Well, good afternoon. We're missing Cheryl today and we've got Dr David Tabaret. Best wishes going out to Cheryl. Yeah, she's a little bit poorly. She's feeling down in the dogs. I think she wishes she was feeling down in the dogs. She wishes she was here so she could slap me for a very poor dad joke.
So what are we going to talk about today? Amanda, look, as always, we welcome people calling in with questions about their pets. And a topic that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to update on the avian flu situation, something happening here and overseas. And if we do get time, maybe a quick update. We would have seen the news about a whole lot of Corellas coming down with some significant illness resulting in mass death in Newcastle. You know, people get influenza.
So do dogs, so do cats, so do monkeys, I guess, but also our bird species. Now, where we see this most affected is through our poultry because we're farming poultry for commercial reasons, for meat and for eggs productions. But the problem with avian influenza is, first of all, it's a highly contagious and a disease with high degree of mortality. It will considerably reduce the productivity of our poultry species. But, of course, we're not just talking about poultry. We're also talking about wild birds. All feathered friends are susceptible to avian influenza.
You might have seen stories about this in the US in particular. There have been outbreaks. But what we're seeing in Australia, and we have seen avian influenza in Australia over the last couple of years, is that we have a less virulent form. So we all become virology experts. It's H5N1 and so on. So at the moment, though, we've had detections of what's called the H7 avian influenza. So this is not the same as the ones overseas, which are much more significant in terms of their impact. However, there are concerns that we could see.
those viruses from overseas migrating with wild birds into Australia because we just can't control the borders to stop birds coming down through, you know, the tropics, et cetera, and bringing some of these diseases in or the current strains potentially morphing into a more dangerous version. I was going to say a lot of birds will start migrating for the winter as well. There's always birds moving, right? Different species always moving up and down the coast, all over the place. A couple of the outbreaks that we had towards the back half of 2024 occurred in large poultry.
farms in Victoria, and that's where the efforts to eradicate the disease have really focused. Now, I guess the question is, well, if they're going into farms, but we've got to remember that's how we've got the best eyes on whether this disease is around, because it's very hard to go out into the forest and decide whether there's an existence of this significant influenza. We can see it when it actually shows up in these species, the poultry species. How can you see it? Well, yes, in terms of it will affect them physically and they can suffer quite significant respiratory disease and lethargy and large scale death. The biggest problem with it is that once it gets into a flock, it can spread very quickly. And so, you know, it could be transported between the sheds, for instance, or within or on a farm where maybe they're free range, but they're still going to be congregating around food, the chickens and so on. And so there's actually more likelihood of spread. And of course, then you get wild birds coming and maybe they didn't bring the virus in, but they could take it out. And once it gets into...
you know, our native species, we're going to see some real problems. Now, there have actually been detections of avian influenza virus in some other species, in dogs. And I'm going to recall this article I read. I'm pretty sure I saw some information that suggested it was getting into seals. And down in Antarctica, there's been outbreaks in penguins, which have wiped out large populations of penguins. Oh, no. So, you know, we kind of look at it and go, oh, this bird virus. But not just the impact on our poultry, which will...
affect things like meat and egg supply. We all know that story. I'm having trouble getting eggs at the moment. Yeah. Now, the birds, for us, eggs and meat are safe. It's just that we don't want the disease to spread between the bird population. So it's controlled by locking down these farms. And unfortunately, like being a virus, there's no effective treatment. So it's a large scale cull to control and try to make sure it doesn't spread anywhere else. So our government vets and biosecurity officers act very quickly. We have very robust emergency plans for containment.
of avian influenza when it's detected. But it is a very contemporary topic. We're seeing it, as I said, in the US, having probably more effect than what we're seeing in Australia. But of course, the big question is, will it or could it jump to people? And could, yes. But will it? Well, at the moment, we're safe and we're not seeing that. So that's good. But if we don't look after the existing species and flocks, we just run the risk that we're letting the virus run rampant and we could end up with that.
you know, more widespread of this disease through other species. Well, hopefully a lot of the farmers are insured as well because, I mean, if they lose all their, you know, all their chickens and stuff due to this flu. Yeah, look, the government responses accommodate, you know, things like how do we make sure that both the people on the farms and obviously those species are protected. So there's quite extensive testing and also there's measures to at least provide. some reassurance to maybe cleansing farms, getting them restocked, things like that. But it's a pretty detailed process. I mentioned the H7 that we've got in Australia or have in the last year or so. The H5 is the one that's more significant around the world. And that has, as I mentioned, been detected in mammals. So, you know, that's where we've really got to be on the lookout for this kind of problem. Keep an eye on it. You can keep us updated. Will do. Hi, Ken. How are you going? G'day, Ken. You've got a problem with your Jack Russell. Yeah, yeah. He's pretty old. He's about 18 years old.
And he's just started, well, recently, I wouldn't say shedding because it just comes off in huge chunks. He hasn't got any ball patches or anything like that, but you just pat him and it's like this cloud of fur comes off. Yep. And he's also been running around the backyard digging up cicadas and eating them. Well, let's talk just briefly about the second problem because it's actually probably not much of a problem. So running around the backyard and eating cicadas, not so good for the cicadas, but...
Not a problem for him. And I kind of like the image of him running around, particularly as an 18-year-old, that he's still got that energy. You know, they're obviously a breed that really like to run down rat holes and things like that. So they're real explorers. They love to get into things and ferret them out. So I would probably be less worried about that aspect. And to be honest, maybe they're a bit annoying to him when they're making noise under the earth and so on. But the hair thing is an interesting thing, and particularly because you mentioned his age. So obviously 18 is a pretty good wicket, right?
That's a really good lifespan so far. What tends to happen? So our hair goes through growth cycles. And with the dogs, I'll go through these cycles, telogen, anogen, and somethinggen. I always keep forgetting the third one. But these are actually stages where the hair goes into a growth phase or it can then go into a resting phase. And in the resting phase, over time, as they get older, this resting phase gets longer and longer and longer. So less growth, more resting. And actually what can happen then is you'll just start to see the hair dying.
coming away um and it's not necessarily that he's got bald patches as you said but it is really just excessive hair that is now pretty old right okay so how often do you bath him um Not all that often, I suppose, maybe once a month if you need it sort of thing. It doesn't do a lot. Yeah. Well, you get to brush nearly every day, but it just doesn't. Oh, okay. Yep. What sort of brush do you use? Because there's a lot of different ones. Like a fine hair, almost like a normal hairbrush, and I've got this coarse soft rubber thing. Yes. And then just rubbing your fur to do the same thing. Yep. Yeah, I was going to say, because you've got this hair that goes into this resting or quiet phase...
and it just sits there, it will need to be removed when the bond into the hair follicle just comes loose. So what you're going to be doing is stripping out that dead hair as it comes away. And so there are different brushes that will do that. It's kind of hard to describe. It's easy to show your picture and so on. But depending on the length of coat, you'll find a brush that's going to actually trap the hair and remove it. And then you have to follow it with that softer brush, which kind of soothes his skin back down. I'd probably suggest also it might be worth giving him a bath a little more frequently and perhaps even consider supplementing either his diet. And you can get food that'll do this or you can buy supplements just to help increase the amount of iodine and sulfur are two of the important.
you know elements required to maintain healthy skin and hair and so you can easily get some supplements that'll add into his diet that'll do that but i'll be bathing him probably fortnightly i think okay and regular brushing as you said like every day is good yeah Give that a shot. I'm sure he'll be happy running around, digging up and eating more cicadas. He doesn't run so much. It's more like watching a truffle pig sort of wander. That's the image I've got. I love it. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it looks like. Good on you, Ken. Thanks for the call. No worries. Thank you very much. 2NURFM 103.7. You're listening to Pet Chat with Dr David Tabbert and Amanda McCreed, of course, but I'm not the pet whisperer. You tell me what to do, when to do it. I'll do my best. Well, right now you can have a chat to Alan from Boorigal. Hi, Alan.
Yeah. G'day, Alan. Now you've got a new dog. Got a new dog, yeah. Our other little snappy died a couple of months ago. We've got a replacement, a rescue dog. Oh, well done. Well done. The only problem we have with him is every time somebody comes here, he gets so excited that he weasels over. Yeah. How old is your dog? Six months. And male? Yes. Is he de-sexed? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So obviously very excitable. And is he inside dog?
Like in the house? Yes, he's in the house and he's outside. He's a bit of everything. A bit of inside, outside. But he's getting excited, I guess, more of a problem when he does that inside when someone comes to the door. Yeah. Yeah. I had one of my little dogs did this as well. Same. And she's two and a half and she did it again the other day. I figure she really liked the person. But I think you're going to have better results than I will, Alan. So, first of all, it's pretty normal. It's very normal. And they're just...
puppies, they're babies really, and so they're getting excited and a bit hard to control everything at once. What we want to do is just recognise that actually that excitement is kind of overstimulating him. So if we really need to dial it back, it's good for him to be happy to see people, like when you come home or someone in the house comes home, he's going to get excited or anybody else for that matter. But let's try and just dial down the excitement. And there's a couple of ways that you can go about this. So if it's you coming home...
what I would suggest is you need to completely ignore him for the first five minutes that you come home. Don't even, don't pat him, don't bend down, don't give him a nod, don't say a word. So that gradually then his excitement will be like, oh, well, nothing's happening. And even, you know, in the circumstance where you come home and you're thinking, okay, I'll play it, cool, and he starts and then you bend down and say, come on, get it under control. Even that to him is like, oh, great, I got your attention. So what we want to do, just completely ignore him for five minutes.
And then he'll start to go, oh, okay, you're home. And then five minutes later, you can say, you know, walk him to the back door, get him to come outside and spend a bit of time with him, getting to say, okay, I'm home now. That's when he gets excited. Okay, so just trying to move the interaction away from the door, away from your arrival. So both location and time. We're trying to move location and time. And time's the really important thing. The problem doesn't occur. No.
Okay. Well, then that's the second step. So the second step is more appropriate if you're already home and someone else comes in, which is like you were just saying. And so for that, it can be a little bit tricky to do this because, again, it's a timing thing. You need to have a lead close by. And when someone does come towards the front door, you know these people coming over.
You have some treats, you get him on a lead and you get his attention and you get him to look at you and sit and take a treat. Even though he wants to go and jump on someone else, he's sitting and taking a treat off you. He's sitting, taking a treat off you. You want to hold his attention. And again, what we're doing is we're trying to move the excitement in location and time away from the arrival and away from the front door. And you need to use a lead to do that with treats. Now, the problem is, why I said it's a little more tricky, is sometimes people just show up.
How rude, right? People just show up and they don't give you warning. Or maybe you go, oh, I was supposed to get the lead out and have it ready. And it kind of like you go backwards. So it's going to be a little bit two steps forward, one step back. But over time, you will start to find he kind of sees people coming and he's like, oh, okay, it's cool. I'll just be chill over here. And then after they come inside, they can say hello to him later. All right. Yeah.
He just gets so excited. He just wants to be everybody's friend. That's all it is. So, yeah, try that out. A lead and some treats. You'll have him eating out of the palm of your hand. Good luck with that, Alan. All the best. Thanks for your call. You're listening to Pet Chat on 2NURFM, and we're going to check out our Pets of the Week. And if you go to our website at 2NURFM.com.au and you can find the lifestyle programs, click on Pet Chat, and then you'll find our Pets of the Week. We've got Rebel and Steel, and Rebel is a five-month-old female. American Staffie. Very across. Yeah. She's very cute looking.
She is. And I am particularly impressed. Amanda, I was reading up on her notes earlier. She sounds like a really well-trained dog. She does. Yeah. She does. Still needs a little bit more work, obviously. She's still only young. But, yeah, they've been doing some good work with her since she came into care. Well socialised, gets along with other dogs and puppies. She walks nicely on a harness and a lead, sleeps in a crate through the night and is progressing well with her toilet training.
Perfect. What more could you want in a dog? Just what you're looking for. And pretty much the summary is she loves peanut butter. Importantly, needs someone home more often than not or a friendly adult dog or both. I highly recommend to continue with crate training. Needs to be welcome inside, part of the family. Ongoing training and socialising training is a must. And I particularly like the note that just making sure the fences are good, but she needs some space to run around. Very energetic dog. But yeah, the training thing really stood out for me. Yeah, me too. And loves peanut butter. Who doesn't? Me.
Okay, we'll talk about that later. Give the peanut butter to the dog. Okay, next we've got Steel, and Steel is three months old. He has short, light grey and white hair with a tortoiseshell style coat. He's a typical kitten, loves running around and playing, but there's nothing more that he loves than his humans. I think Steel might be like, once he's got here, he's like a steel trap. Yeah. He's going to be attached to you. Yep. It says he will stick to you like Velcro and be your new best friend. So if you want some love from a cat, that's a good cat. Oh, no.
And what else? He'd suit most households. He is child-friendly, cat-friendly, and would be suited as an only pet. However, if he's an only pet, he would need to be in a household that is home, if you're home a lot, so he doesn't get lonely. Well, hopefully someone, one of our listeners who may be thinking of a new pet can go on to our Pet Chat website and have a look at the Pets of the Week. Yep, sounds like a plan to me. Now we've got a few more minutes left. So you want to talk about? Well, look, a lot of people would be aware there's been some really significant and pretty horrible events with our Corella population in Newcastle, particularly in the inner city around Carrington, Hamilton, that sort of area. And we at the Emergency Centre late Sunday and through Monday, Tuesday, were still receiving dead and dying.
Corellas. So at this stage, there is an investigation ongoing with the Department of Primary Industries and the Environmental Protection Agency. I haven't got an update on that, but one of the things about their process is to really think about all the things that could be causing this significant event. We're talking hundreds of birds. And from what I've seen, the birds have presented with various kinds of problems, including neurological, respiratory and bleeding. So the consideration is, you know, is this some...
sort of mass poisoning. But I think we also have to be aware that we've got to investigate for things like, I mentioned before, avian influenza. We've also got to investigate for other infectious diseases. There could be contaminated water sources. That could also be a significant cause of such an event.
And what I've also seen is, you know, the work that's being done by Native Animal Trust Fund, the Hunter Wildlife Group, those carers are just going above and beyond. And just also from a perspective of the patients that we've seen that have been dying, and I know that staff at Hamilton Vet Clinic there as well were seeing most of them, it's a really significant and traumatic event for the teams because they're seeing so many dying animals coming in that a lot of them do have to be euthanized because they're so severely suffering. And that's playing a bit of a, you know, taking a toll on our teams as well. So if people find an injured bird, a dying bird, should they take it to their local vet or call wires? Yeah, look, call the Hunter Wildlife Rescue or to their local vet. But also just to be aware to protect yourself. At this stage, as I said, we don't know what's causing it. So we just need to be cautious around our own exposure. And the corellas, they're noisy and they're playful birds. There's a lot of them around, particularly in the city. So I think we're going to notice a bit of a gap, an absence of them, unfortunately.
So hopefully we'll get to the bottom of this pretty quickly and try and make sure it doesn't happen again. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. All right, well, we've got Carmel from Lockenbar on the line. Hi, Carmel. Hi, how are you? Good, thanks. You've got a Maltese with a skin flare-up. Yeah, so he's had this now. It's got two weeks. He was on antibiotics and it didn't seem to clear it. He's on Tredx and that's not clearing it. The cider point he had a reaction with. I'm sort of at my wit's end to what to do now. Yeah, that's pretty nasty. His diet hasn't changed.
I mean, Beth said to me, wash him in a bleach bath, so I've been doing that every day. And now he's coming up in more sores. And I'm like, well, there's obviously some sort of underlying issue and I'm a little bit... I just want to... The poor bugger, I don't know what to do, you know? How old is your little one? 11 years old. Okay. And if you could just describe quickly, what do these areas look like on his skin? So they come up in like little sores where he's scratching, but it's like a rash. Yes. And then it just goes to like a...
like a, I don't know how you'd call it, like big blotches on his skin. Yeah, so he's pretty itchy though. Sorry? He's very itchy? Yeah, yeah. Okay, and which area of his body is this happening? So this is all over, but like on the top of his head near his tail, I noticed under his tail when they clipped it last week, it was all just scabby, and now like near his legs on the top. It's sort of, and even underneath. So it's sort of like in big blotches. Yep.
And I'm like, well, you know, that's not fair. I'm the poor dog. What do I do, you know? Yeah. And it certainly sounds like you've been doing a lot already, which would take care of most of the usual things that we see. I presume that you've used a medicated shampoo. Melisid. Yes. Okay, good. Yep. That's an antibacterial and an antifungal, and it also has some antipuritic or anti-itch activity as well. And that's a very good product to be using for this sort of problem as a general. Okay. So it's very dependent on what this looks like and what the sort of tests that have been done. There are a whole lot of things that could be causing.
what's happening for your little one, I would probably suggest having a chat with your vet and just saying, you know, it's been going on for a couple of weeks, we've tried a few things, and thinking about a referral to a veterinary dermatologist. So if it was us, like if it was you, and you go to your GP and they try this and then you try this and you try this, at that point you're going to say, you know, is there a specialist? And probably the GP is going to say, look, let's get you off to see the dermatologist. And so, yeah, you can do that for dogs. So there is dermatologists that we have consulting in Newcastle. So speak with your vet about that. They can give you a referral and then book in. And hopefully, you know, some of these problems need biopsies and things like that. So once you kind of get to that point, you'll really probably need the specialist to look after things.
Okay, no worries. Thanks, Carmel. Thanks very much, Carmel. All right, we are out of time. We're going to give our voucher to Alan from Boorigal and we'll be in touch. Congratulations, Alan. And we will see you next time for Pet Chat. Thanks, Amanda. Thanks, David. Thanks for listening to this podcast from 2NURFM at the University of Newcastle. You'll find them all at 2NURFM.com.