Tag Archives: humane shelter

Giving To Pets

Just ten more shopping days until Christmas. No doubt you’ve read article after article about gift ideas for your pet. No doubt you’ll see more before December 25th arrives. At the risk of seeming selfish, I’m going to ask you to get an appropriate gift for your pet, but also one for your veterinarian. The latter [...]

Adopting A New Pet From A Humane Shelter

The time is right, you’ve moved out of that cramped apartment and into your family’s first home. You’ve decided to add a pet to the family. The family agrees we want to do the morally correct thing and save a life by adopting a puppy from the humane shelter across town. For $250.00, you can [...]

Memorialize Your Pet

When we lose a pet we experience the same five stages of grief one experiences with any loss. One of the ways to help ease that grief is to perform positive acts that help us keep good memories alive. A memorial for a deceased pet is a healthy way to do just that. It is [...]

Shelter, Don’t Dump, Unwanted Pets

This is an ode to Lucy. And to “M” and “J” who took her in. Some low-life dumped Lucy out in their neighborhood. The saddest part about Lucy’s story is we could tell no one cared about her before her arrival at M & J’s house. No one cared enough to have her spayed. No [...]

Choose A Reputable Breeder

I saw a sad little case of a sad little puppy and a sad little pet owner involved in a sad little situation this week. A young girl and her mother brought me a puppy they had traveled across two states to purchase. The puppy had an entire list of birth defects none of which [...]

Avoid Puppy Mills, Adopt From A Shelter

One of the ways we can prevent the sadness we wrote about yesterday in Tila’s story is to stop supporting puppy mills and unscrupulous, indiscriminate breeders. Today I saw Rocky, a two-year-old, mixed breed small dog who is going to make his new family’s life very happy. He came from our local humane shelter and [...]

Dog And Cat Ears Should Not Hurt For Long

Every good comedian needs a straight man. Sometimes a zealous doctor needs one, too. I got mine today as a childhood friend of our twin sons brought me a cute little dog she had rescued from a humane shelter in Birmingham, Alabama. Jenna and her son, Britton, had seen videos of a brother and sister [...]

Estimating Eventual Adult Weights of Adopted Puppies

“Dr. Randolph, how big do you think he’ll get?” I wish I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that when they adopted a pet from our humane shelter, And how many times have I been right? Let’s just say if I got a dollar for each correct answer I still couldn’t afford [...]