I'll tell you what, very excited by our regular pet chat yesterday because I was away for a couple of weeks, but he hasn't been here since the month of May. Exactly. 10th of May I was last here. 10th of May. You even got it down to the date. Dr. David Tabra, good afternoon to you, sir. Hello, Mark Rock. Now, you've been around doing lots of things. I know a lot of boring conference stuff, but you did actually chat to a lot of different vets as well while you were away. It's conference season. We tend to do this in the middle of the year. That's actually not a bad idea. It's cold here. We'll go somewhere. Where were you conferencing at? Adelaide.
Oh, that would have still been cold. Well, no, it was lovely. Not in the resort. It was lovely. No, there was no resort. But look, we're always much busier over summer. Oh, that makes sense. And nobody wants to organise conferences around Christmas holidays and things like that. So, yeah, we'll...
kind of catch up with people at this time of the year. Very interesting talking to people about a couple of topics that might help our pet owners out there. So we're going to, if we get some time, we'll talk about parvovirus and possibly some new tick prevention for cats. And of course, only is if we can, because since David has been not with us for a while, he wants to jump right into some calls. I want to talk to people. All right. 49216216, whether it's your pet dog, your pet cat, bird, budgie, rabbit, guinea pig, horse, snake. They're the main ones, aren't they? I'll cover most of those. Cover most of those. All right. It's Pet Chat time at 2NURFM is the name of the game. Dr. David Tabber to see he's ready to go. He's vibed up. He's had all that time off where he's just done nothing.
Luxuriated resorts. You were up at the Gold Coast the other week at SeaWorld and all these places just lounging around. Yep. Just a bit of time off in the middle of the year. Absolutely. And I believe you've got some more time off to do that wondrous of tasks, moving house. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's happening at the moment. And I'm sure you already know this. Look, if you've got to do it, you've got to do it. It is like the worst job in the world. And it gets worse every time. I think once you're over 50, it's considered a risk factor that might shorten your life. Now, that's not a medical opinion, but I'll tell you what.
Yeah, it has an effect. Yeah, maybe the very first one you do, like, oh, my dad, great, it's fantastic. I know, I've got a suitcase of clothes and a pillow. And now we've got a U-Haul and a trailer and a storage locker. Yeah, do you ever find, too, that it's also a great chance to clean out all the junk? This is great pet talk, by the way, but you're cleaning out all the junk and it's a chance to throw stuff away? Well, yes, and more importantly, open the boxes that are unopened from your last move. Last one, love it. All right, but David, you did mention very quickly about your house moving, and you did say one of those boxes has a whole lot of pet stuff, so it turns out the stuff of the animals grows as much as the human gear. Absolutely. Yeah, we love it.
You've got to buy all the gear, all the toys, the chew toys, the blankets, the harnesses. And then you realise that, well, hang on, we're buying more and more of them, but we've actually got some sitting in a box at home. So well done to that. Good afternoon, David at Jewels. David, your two-year-old staffing is very excited with new people and decides to pee on them. What's going on, David?
Yeah, that's right. A beautiful dog in every other respect, but when new people come to visit, he gets excited, dances around, and he pees at the same time. Look, half the time it goes all over the people, which is very embarrassing. I just wondered if there was any sort of behavioural modification I could do to help him. got to come out of that yeah absolutely there's i mean the urinating on them is just a feature of the excitement right so it's it goes with that so really the issue that isn't about oh how do we stop him peeing the issue is how do we get him to be calm when people come in to the house and usually the thing with at least i find because i've got some puppies you know they're 10 months old people see them and they you know they're very happy they've got this playful demeanor um and people will often bend down pat them and so the dog says oh that's so exciting i'm getting overexcited um and so what we want to do is get your dog to be calm in that environment and you do need to clue in your visitors about what they have to do which is basically you have to make sure that your dog is calm before the person enters and that's training where you get them to sit and stay and this is why we do this kind of training so this is going to take a while but you get them to sit and stay and a lot of time with this situation it's a good idea to put a lead on your dog when someone comes to the front door because the dog will respond to your commands a lot better if you've got a lead on them okay so we do that get a lead on them get them to sit and stay which you will practice at other times as well with food rewards
And then when the dog is calm, have the person enter and the dog is sitting, then you give them a food reward. The person can walk past, the dog stays calm, give them a food reward. And so you will gradually build up this tolerance where the dog will go, someone's coming, what I need to do is go and sit on this mat and I'll get the reward for sitting there. And every time someone's coming to the door, he's going to be happy that they're there, but that's because he's going to go and sit on his mat. And I've seen people have trained their dogs quite easily to get to the point where someone knocks on the front door, the dog might bark once and then runs over and sits on a mat and won't move.
until they're given permission and i think that's probably where you could end up with but it's it will take a bit of time but just those little break it down into baby steps yeah okay okay and and um yeah look the excitement of playing with the people and that's why i said you've got to get the visitors in on this they say just ignore the dog for the first five minutes okay and um the other thing is particularly with smaller dogs but two-year-old staff he's still low down when people bend over you're bringing your face down to the dog the dog sees that as an invitation to jump and play and get more excited so ignoring the dog as well will help him realize that actually the person who is Most influential in this scenario is yourself. And so they start to switch the attention back towards you.
So give that a go. And as I said, the training away before people get there, but then the lead on, food rewards, and just cluing your visitors up. Say, look, you need to ignore him for a couple of minutes. Yeah, best of luck with all of that, David. And obviously, maybe not having your guests wear their Sunday best while that training process is away. Yeah, it's a little bit embarrassing, isn't it? It is what it is, but we've got a solution there to change those patterns. So fingers crossed and best of luck, David. A couple of topics to roll through, David. And first one is CPR. Now, I'm just going to let you go with your story here because it's quite fun. Well...
2NR, a great radio station. We've got some great music to play. And what I've found is a lot of the music is actually really helpful for me when I'm doing CPR on a patient. Is that right? I don't want to give people the wrong impression. It's not to keep me calm or anything. It's not sort of just sitting there, I'll just listen to my favourite tunes while I'm trying to save your doctor. Not the Rod Stewart we just heard. No, more like this. Okay, there you go. Staying alive. And that's our goal and our hope for the patient. So, yes, we're being optimistic. But at the same time, what it does is we're getting a beat of about 120 per minute. And that's what we're aiming for, right?
Helping along there, yep. Okay, well, if that's your CPR effort, Mark, I hope I don't have a heart attack right here. I'm not going to bang too hard. Okay, so basically the reason we use these music prompters is to provide that rhythm that we need to put the chest compressions into the patient because we need to hit that 100 to 120 beats per minute. And so there's a really nice set of genres with music and disco is pretty good.
It fits right into it, where we need to prompt whoever's doing the chest compressions to hit that rhythm. Because if we go too slow, we're not going to generate enough blood flow. And if we go too fast, we're not going to get the right amount of blood flow. So I know it can be a bit of a morbid topic, but I mean, this is on in the background. That's how we need to sort of get in time with that music. That's right. And there's a couple of songs, and you can go onto your Spotify and your music playlist and things like that. So I did this last week. I was teaching some CPR, typed in on my music playlist CPR songs and got some up-to-date modern songs, which was very interesting, except I found a lot of them had a very long pause in the middle.
Oh, that's no good. Of the song. Now, here's the thing. I reckon that could be still useful, because while the pause is on, you can be then, the music's stopping, you can listen for that. Checking. Check, is there a breath? What's happening there? Right. Well, that's true. We do need to, we have a two-minute cycle, so if the pause comes at two minutes in, then that would work. Yeah. Yeah, okay. I hadn't thought about that, so that's quite. We're saving lives, David. Absolutely. That's what it's all about. So, no, it's really interesting, and it's a helpful thing, but sometimes when, we can use a metronome and so on, but we just seem to find that rhythm works really well with some of those songs.
to do the CPR effort. The parvovirus, I know from time to time this pops up a little bit, but it's back at the front of the bus again today. We start to see, particularly in this colder weather, we get a bit of wet weather, the parvovirus has been around since 1978, actually. And so we know most of our dogs, we need to keep them vaccinated, and that's the best way to protect against it. But there are some problems that we strike in very young dogs in particular that get affected by parvovirus, and it attacks the lining of the gut.
and so strips out their gut lining they present with vomiting, diarrhoea, often quite bloody diarrhoea, and it's rapidly dehydrating and depletes fluid out of their system. So very young or small puppies with parvovirus will die without treatment. So we are aware of it at the moment, mainly because the optimal time for parvovirus, it survives in the soil for up to two or three years, is that it will be in the moist soil in the backyard, you know, drains, concrete, things like that, and it will cope with this cooler weather. So that's why we're really concerned about it. And obviously, as we hit spring, we have new puppies around, things like that. And that's when it starts to take off. So it's really important for everyone to be aware of making sure their pets are vaccinated, their dogs are vaccinated, to prevent, hopefully, the spread of this. Because unfortunately, even though we might think, oh, yeah, vaccination will take care of it, there's a small number of pets that aren't vaccinated or they can't be vaccinated because they're so young. And so they're the ones who are most susceptible. So as in the rest of life, you just have to be careful of those extra moist areas. Right.
you know the cool weather we might think sometimes oh it's hot weather disease but that's really because it's picked up through the winter and then it starts to explode during spring All right. Thanks, David. Keep a watch out for that. 49216216 if you have a question for Dr. David Tabber today. Now, I know you're very excited, David, because shortly we'll delve into not only our dog of the week, but our cat of the week as well. I know this is new. Well, see, you have a couple of months off and the world changes, right? But we do cats now. I'm so pleased. And we know that cats are the superior pet choice. Well, you know, that's an opinion. It's my own opinion. Dem's fighting words, Mark. Well, you know, you're allowed to be wrong. That's not a problem.
Pet Shadow 2 on URFM. That's how you plug in to the wealth of veterinary knowledge that is Dr David Tabbert. And you get them for free. Mike and the mechanics we just heard. Yeah. So I've added that to my CPR playlist.
But I'm just not sure about the words. All I need is a miracle. Well, you've got staying alive and all I need is a miracle. So that's a good vibe to go in. Well, true. Yeah, positivity. It's all about the beats per minute, as you heard earlier on. All right, we'll get to our cat of the week a little later. But first, our dog of the week. And I've got to say, Susie, she looks pretty nice, doesn't she? I reckon Susie's going to find a home very quickly. Yeah, Dachshund. And highly intelligent, playful. Loves to sort of be in the home, though. She's an inside dog with access to outside. She uses the doggy door, toilet trade and all of that. Gets on well with the other dogs.
and would get lonely, though, without a companion or a soulmate. Loves her food, so she's a bit after our own heart there, David, I've got to say. Thanks, Mark. I include a bust-off in that. Yes, okay. Also loves cuddles and being on your lap as well, so very affectionate and strong and independent. So this type of dog, what are you seeing? Crystal ball this for us, David. Who would be perfect home? Well, I think you might be, Mark. No, I'm not going to have any dogs. Okay, no. No, this needs a family that's always at home. Yes, someone always at home. That's right. You're here making sure the wheels are doing where I keep running. Barely. Look, the thing I would...
I often think with these guys is a lot of people think they don't need much exercise, but they love to exercise. They love to run. Okay. But they just as much, they love to lie in the lounge. And I think all the photos on the 2NUR website there show that they're all indoor photos. They very much are. Yeah. Very much are. But I mean, again, you look at them. I mean, if you just want a dog that's sort of like, oh, I could fall in love with that. That's your animal. She's got a gorgeous face. Three years old. A bit like us as well, Dave. The comparisons just go on and on. House training uses the doggy door. So there you go. Are there scenarios where you feel that such an animal would not be compatible with?
No, I think you probably, the fact is that she's been fostered in a situation where there's people there and there's other dogs. And the fact that she's getting along, because sometimes we'll see dogs come through here that when we're talking about them and it's like, oh, they prefer to be on their own. So the fact that she's good with others, but obviously wants to have someone around at all times. So no, I think, you know, most scenarios she's going to be good to go into a home, obviously secured fencing and be able to provide for her needs. Care as she gets older. Of course, the only thing there that we can see there is that loves to sleep. It doesn't like to be disturbed, but let's face it, who does? Well, she's not getting up for a morning radio show, is she? She's not getting up at 5am. All right, you can find Susie the Dachshund up at our webpage at the dog and the cat of the week at the pet chat page at 2nurfm.com.au. We'll do the cat next. David, how about that? Excellent. You've got back on the horse pretty well so far, David, I've got to admit. Thank you. Good afternoon, Greg at Rutherford. Your 10-year-old Shih Tzu, annual vaccinations and having some bad reaction. What's going on, Greg? Well, the vaccinations and... Oh, OK.
So has this been something you've seen every year, is it, Greg? I would say for the past four or five years. Right, okay. And has there been anything more serious than just that being lethargic, like vomiting or...? Right. Yeah, okay. Any thoughts from your vet about what they want to do? Or is it concerning enough that they can change the schedule, I guess, is the other question? Because there is a three-year vaccine. But if we had an annual vaccine this year, then obviously, you know, you've got to wait for next year and then think about using the three-year. And that might be an option to discuss with them. Right, right.
Yeah, I'd probably have a chat with them then about whether they've got the three-year vaccines, because if she does have these kind of reactions and it's going to be the same reaction, but you only have to have it every three years, then that's obviously a bit of an advantage to delay that effect. Could it be the age of the dog? Could it be the age of the dog? Well, look, what actually happens is when we use vaccines, and we often have what's called polyvalent vaccines, so pretty much all the vaccines for dogs are a combination of a number of different viral particles. So most of the vaccines are what we call a modified live virus. So there's advantages for using a modified live virus. So first of all, they're modified so that they don't cause disease. But a live virus means that we can actually use a smaller dose and the viral particle is...
persists in the body for a bit longer so that the immune system of the dog has time to see it and to create a reaction. So that's what we're actually trying to do is to get the immune system to have a reaction that largely we're looking for a memory effect. So there's what we call B lymphocytes in the blood and in the bone marrow that they keep this memory of the vaccine and the parts of the vaccine that are similar to the wild. virus that causes disease. And so if ever your dog encounters those wild viruses, then the body is ready to react straight away. But because we're injecting the dog with the particles that kind of put a bit of stress into the immune system, and that's what they're designed to do. So sometimes you will get, yeah, they'll be off their food a little bit. Usually if that's all it is, then it's probably, as I said, maybe just changing to the three year is probably the best idea. I have had over the years, over the past 30 years, probably only a handful of dogs that have had a more severe allergic type reaction.
to vaccines. So oftentimes, is it the age of the dog? It's probably just more that, look, I've had this before and this is my body's reaction to it. So you may not need to do anything else except chat about that three year. That's probably the best way to go. Best of luck with everything there, Greg and the dog. Now let's focus on our cat of the week, David. I know that very excited about this part. If you're looking to add a cat to your family, why not think of Shoga, a nice little ginger cat, apparently.
Not that many female gingers out there, so I wasn't aware of that, but she is one of them. She gave birth to three little ones, and two of those are still available for adoption as well, suitable for most households. Sadly, was just dumped with the three kittens until someone came to her rescue. But yeah, she'll be fine with kids, and apparently is good with smaller dogs, and has been tested around other cats as well. So it looks like we might be okay with this one. Yeah, look, she's probably going to be the most affectionate cat you'll ever see in your life.
Very young mother and cruelly dumped, but now in a good, safe place and looking for a forever home. All right, maybe that is you. You can check out Shoga and, of course, our dog of the week, which we were talking about a little while back as well, which was Susie. We're up at the Pet Chat page, and you can find that at 2NURFM.com.au. 2NURFM 103.7. We're here with Pet Chat. Dr. David Tabbert is here. Good afternoon, Mandy. I know time's going to get to us, so I'll have to be super quick for you. Your five-year-old cat won't stop licking its belly. What's going on, Mandy? Yeah, he just won't. He's a domestic longhead. He's super fluffy. He's just about eight kilos, so he's a big boy.
He's constantly in his belly. My vet has given him a couple of arm injections, and I don't know how to pronounce it, so... What was it? Convenia. That's it.
a steroid to stop basically stopping from licking. It does work, but it's expensive. So I reverted to going on pet quarters and getting... You're breaking up there, Mandy. We're going to sort of... Convenience is an antibiotic.
But it's a long-acting antibiotic. So the thing about this licking its belly with cats is the first thing is to rule out physical causes. And perhaps if we're using antibiotics, then we're worried about skin infections, bacterial skin infections. I would always, always, always, always double-check and make sure we're up to date with flea prevention. It's not fun to bath a cat, but can be helpful in some circumstances using medicated shampoo. The other thing we sometimes see is cats in stressful situations will cause a behavioural effect of...
doing this displacement licking. So I would actually also keep that in mind. And sometimes you're in the right hands where you're maybe trying out some different treatments and hopefully with those you can get to the bottom of it. Best of luck with that, Mandy. Dr. David, your first one back. You're okay. You'll be here with us next week as well. I'll be back next week. Great. Sounds good. Pet Chat wrapping up today. 2NURFM. Thanks for listening to this podcast from 2NURFM at the University of Newcastle. You'll find them all at 2NURFM.com.