It’s a big day for us here in my backyard caprine enclave. At some point today I expect an email informing me of my doe’s pregnancy status. At that time I’ll know whether we’ll have baby goatlings come late March or early April...with a whole season of milking and cheese-making to follow.

At the moment we’re holding our breath on the preggers thing. Tulip most of all, I’d imagine, considering...

I should have saved this post topic for Valentine’s Day––or maybe not, considering it’s not exactly a romantic one. Still, it’s plenty appropriate for any time of the year if you consider that 1) pet overpopulation isn’t going away anytime soon and 2) some people remain impossibly clueless on the subject of sex and the single pet (hence #1).

In case you don’t completely understand the...

Gastrointestinal foreign bodies (AKA, things our pets should not have ingested) always get a lot of play in the weeks leading up to the December holidays. This is especially true for the linear version of the foreign bodies we love to hate: those strings, ribbons and flosses we irrationally employ with wild abandon during this time of the year.

Whether we're talking Christmas tree tinsel...

I was listening to this radio show on NPR on Thanksgiving morning when it suddenly occurred to me: Answering questions for a radio show on cooking turkeys is pretty much the same as answering questions for a pet health website.

How so? It’s entertaining...regardless of whether you’re asking, answering or just tuning in. Questioners and listeners/readers get more informed. The answering party...

Turns out that 52% of pet owning Americans plan on buying their pets a present this year. According to the Associated Press poll that brought this news to a publication near you, that’s up from 43% last year.

Conclusion: Pets are beloved and becoming more traditionally so if their ability to rake in the holiday swag is any measure.

Which has elicited some impressive media responses to the...

I used to think it was a red herring akin to the old wives tail about dry noses and warm ears. Sure, I thought, sometimes a “down” tail truly means something. But most often it’s all in the eye of the beholder. As in––he who lends credence to things as frivolous as the carriage of a tail deserves the stress said observation evokes.

Is her nose warm, dry, moist, cool, chilly? Who the heck...

Here’s a question: What’s the protocol for handling clients’ off-color jokes, taming their florid outbursts and rejecting any untoward advances?

I have no clear answer for all these cases. That’s where you come in.

No matter what business you’re in, you’re bound to be exposed to undeserved assaults on your dignity and/or your domestic status. Some people are, simply put, “inappropriate.” So...

Never fear. You still have time. Place an order by tonight (or maybe tomorrow night) and you’ll have a turkey. But not just any turkey. This is a turkey that, as we speak, lives and breathes on a free range farmstead in all his or her gallinaceous glory.

All those Whole Foods birds? They invariably best the standard supermarket Butterball for flavor, freshness and potential for “free range”...

Got an oily animal problem? Above all others, Dawn is my go-to product.

I spent the eighties and early nineties washing oil-spilled seabirds in dilute Dawn solutions. The tar glopped feet of gulls, pelicans, herons and plovers (among others) always emerged from the goo after repeated rinses in the light blue magic waters.

When cats and dogs come in covered with motor oil (reference a recent...

Being a food animal veterinarian can offer a broader range of opportunities than the average American might think. We can shuffle papers for a big behemoth of a swine operation, sit behind a desk in Washington D.C., condemn carcasses at a CAFO, manage herds for 1,500-head dairy facilities, consult with family-run farms as they attempt to go organic or introduce chicken fanciers to the sweet...