete inability to pass any and all math classes. So I majored in International Relations and worked for a decade as the Assistant to Big Deal Mogul. I loved this job. It was glamorous, paid a fortune and involved flying all over the world in private jets with him.  When he died I was devastated. He left behind in one of his homes a middle aged German Shepherd, whom his wife promptly asked me to euthanize. ‘Who would want her?”,  she rationalized.  Well of course I refused to kill this sweet older dog so she fired me and I added Sophie (the wife didn’t know what her name was so I named her Sophie) to the mix of dogs already in my home. She went from being an obese, extremely depressed and quiet dog to a slim, silly, happy member of the pack who had barking contests with my husband. I adored her especially as she was a connection to my beloved boss and was the last pup of his two favorite dogs.

One day I took her to the groomer for a bath and when I picked her up she was paralyzed. I was shocked beyond belief. The groomer denied having dropped her in the tub and breaking her back but that was exactly what had happened. It was devastating. Every vet that I took her to told me to euthanize her, that there was nothing they could do. I tried homeopaths, holistic meds, acupuncture, chiropractic, raw diets, you name it. I would have stood on my head, stuffed garlic up my nose and chanted in Hebrew if I thought it would have helped her. I spent six months taking her from place to place trying to find ANYONE to help her. Her front legs were fine, it was just her back legs that didn’t work. Finally someone suggested swimming as a therapy. I asked several neighbors and finally one of them agreed to let me use their pool. Two months later she was walking again, all by herself. I could not believe that there was no one in LA that knew about this kind of therapy or was doing anything like this to help animals. It was going to have to be me.

So as I’d lost my job anyway working for the billionaire’s wife, I started volunteering as a veterinary technician in the hospital of a veterinary surgeon. I also went back to college (which I never liked the first time around) and found myself at age 35 in a room full of teenagers studying Veterinary Technology. It was brutal. I then went to human massage school, then canine massage school and finally Canine Rehabilitation School, all while still working at the vet hospital. The process was long and arduous but I had saved my money from all those years working for the billionaire and figured that if my idea didn’t work out that at least I would have tried. I honestly had no idea if there would be any need for my services. But I could always go back to working for another billionaire as I had standing offers from several if I decided to go back to that world.

Then one day the vet called me at home and told me he had my first client for me. Of course it wasn’t some sweet old lady from Pasadena with a poodle who needed massages. It was one of the most famous celebrities in the world whose German Shepherd had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed. If I could not get the dog walking again he was going to euthanize. I wanted to vomit. No pressure there!

Thus begins my career in animal rehabilitation. Each week my staff and I treat about 100 dogs at our facility, many of them paralyzed, most of them suffering from severe injuries, arthritis, torn ligaments, fractured bones and all the problems associated with aging. Our work is incredibly rewarding, always exhausting, sometimes very sad and fulfilling beyond belief. Most days I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven doing the work that I do. And as my therapist sister says,”Animals saved your life when you were young, now you’ve dedicated your life to saving theirs”.

P.S. I got that celebrity’s German Shepherd walking again. Thank God.

- Leslie

Knowing the Warning Signs of Aging in your Dog
By Patty Khuly, DVM, www.Doolittler.com for SeniorPetProducts.com

Sophie Sue will be eleven years old this month. She’s a much beloved, dark brindled French bulldog whom I rescued nine years ago after I performed a C-section on her, thereby extracting four healthy pups.

Her uterus at the time, sad to say, was in poorer shape than the rest of her no thanks to her then-owner’s negligent management of her pregnancy. It’d had to go. Turns out this owner was in even greater dire straits financially and emotionally, at least. That’s when I ended up trading my reproductive medicine services for Sophie Sue’s freedom from a backyard breeding dog’s crated life.

Sophie’s always been an impressively healthy dog ever since until last year. Before then, she’d suffered from some simple periodontal disease and the occasional bout of diarrhea but nothing serious. Last December, however, her age suddenly made itself known.

One morning she arose with a stiff neck. After a week, she couldn’t move her neck in any direction. It seemed to come on so quickly. But if I had been honest with myself, I might’ve recognized the signs earlier. She’d been reluctant to jump so high, move so fast, play so hard.

Sophie’s experience proved that everything I preached to my pet-owning clients was true: The signs of geriatric onset are there. Pet owners just aren’t paying attention to the early warning signs. They aren’t taking the time to find solutions to the problems they know they’ll face in the future in advance of their onset.

Further reflection, however (the consequence of my struggle with guilt over having ignored the accumulation of evidence pointing to Sophie’s advancing age), forced me to look at the situation more constructively. If a trained professional could overlook the obvious, it was clear to me that every pet owner was at risk of missing the signs, too.

OK, so why, exactly, can this happen?

Part of the problem stems from our pets’ accelerated biological clocks. We all know that dogs don’t live as long, but somehow we’re lulled into a false sense of security based on our dogs’ natural exuberance and their inexplicable, innate ability to bury signs of pain and discomfort.

That’s the rational justification, anyway. Now comes the psychobabble-y, irrational explanation: Pet owners just don’t want to see the signs of aging. We’re content to persuade ourselves that our pets are perfectly fine until they’re obviously, irrefutably not fine. Part of us simply doesn’t want to comprehend the fact that our pets are aging visibly before our eyes.

In Sophie’s case, her orthopedic emergency was just the tip of the iceberg. Two ruptured discs smoldered beneath the surface. When they were removed (along with a benign tumor another clear-cut indication of her advancing age), she returned to her normal behavior.

Nonetheless, I became more cautious (and realistic) about noting her daily activity, assessing any signs of her deterioration by keeping detailed notes on her progress – her weight, activity level, appetite, etc. I added supplements to her meals, changed her diet to a largely home-cooked, custom-made melange, and made household changes to reflect the inadvisability of her former jumping behavior.

Sure, I chastised myself for previously skimping on supplements that might have helped keep her discs under control (though we’re not really sure how they might work) and for allowing her to jump and climb stairs, forgo a harness, etc. All these precautions might have made a real difference. Maybe she wouldn’t have suffered as much if at all. All in the past, I assured myself. Everything would be different now.

Yet, as if to prove decisively that this year was going to be a bad one, an entirely unpreventable tumor made itself evident a few months later. This time it was her brain.

I might never have noticed it so early had it not been for my new found degree of Sophie-awareness. This time I would make up for my previous transgressions. Early detection was key. And radiation proved the right option. Six months later she’s doing great.

You could say that I’ve become something of an evangelist on not ignoring aging since Sophie’s saga. Though I’ve had older dogs before, their geriatric care never affected me quite so visibly at least I never felt it so acutely.

Maybe it’s just that Sophie’s special. Perhaps, however, it’s that everyone eventually wakes up to the reality of their pet’s mortality and learns that there are very real benefits to doing what we can to ensure their older years are as comfortable and pain-free as humanly possible.

If it takes this much to bring this knowledge home to a veterinarian, you might assume you’ve got no chance of managing your pets’ geriatric bodies. But I would strongly disagree. All it requires is that we open our eyes and agree to accept full responsibility for doing the best we can for our aging loved ones.

By Patty Khuly, DVM, www.Doolittler.com for SeniorPetProducts.com

When does your dog become a senior citizen? The answer may surprise you.

Some dogs are considered geriatric at five years of age while others won’t credibly qualify until they’re ten or more. At issue here is the discrepancy between different breeds and sizes of dogs. Giant breeds like Great Danes and the larger mastiffs age prematurely relative to the tinier breeds (like poodles and Yorkies).

Though the average lifespan of a dog is somewhere between ten and thirteen, most vets start treating most dogs as seniors when they’re about seven (though most big guys get the same consideration beginning at age five). This is when our dogs’ rapidly ticking biological clocks begin to send subtle signals visible sometimes only to a trained professional.

Nonetheless, it’s never too early to start thinking about your dogs’ golden years. After all, you want her to be as prepared as possible for the ultimate in longevity so she can live out her days to her fullest, most comfortable canine potential, right?

Unfortunately, I find that most owners miss out on these early cues, mostly because they expect a dog’s personality to “settle down” after puppyhood. But such so-called”settling” isn’t usually personality driven. Instead, it’s the result of physical aging. And studies convincingly demonstrate that the sooner these pets’ individual aging issues are identified and addressed, the greater their longevity.

So how do you know you’ve got a senior dog on your hands? Here’s this vet’s personal checklist to help you avoid the rationalization that keeps us from recognizing the early signs of normal aging:

1-She’s losing her game

Maybe she used to spend thirty minutes chasing that same red ball. Now it’s ten throws and she’s loving the soft ground beneath her feet more than she does her once-beloved ball.

2-Where’s the spring in his step?

You know what I mean. It takes him a minute longer to cross the room than it used to or maybe he stops midway and plunks his butt down on the nearest soft spot. The hitch in his step may not yet be obvious to you but slowing down isn’t just a geriatric personality change; it’s creakiness that’ll soon make itself more obvious.

3-The only thing that matches her appetite is her waistline

Sure, she still eats like a pup but it sticks to her ribs maybe just a little bit more than it used to maybe a lot more than it used to. And it’s never too early to start worrying about her weight.

4-Those eyes… and ears…

She may still have the sweetest doe-eyes on planet Earth but they’re looking a little bluish, now, aren’t they? But don’t worry they’re not always cataracts. Sometimes it’s just “nuclear sclerosis”, an old age change that won’t seriously affect her vision but might as well be crow’s feet for the way in which it signals her advancing age.

And her hearing? You’ll know if she’s losing it. Though it’s always tough to figure out whether it’s just selective hearing loss or the real thing, I always recommend opening her favorite bag or can of food three rooms away to test her true abilities.

5-Gray is the new black…or brown…or red…

Some dogs just get gray hairs earlier than others. But it’s no use ignoring them. Face it; he’s getting older, regardless of his chronological age. Think of it this way: If his hair is turning white, how would a similar process affect his liver?

6-Muscle matters

Is her shape changing just a tad? Observant owners will notice that the once-robust hams of her hind limbs are slimmer than they used to be. And there may even be some spikiness of her lower spine as the nearby muscles atrophy. These are often the first signs of senior-dom, especially in large and giant breed dogs. So pay attention!

7-Lumpy-bumpies

Some breeds are predisposed to lumps, bumps, warts and other masses of the skin as they age. Benign masses are the most prevalent so don’t necessarily fret if the landscape of his surface starts to resemble the topography of a mountain range. Let the vet sort it out so you can sleep at night.

8-Tell-tale toenails

Broken, cracked, over-long and/or unevenly worn toenails are common for older dogs. This, too, can provide an early indication of advancing age. After all, it should be obvious that if she’s moving less she’ll be less likely to hone her claws on the rough surfaces she walks on. Unevenly worn toenails can also help pinpoint neurological or orthopedic maladies as well as nutritional deficiencies. Who knew that her toenails could tell you so much?

9-Wow, that’s killer breath!

But it’s not really about the breath, is it? It’s always the teeth and gums behind it that affects our dogs’ wellness and, ultimately, their longevity. 80% of dogs will begin to show signs of gum disease at three years of age. Proof, yet again, that you can never start working on these issues too soon. Frequent brushing and annual cleanings are recommended for most dogs.

10-The hard-to-manage heave-ho

A dog of any age can have difficulty rising if his hips or knees are put together poorly. But nothings says “geriatric like a formerly quick-to-his-feet canine now struggling even ever so slightly to make it up from a prone position.

OK, so maybe not always, but more than usual, he’ll also start to look askance at those steps he once flew down like a champ. The very first signs of this kind of exertion or reluctance should lead you directly to your vet. And remember, it’s never too soon to start modifying his environment with ramps and smaller, easier to manage steps.