2nd Chance Rescue. Check out their site for adoptable Dogs!

Check out this website if in the Pennsylvania/ Maryland area.

http://www.2ndchance4liferescue.org/

Bladder Cancer in Dogs

The most common type of malignant bladder tumors in dogs is transitional cell carcinomas (TCC), which usually affects the neck of the bladder in the area called the trigone. Since both ureters from the kidneys empty urine into the bladder in the trigone area, a tumor in this region is inoperable. At times, tumors may also arise in the upper part of the bladder. These tumors are usually more easily removed surgically.

Because bladder cancer in dogs is usually diagnosed at late stages, it has a rather poor prognosis. By the time it is diagnosed, the cancer will have metastasized (spread) to other locations, such as regional lymph nodes, the pelvis, and the lumbar vertebrae.

Survival time ranges from a few weeks to over one year upon diagnosis, depending on factors such as the size and location of the tumor, and whether it has spread to other locations.

If left untreated, bladder cancer can lead to complications from urinary tract obstruction (e.g. unable to urinate) within 3-6 months.

Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment of Bladder Cancer in Dogs

Signs of Bladder Cancer in Dogs

• blood in the urine;
• difficult or painful urination;
• urinary incontinence;
• increased frequency of urination but with passage of only small amounts of urine;
• recurrent infections of the urinary tract.

As you can see, these signs are similar to other diseases such as urinary tract infections and bladder stones. As a result, mis-diagnosis can occur and it may be months before bladder cancer is properly diagnosed. Therefore, it is important to request additional tests if your dog is showing any of the above signs and does not seem to be recovering even with treatment.

Share Your Experience!

Join our Dog Cancer Forum

Dog years: How do you calculate a dog's true age?

Continue reading the main story

It's often said that the age of dogs can be better understood by multiplying their age, in human years, by seven. But is that really true?

Meg, my West Highland Terrier died a couple of months ago. She'd reached the grand old age of 19 years and four months.

A few days later, I was reminded of the oft-quoted statistic that every human year equates to seven dog years. This mental calculation looms more largely in an owner's mind as a dog gets older, and thoughts turn to how long the pet has left.

But if that stat were really true then Meg would have been 135 years old when she died, which seems very unlikely.

No human is known to have lived beyond 122.

So if the seven dog years to one human year is wrong how do we work out an accurate calculation?

Dogs are the most diverse mammal species on the planet. They can vary in weight from 6 lb (3kg) to 200 lb (90kg) when fully grown and have widely differing body shapes and hair types.

This also means that there is a lot of variation among breeds in terms of life expectancy. And unexpectedly, small dogs like Meg live longer than big ones.

Continue reading the main story

So it may be because the risk of cancer increases so much, and because large dogs are at such a higher risk of dying of cancer (roughly 50% chance), that large dogs generally have shorter lives than small dogs (roughly 10% chance of dying of cancer).

Ben with Meg in 2011

This is true despite the fact that small dogs reach adulthood faster than big dogs.

"Small dogs reach skeletal and reproductive maturity sooner than larger breeds. Once they've achieved those measures of adulthood they carry on to live longer," says Dr Kate Creevy, assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Georgia.

In other words, small breeds have a shortened juvenile period and an extended adulthood.

Continue reading the main story

How to calculate your dog's true age

For first two years:

• 12.5 years per human year for the first two years for small dogs
• 10.5 years per human year for the first two years for medium-sized dogs
• 9 years per human year for the first two years forlarge dogs

For years 3+:

• Small: Dachshund (Miniature) 4.32, Border Terrier 4.47, Lhasa Apso 4.49, Shih Tzu 4.78, Whippet Medium 5.30, Chihuahua 4.87, West Highland White Terrier 4.96, Beagle 5.20, Miniature Schnauzer 5.46, Spaniel (Cocker) 5.55, Cavalier King Charles 5.77, Pug 5.95, French Bulldog 7.65
• Medium: Spaniel 5.46, Retriever (Labrador) 5.74, Golden Retriever 5.74, Staffordshire Bull Terrier 5.33, Bulldog 13.42
• Large: German Shepherd 7.84, Boxer 8.90

Large dogs, on the other hand, may take two years to get to their fully mature skeletal body size and then they may only live another four or five years.

The Bulldog for example only lives on average until it's six years old whereas a Border Terrier lives on average to the age of 14.

What this means is that small dogs age more quickly than big dogs in their first couple of human years but slower than big dogs once they hit adulthood.

So, bizarrely, a small dog is older than a big dog at two human years - but younger at five.

"It doesn't happen in any other animal," says Kate Creevy. "There isn't any other species which has within a single species the same degree of size diversity that dogs have. It's possible that by creating all of these diversely sized dogs that we unmasked this ageing phenomenon."

Continue reading the main story

History of the domesticated dog

• Archaeological evidence suggests the domestic dog appeared around 15,000 years ago
• Over time man selectively bred dogs to encourage particular characteristics
• In China dogs have been bred as pets for more than 2,000 years

She argues that if scientists genetically engineered one cow weighing 20 lbs at adulthood and another weighing 2,000 lbs then the same thing could happen in cows.

Nobody knows where the seven dog years to one human year theory came from or at least no-one is claiming responsibility for it. It first appeared in maths text books in the 1960s and questions were set asking children to calculate the age of a dog using the 7:1 ratio.

For the dog species as a whole it's not a bad estimate at all.

If you factor in the varying rates of ageing in early part of a dog's life and the differing life expectancies a more accurate estimate across all breeds would be six dogs years to one human year.

However if you look at opposing ends of the spectrum a Bulldog will age an average of 13 years per human year whereas for a Miniature Dachshund it's just over four years.

And Meg, my Westie? She was not 135 but 109 when she passed away, the calculator suggests - ancient in human terms, but not unheard of. I think she'd have settled for that.

reprinted from BBC News

This Abandoned Pit Bull Lost An Eye, But She Never Lost Her Heart

She was abandoned, half-blind and starving to death; but thanks to the dedication of a group of good Samaritans, one brave pit bull is getting another chance to live and love.

In the video above, watch as Eldad Hagar, co-founder of animal rescue organizationHope for Paws, and a team of helpers rescue Savannah, a beautiful pit bull, from a park in the Los Angeles area.

"People tend to abandon their animals [in that park]," Hagar told The Huffington Post in an email this week. "It's a pretty wild area, many coyotes are always around, and it's just a horrible thing that people do thinking the dogs can somehow survive on their own."

Savannah, said Hagar, was in a terrible state when he found her. One of her eyes was badly injured, she had wounds on her body and she was clearly starving.

"Once I approached the bushes where she was hiding, I realized that she had no more fight in her. She was so hungry, so tired," Hagar wrote. "The process of starvation is horrible. The body first breaks down all the fat for energy, then muscles, then internal organs... it's a slow and very painful death."

The rescue took more than two hours, but finally, Hagar was able to coax the pooch out of her hiding place and into his arms.

Savannah was whisked to the vet, where she soon underwent surgery to remove her left eye and a large tumor in one of her ears. After the surgeries, her "sweet spirit came alive," Hagar wrote in the clip.

Savannah is currently living with a foster family and is looking for a forever home. To find out how you can adopt her or other beautiful animals like her, visit the websites of Hope for Paws and the dog rescue organization Second Chance at Love.

Up to sniff: Dogs taught to detect prostate cancer

A new urine-based sniff test ‘might help reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies,’ says lead author Dr. Gianluigi Taverna. The dogs accurately detected prostate cancer 98% of the time.

KRITCHANUT/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTOGerman Shepherds were taught to sniff out prostate cancer-specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Highly-trained dogs are able to detect prostate cancer in urine with 98 percent accuracy, according to a study presented May 18 at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Orlando.

“This study gives us a standardized method of diagnosis that is reproducible, low cost and non-invasive,” said lead author Dr. Gianluigi Taverna, chief of the prostatic diseases unit at the Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy.

“Using dogs to recognize prostate cancer might help reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies and better pinpoint patients at high risk for the disease,” he told Reuters Health in an email.

Researchers in Italy enrolled 902 participants and divided them into two main groups: 362 men with prostate cancer, ranging from very-low risk tumors to metastatic disease, and a control group made up of 540 men and women in generally good health or affected by other types of cancer or non-tumor related diseases. All participants provided urine samples.

Two 3-year old, female German Shepherds named Zoe and Liu were trained for about five months at the Italian Ministry of Defense’s Military Veterinary Center in Grosseto using the positive reinforcement “clicker method” and “imprinting,” during which the dogs learn to distinguish certain distinctive scents.

Both Zoe and Liu had previously worked as explosive-detection dogs.

During the training, 200 urine samples from the prostate cancer group and 230 samples from the control group were analyzed. The dogs were taught to recognize prostate cancer-specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the samples.

New urine samples were provided for the evaluation phase.

The dogs were instructed to sit in front of each sample where they detected the prostate cancer VOC. None of the team members knew which samples were which, except the chief medical veterinary surgeon, who observed from outside the room. The dogs were rewarded when correct identifications were verified.

Dog 1 achieved 100 percent accuracy in detecting samples from prostate cancer patients and 98 percent accuracy in eliminating samples that did not come from a prostate cancer patient.

Dog 2 was close, with 98.6 percent accuracy in detecting prostate cancer and 96.4 percent accuracy in eliminating those that didn’t have the disease.

Overall, the dogs had 16 false positives and four false negatives.

Though the high accuracy displayed by the dogs is encouraging, they are not about to replace human doctors, Taverna pointed out. Plenty of other information, like tumor stage and size, and the age of the patient - none of which the dogs can detect – go into determining treatment, he noted.

Dog-detection is a technique that “needs to be combined with other, common diagnostic tools (PSA, biopsy, MRI, etc.),” Taverna said Dr. J. Kellogg Parsons, a surgeon at the University of California-San Diego’s Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center, considers the findings “provocative.”

However, he told Reuters Health, “The results need to be validated in different patient populations and using different dogs. If the results can be replicated, then we need to zero in on the biological or chemical factor(s) that are at play.”

“Our ability to use dogs in a clinical setting to detect cancer is limited,” he added. “Therefore, we need to determine what biomarkers are being picked up here.”

Taverna said his team hopes to pinpoint exactly what the dogs are picking up on. “We want to expand on our current study by converting the chemicals detected by the dogs into gas chromatography-mass spectrometry so the process can be duplicated by machine. “

While humans have roughly five million olfactory cells (receptors that detect different odors) in their noses, dogs have about 200 million. For years, law enforcement and the military have used dogs to help locate bombs, drugs and missing people.

Recent studies have shown that dogs can also alert people to epileptic and diabetic seizures (the latter reportedly through the smell of breath or sweat).

Researchers have also been testing dogs’ ability to detect melanoma, as well as breast, lung, bladder and ovarian cancer. One study showed that dogs could detect ovarian cancer in tissue and blood samples; another focused on VOCs in urine for detecting bladder cancer.

Dr. Taverna’s research is building on an earlier study conducted in 2010 that demonstrated a dog’s ability to sniff out prostate cancer; however that study was relatively small with just 33 patients.

What is Your Dog Thinking?

Emory University researchers have developed a new methodology to scan the brains of alert dogs and explore the minds of the oldest domesticated species. The technique uses harmless functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the same tool that is unlocking secrets of the human brain.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) is publishing the results of their first experiment, showing how the brains of dogs reacted to hand signals given by their owners.

"It was amazing to see the first brain images of a fully awake, unrestrained dog," says Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy and lead researcher of the dog project. "As far as we know, no one has been able to do this previously. We hope this opens up a whole new door for understanding canine cognition and inter-species communication. We want to understand the dog-human relationship, from the dog's perspective."

Key members of the research team include Andrew Brooks, a graduate student at the Center for Neuropolicy, and Mark Spivak, a professional dog trainer and owner of Comprehensive Pet Therapy in Atlanta.

Two dogs are involved in the first phase of the project. Callie is a two-year-old Feist, or southern squirrel-hunting dog. Berns adopted her at nine months from a shelter. McKenzie is a three-year-old Border Collie, who was already well-trained in agility competition by her owner, Melissa Cate. Both dogs were trained over several months to walk into an fMRI scanner and hold completely still while researchers measured their neural activity.

The researchers aim to decode the mental processes of dogs by recording which areas of their brains are activated by various stimuli. Ultimately, they hope to get at questions like: Do dogs have empathy? Do they know when their owners are happy or sad? How much language do they really understand?

In the first experiment, the dogs were trained to respond to hand signals. One signal meant the dog would receive a hot dog treat, and another signal meant it would not receive one. The caudate region of the brain, as

sociated with rewards in humans, showed activation in both dogs when they saw the signal for the treat, but not for the no-treat signal.

"These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals," Berns says. "And these signals may have a direct line to the dog's reward system."

Berns is a neuroeconomist, who normally uses fMRI technology to study how the human mind works. His human brain-imaging studies have looked at everything from why teens engage in risky behavior to how adults decide to follow, or break, established rules of society.

Dog lovers may not need convincing on the merits of researching the minds of our canine companions. "To the skeptics out there, and the cat people, I would say that dogs are the first domesticated species, going back at least 10,000 years, and by some estimates 30,000 years," Berns says. "The dog's brain represents something special about how humans and animals came together. It's possible that dogs have even affected human evolution. People who took dogs into their homes and villages may have had certain advantages. As much as we made dogs, I think dogs probably made some part of us, too."

The idea for the dog project came to Berns about a year ago, when he learned that a U.S. Navy dog had been a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. "I was amazed when I saw the pictures of what military dogs can do," Berns says. "I realized that if dogs can be trained to jump out of helicopters and airplanes, we could certainly train them to go into an fMRI to see what they're thinking."

All procedures for the dog project were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Emory. "From the outset, we wanted to ensure the safety and comfort of the dogs," Berns says. "We wanted them to be unrestrained and go into the scanner willingly."

The dogs were trained to wear earmuffs, to protect them from the noise of the scanner. They were also taught to hold their heads perfectly still on a chin rest during the scanning process, to prevent blurring of the images.

"We know the dogs are happy by their body language," says Mark Spivak, the professional trainer involved in the project. Callie, in particular, seems to revel in the attention of breaking new ground in science.

"She enters the scanner on her own, without a command, sometimes when it's not her turn," Spivak says. "She's eager to participate."

4 Paw Reiki LLC

Betsy Groller is offering an Introduction to Animal Reiki workshop on Wed March 14th at 7pm. You can pre-register at Joe Paws Bakery or at info@4pawreiki.com.  Cost is $10, 25% going to Animal Rescue League's Grey Muzzle Program. 

Reiki which means "Universal Life Force Energy" is a healing energy system that was discovered in Japan in the early 1900's. It is gentle and non-invasive and can heal on many levels.  Reiki always heals on some level whether that is physically, emotionally or spiritually, even if it does not “cure” the physical body.  It is especially wonderful for animals as it is such a gentle and loving energy. Animals respond intuitively to Reiki energy which assists them in healing emotional, behavioral, and physical illnesses and injuries. At times the changes we see may only be subtle but it generally heals on a much deeper level. Other times evidence of healing can be seen quite dramatically.

When working with an animal, Reiki allows the practitioner to connect with them very deeply.  Often intuitive impressions are received of specific areas that need healing or other areas that need to be communicated to the owner.  This often assists the animal and the owner bring about a deeper level of healing.  Animals are not the only ones that benefit from Reiki; people benefit as well. 

Betsy Groller of 4 Paw Reiki, LLC offers Reiki treatments to animals and people.  The beauty of Reiki is that it will bring the client the level of healing that is needed at that time, whether it be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.

www. 4pawreiki.com