Dog News

An (Un)Exhaustive List of What I Know About Dogs

by Shawn Finch, DVM

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Routine preventative care is so much more boring than the excitement of emergency care or the challenge of treating serious disease.  Boring is my favorite thing ever.

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Feeding your dogs well will enhance and extend their lives more than almost any other thing I can imagine.

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Most of the toxins that are bad for us are the same ones that are bad for our dogs, but there are some weird ones that you would not automatically know, like onions and naproxen and the xylitol in sugar-free gum.

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Dogs will not always stop playing when they are tired.  They will not always come out of the heat or the cold.  They do not know how to safely cross the street or balance in the back of a pickup truck.  They need us to protect them.

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Most dogs should not be bred, or even intact.

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Vaccines protect our dogs from horrible, sometimes fatal, diseases.  They should be neither under- nor overused.  Each dog’s vaccination schedule should be tailored to his or her individual situation.

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Every dog and every puppy is amazing and unique and beautiful.

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The only serious downside to dogs is that their life spans are so much shorter than ours.

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Preventative dental care, including regular dental cleaning under anesthesia as needed, will spare your dog all sorts of pain.

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Many of the signs that we tend to attribute to aging are actually specific, treatable conditions.

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Puppy mills are the scourge of the dog world.

I’d like to offer a warm welcome to Dr. Finch and thank her for joining us – I’ve been a long time fan, and our readers will enjoy regular features and a planned future Q&A. You’ll find a blurb about her in the author info box below, but I’ve asked her to offer an intro snippet to help you get to know her better. -NB

o!  me…yeah…hmmm…

I’m a vet…I like dogs…
I am married to Russ.  We have two awesome daughters.  We have two dogs and a cat, Noodle the Poodle, a 12 year old neutered male Miniature Poodle, Joy the Puppy, a 2 year old spayed female Lab-something, Max the Cat, a 15 year old neutered male…cat (domestic shorthair), all rescues.  We recently lost our very sweet Ebony Dog, another spayed female Lab-something, at nine years old to cancer.  We have had three Miniature Poodles before Noodle, all just as silly, and one Corgi-something, also very cute and very silly.
I grew up in Omaha Nebraska.  My first dogs were two awesome Basset Hounds named Mandy and Kipper.  My parents had them since before I was born and moved them to Panama and back to America with my Dad’s Navy career.  It is Mom and Dad’s influence that made me a dog lover!  They now have Ernie Dog, who is the smallest dog I know (four pounds).  Both of my brothers are dog lovers too and have four dogs between them.  Two of those dogs are the biggest dogs I know, Riley and James, after whom my veterinary website is named.
I decided to be a small animal vet when I was in third grade.  I finished my undergraduate degree in pre-veterinary medicine at University of Nebraska at Lincoln.  I went to Veterinary School at Iowa State University.  I have been a veterinarian since 1998.  We lived in Littleton Colorado for five years and have been back in Omaha for the past seven years where most of our family lives.
I am a member of AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association) and The Nebraska Academy of Veterinary Medicine, and I am a big supporter of Nebraska Humane Society, which rescues and rehomes dogs, cats, horses and exotic pets.
I write for CareFRESH (small pet bedding company), Omaha.net (local website), my own website, Riley and James, and now here (woo!)  When I am not actively parenting, vetting or writing, I like to read, garden and walk the dogs.
Update September 22, 2011  I work for Gentle Doctor Animal Hospital in Omaha Nebraska.