Yes, it's that time of the week and usually we'd have Cheryl Shaw here, but we've got Dr David Tabrett and it's Cheryl Shaw's birthday, so we should say- It is. Happy birthday, Cheryl. Happy birthday, Cheryl. Hopefully you're doing something lovely. Well, maybe she's not even listening. Maybe she's too busy having a good time. No, this is her birthday present. Well, that's right. She can text me later. That's right. Thanks, Cheryl. What are we going to talk about today? Now, we just had Easter. We did. Big weekend. And I realise it's kind of after Easter, but I just thought I'd touch on some of the things we saw at the emergency centre with chocolate poisoning. And to be honest, we're still seeing. And depending on callers and time, I also wanted to talk about some seizure.
Dogs that are having fits. Okay. So if you've got a dog that's having a fit or a seizure, let's hope they're not. Maybe you should go to the vet right now. If they're having a seizure at the moment, don't ring us. Ring your vet, get to the vet. That's right. But if you'd like to talk about seizures in general, you can give us a call. And we have Pam from Cessnock on the line. Hi, Pam. You've got a 13-year-old dog that's hard of hearing. Well, yes.
sight problems for quite a while now. And he's a Japanese chin. So he's got the dislocating patellas and that's kind of lost weight and they don't seem to give him much trouble anymore except with his jumping up and down. But we learned from a very young age that he was deaf in one ear and couldn't hear out of the other. But now it's really starting to be a problem, I think, with him. Months ago, I first started to notice this and it's scary when I see it.
Okay. Zoe's searching for something. His ears are pinned right back. And, of course, Bill, you know how they've got the long-haired ears that sit down lovely and whatnot. Yes. He pins, and you can actually see into the ear, and he gets his funny face, and it's frightening because he looks scared. I was wondering, I have noticed, I...
He doesn't hear me. If I clap my hands really loud, he hears that. Oh, that's good. That's good. Yeah. And you mentioned that when he was younger, you were told that he was deaf in one ear? Sorry, that's the old joke. But is that right? He actually was deaf at a young age? No, no. I've only noticed it 13 last month. Yeah, that's a good age, isn't it? Yeah. A very good age. Like he's been grey for about six or seven years.
He loves getting outside and everything. But I... Yeah, it just worries me. You also mentioned that he has vision problems. So is he totally blind? No. No? Okay, but he does have some vision problems. So one of the things, like I do think that him looking scared is probably real, as in he doesn't know exactly what's going on around him with the environment because he doesn't have great vision and now he doesn't have great hearing. And so how does he make sense of the environment? Because, you know, if he's either A, bumping into things or suddenly there's someone nearby and he didn't even know that you were coming up beside him or...
He's not hearing things. So he's trying to process those things and the information that's coming in. And particularly if we lose a sense, such as hearing, and as we know, dogs have exquisite hearing normally, far better than their vision. So they really do start to suffer this lack of information coming in when they have hearing problems. So a couple of things. One is if it is coming on in that age group, one of the things we are aware of is just making sure they don't have an ear infection.
You know, traditionally you kind of think, oh, an ear infection, no, there's no pus coming out of the ear and things like that. But what we also have to look for is a middle ear disease, okay, which is further down, and that can often be caught behind the eardrum, so you don't even get fluid coming out of the ear and it may be clear. Now, usually a middle ear infection develops from the outside in, but occasionally it can actually arise in the middle ear itself. Now, the other thing with, so we need to probably suggest getting him checked at the vets so they can have a look at his eardrums. And there are a few simple tests they can do to evaluate his hearing. Because one of the things that happens with hearing is that, for instance, they can actually get vibrations that travel through their skull that can also trigger hearing. And if they're able to hear those things, it gets a little bit technical in how we actually assess that. But what it tells us is that the brain is working and that the nerves from the ear to the brain are working. And also that the little nerve fibers that are detecting the movement inside the inner ear. So we're going deeper and deeper inside the skull now.
But those things are still working. And again, we probably, like I said, we can get an external ear infection, middle ear infection. You can get inner ear infection. Normally they would lose their balance. Right. And he'd be like spinning around and couldn't stand up, that sort of thing. So if that's not happening, then he probably hasn't got an inner ear infection. He's been stumbling a little bit, but I think that's more from his knees than anything. Because it was only one knee to start off with, but now both back knees, you can see him as he walks. They click in and out. They pop in and out every step he takes. Yeah.
yeah so one of the things that the other thing that can happen with dogs and particularly when they're elderly similar to people is that they just get a gradual degeneration of their nerve signals and whether it's in the ear itself or whether it's actually in the brain and they're not processing um then you know they're probably um that's just going to come on with age and gradually get worse and there's not much we can do to fix it. But what we can do is we can keep the environment safe and we can make sure that things are familiar because, as we said, if he's already didn't have great vision, we don't want to kind of upset the apple cart. But he really is starting to rely on smell. He's starting to rely on touch and vibration. And that's how he's starting to process information. So I'd say it's worth getting checked out just to make sure there is no infection and make sure there's no other signs of neurological disease. But I think it's probably going to be a degenerative condition that he's developed.
Okay, thank you very much for your call, Pam, and good luck with it. Next we have Thomas from Maitland on the line. Hi, Thomas, how can I help you? I'm good, thank you. How are you? Not bad. How can I help you? So I just have a question. It was, do you think your pets judge you when you fart?
Do they judge you? God, I hope not. Because, like, honestly, you know when you say, like, oh, just blame it on the dog, do you think he gets one up on you when, you know? Well, I'll tell you what, he might betray you. He might kind of. So let's just think about this. What is happening with the dog is that their behavior and their alertness, and similar to what we just said with Pam about their sensory faculties. So dog's hearing is great, but I'll tell you what's even better, and that's their smell and their sense of smell.
Things have changed in their environment. I've got to suppress the laughter here, Thomas, so just bear with me. But things have changed in the environment when this is happening and they can detect it before anybody else and I think their posture is going to change and they may look at you quizzically and perhaps with a little bit of a judgmental. They still love you. They do. They still love you. But they're really switched on to these things that it's information about the environment. They're processing it. And so, you know, maybe they're not happy when you do that.
But you can still blame it on them, I reckon. Well, they haven't conquered the gift of speech. So I think your secret's safe for the moment. Well, thank you very much. No worries. Good on you. Thanks for your call, Thomas. We're going to talk about chocolate. Easter, long weekend. So over the long weekend, over at my work is the emergency centre where we see lots of emergencies, but particularly chocolate. We actually had about 300 patients coming over the weekend, not with chocolate, only some of them. Right. But we had enough that when the ones that were hospitalised, we call that the Willy Wonka chocolate corner.
Right, okay. That was enough. They've had a good time in the chocolates. Look, it comes up around Easter, obviously, Christmas, these times of years. But interestingly, and I was having a look at some of the patients there, and we've got some patients in that have still got some chocolate poisoning. Obviously, people need to eat more chocolate because their dogs are still getting into the bags and the stores. Put them up high. Yeah, keep them out of the way. We actually had one dog that I saw. It was a big dog. He'd eaten those little chocolate eggs, the solid ones, out of the packet, straight two packets, and we'd had to make him vomit.
And there were three piles of vomit with about 20 eggs in each one, which just looked like- With the silver foil? I think if you washed them off, you might. No, don't do that. Don't do that. Sorry if anyone's eating their lunch. But just to answer a few questions and FAQs around this is very quickly is chocolate contains a whole lot of substances called methylxanthines. They make us feel really good. They don't make dogs feel really good. They do love the sugar and the creaming taste. But the theobromine, which is the main one, is actually quite toxic to dogs. And it's a stimulant toxin. Cats are less sensitive and cats, I think, are a little more-
Smarter. Yeah. Particular. I'm a cat person, so I'll say that. Smarter. I was going to say particular. The other thing is dark chocolate is worse than milk chocolate, is worse than white chocolate. In fact, white chocolate has minimal toxicity because it's actually got no theobromine in it. Right. But it is high in fat and it's high in sugar. So you can cause pancreatitis or gastritis. But let's go back to the chocolate. So dark chocolate is more concentrated on the theobromine and that's the poisonous part. And what it does is this toxin,
Theobromine has a number of effects. The main one that we would see, first of all, is they often might be vomiting, but often not. And we have to make them vomit to get rid of the chocolate as much as we can. But being a stimulant, it can also cause tremors and seizures and cardiac arrhythmias, so heart rhythm disturbances. And I've seen a number of dogs actually have very, very severe illness associated with this, which requires intensive care treatment to stabilise the risk of seizures and prevent them and also to control their heart rate, which can get very, very fast. We're talking up around 300 beats per minute. Wow. Yeah, just from eating chocolate.
So the other thing, and kind of post Easter, where this becomes important, is the way the body deals with theobromine is it gets excreted ultimately through the kidneys, except the theobromine gets reabsorbed back into the bloodstream out of the bladder, through the bladder wall into the bloodstream. So you get this recycling, and that can mean that the effect of untreated chocolate poisoning, even in a mild case, could go on for five or six days because they're just constantly recycling it. And in severe cases, what we will do is put in a urinary catheter so that as the urine comes out of the kidney, enters the bladder, we are immediately removing it so that it has no opportunity then to recycle that theobromine back into the body. So we have these mild ones where maybe they just haven't eaten enough that is dangerous, some that we can make them vomit. But otherwise, sometimes they end up in hospital in intensive care. And usually there's a good prognosis with most of those. But obviously, if you suspect that your pet has gotten into chocolate, then we need to get them seen too.
Critical thing is, as I said, dark chocolate's worse. Cooking chocolate is even worse because it's so concentrated. And also the amount or the grams that they ingest. Smaller dogs are going to be more sensitive than bigger dogs, but by and large... Keep the chocolate for yourself, not for the dogs. So maybe the moral of the story is put your chocolate in the fridge because they can't open the fridge, you'd hope. Look, Amanda, you've just opened a whole can of my arms. Does chocolate go in the fridge? I'm in the fridge can. Me too. Yeah. I'll put up with the white bloom on it. That's fine. But, yeah, my wife, she'll say no, chocolate goes in the cupboard, not in the fridge. Well, if you're going to put it in the cupboard, make sure that the cupboards are up high and away from them. And the dogs can't get in there. Yes. Okay. Well, there you go. We won't get into that whole situation. Oh, there's a debate. We'll be here all day. In the meantime, we've got Ina from Raymond Terrace on the line. How can we help you?
I've got a, she's a two-year-old German Shepherd. She was diagnosed when she was about four months old with anxiety. She was breathing 90 breaths a minute. Right. And she's now on Prozac. 40 milligrams two times a day. Yeah. I'll just get you to turn your radio off if you've got that on. I'll move away from it. Thanks. Yeah, I'll move away from it. Thank you. All right. And is this breathing problem still happening now or is she adapted with the medication? She's down to 35 to 40 breaths a minute now. Oh, that's pretty good.
But is there anything else I can do instead of giving her tablets? So just, this is a whole show in itself, okay? And I'm probably the least qualified person amongst the vet team, I should add, on Pet Chat to speak with about this. But I can give you a little bit, having been a vet now for about 38 years, 37. So first of all is dogs, we see associations with certain breeds with generalised anxiety, if we can call it that.
So that's one aspect. The age thing is really interesting to me because oftentimes there will be triggers associated with certain anxiety disorders. And, you know, we talk about things like, say, separation anxiety. We talk about phobias and anxiety behaviors associated with phobias, some storms or loud noises, et cetera. Are you worried about anything like that? Yeah. And then there's what we're seeing is the behavior of the anxiety because oftentimes that's where we really miss the mark. So you mentioned the breathing, and this is when we start to interpret what's going on.
that's activating the breathing, which is basically... This is while she's asleep. Oh, okay. You know, the breathing, because I counted it while she was asleep. Yeah, okay. I'm going to take your...
to one of my colleagues offline later, but let's just keep rolling. Just because I hadn't heard that particular scenario, that when they're asleep is rapid breathing a symptom or a sign of anxiety. Yeah, he told me it could have something to do with her heart and everything, and he checked her, but he said he couldn't find anything with her heart. Yeah, yeah. And did you see any improvement since she's been on medication? Presumably that's been for a while now. The breathing has slowed down to 35 to 40 breaths a minute while she sleeps. Yeah. And any other signs of...
problems during the day um no not really yeah okay i know she doesn't like other people but yeah she's a shepherd well yeah that's okay i mean she's territorial so there may be aspects related to um you know the risk of uh psychological behaviors such as anxiety and how they interact with other people and some of that's training and some of that's before i got her either yeah i got her when she was three months old Well, that's still very much in the age that we would, you know, they've only recently weaned and they're starting to explore. So that's, you know, they're very much under the influence of whatever environment you set them up with before they become adults. Having said that, I haven't heard of that problem being diagnosed from when they're asleep and they're breathing. And there are some other causes, but just be aware too, there is a, there's like us, dogs go through stages of sleep. So rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep is where their motor cortex is actually still is activated.
And so they can do things like paddling or making a noise and they'll increase their breathing. And, you know, you always look at your dog and you think, oh, they're chasing rabbits in their dreams, that sort of thing. Yeah, so there can be different phases of sleep where we see different patterns of both respiratory and movement or how easily they are roused, those sort of things. But sleep's a very important part for our dogs and probably an area that is little understood overall. Yeah, because they sleep about 18 hours to 20 hours a day or something, don't they? I know koalas do. I don't know. No, they do a lot, particularly if you're exercising your dog with walks and things like that. They certainly do conserve their energy levels.
I'm curious about all of these questions and I think what I'll do is I will take it offline to be able to ask a few of my colleagues what their thoughts are because I haven't heard that scenario, as I said. But generally from the anxiety side with medication, it can be very helpful, but it's really good to know what these triggers are if there are any that can be identified because what we want to do is develop the dog's tolerance and their ability to cope with situations so that they're no longer anxiety inducing. And the medication helps us do that. But, I mean, we don't want the dogs to suffer because anxiety, you know, as people will describe, it's a very debilitating illness. And so if we can actually relieve that distress and at the same time then engage with some training aspects, I think that gets us to having a happier, healthy dog. Thanks for your call, Lena. I really appreciate it. And I guess, David, you'll have a... Yeah, I'll have a chat with Natasha at Behaviour Specialist and we'll see what we come up with. Excellent. And we've got Karen from Tumbi-Umbi on the line. Hi, Karen.
Hi, how are you? Good, thank you. Now, you've got a rescue cat living at home and you're downsizing and you want to help the cat adjust, is that correct? So where are we up to, Karen, with this move, et cetera? Okay, so long story short, we found him wandering the streets of the Inner West.
We picked him up and we brought him home. And little did we know, he's had cat flu at a very young age. He's been through a myriad. He's done multiple surgeries. The vet said it looked like he's put his head through a nuclear warhead there. And so he's had a lot of issues and things like that. However, we brought him home and he goes inside and outside. And now we're selling the family home and we're downsizing. So what I've done, I've actually bought him the biggest enclosure that I could fit on my back patio here. It's about six foot by six foot tall, six foot wide.
We put all these little things in there and that sort of thing. But he looks out to the grass and I know he wants to go out there. So I'm thinking, what are the success rates of putting him on? We also have a kazoodle at home as well. What's the success rate of putting a harness on a cat and just taking him around the backyard? So I'm not just putting him in this netted enclosure and then that's it. Do you know what I mean? I just want to be able to take him out for half an hour just to get him used to the idea, well, your new home is going to be actually this enclosure on a balcony. It's not going to be green grass anymore.
A couple of things. Using a harness and a lead. Amanda's had this experience. Oh, my God. I had an experience where, yeah, I've got an inside cat and I thought, oh, I'll just take it outside and put it on a little harness. And anyway, I obviously didn't spend a lot of money on the harness. The cat freaked out. The harness just came undone and she took off and it took us hours to find her and she was under the house next door and I had to crawl under the house and then it took me an hour to get her out and I put the lead on her. It kept breaking. So if you're going to do that, make sure you have one that fits her and that's not El Cheapo because you don't want to lose her. Don't be an El Cheapo is the message. It's a disaster. But where we bought this cat enclosure?
from, I think it was like $700, and I'm also buying the harness from these particular people, because that's my worst nightmare, because what's going to happen is that we're going to transition to one house, and then from there go into the apartment, but where I'm actually moving to is actually my mum's place, and we do, I know there's a lot of strays around there, and I think it would be my worst nightmare about him getting into a fight or anything, so I was thinking about the harness and hoping, because I don't want to stress, I think he's a little stressed. So one of the things... Well, it's a big move and a lot of change going on. It is, yeah. And particularly with two moves in a reasonably short window. A space of time, yeah. Yeah. One of the things you need to do is to get some Feliway spray. Yeah, I've got that. Good. So you need to be spraying it now. Yeah. Okay, it will be calming for him. And then what you do is, as soon as you get a chance, spray at the new place, well, both of them, I guess, in turn, before you move there.
like before you move him so that the smells are familiar from one to the other. I've also got the plug-in. Oh, the diffuser's great. That makes much more sense and it's more permanent. Yeah, they work really well. So that's one thing. The enclosure is fantastic. The other thing is whilst he's looking out with longingly at grass, you could get, you can get cat grass. Yes, I got that as well. You've got it all. I bought for this cat, honestly. It's like...
He's at a resort in his enclosure. Exactly. He's doing well. Yeah, I've got the cat grass growing in there for him. I've got his tree stand. He's got two scratching poles. And I get in the enclosure with him and play with him as well. Karen, you don't need us. You've got it covered. You're going to be fine. And look, it's a good question about the harness. No problem. Yeah, do it. Just don't let him go. Yeah, make sure it fits. Make sure it fits. Don't do what Amanda did and buy a harness off someone out of the back of their truck. Not quite, but yeah. Thank you for the reassuring. You'll be good.
Yeah, thank you so much. No worries. Good luck with the move, Gary. Yeah, good on you. Thanks. Goodbye. Oh, dear. Covered it all. Yeah, it wasn't a good thing when the cat went freaked out. Oh, no, that's scary. Yeah, it was scary for the cat. It was scary for us. And she's remained an indoor cat ever since. Absolutely. Yeah, which I guess is a good thing anyway.
And you're not crawling around under your neighbour's buildings anymore. Just for random afternoons. Oh, it was not good. It was not good. Anyway, we've run out of time, but if you want to check out our pets of the week, you can head to 2nurfm.com.au and we'll talk about those ones next week. And thank you very much, David. Thanks, Amanda. We didn't get to seizures, but we've got a topic for next one. Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks, guys.