Longer pieces about the things that decide what living with an animal is actually like — the emergency that kills a healthy dog in an afternoon, the four weeks a fish tank needs before any fish go in, why a rabbit that stops eating cannot wait until morning, and what to ask a breeder before any money changes hands.
Pick an animal below to see only the posts that apply to it. Many of these cut across several — what a flat face costs is a question for cats as much as dogs — so a post can sit under more than one, and the animals it covers are on the corner of its picture and at the top of the post itself.
Search goes straight to the post. It looks at the headline and at the words the breed pages use to link these, so “GDV” finds the bloat piece and “teflon” finds the one about what a bird breathes.
Subscribe and new posts come to you. The feed below is this blog. Every species and every breed page has one of its own as well, so you can follow just the animal you keep and hear about it whenever somebody adds a photo.
Subscribe to the blog16 posts about cats, newest first.
A great many of the breed profiles on this site end up saying some version of the gene pool is small, ask what the breeder does about it. It is the least visible thing wrong with pedigree animals and the hardest to fix, because unlike a single testable disease it is a property of the whole population rather than of any one animal in it.
· 4 min read
Scores of the breed profiles here warn about heat, and they are the flat-faced breeds, the thick-coated Arctic ones and the animals that cannot sweat at all. Heatstroke is one of the few emergencies where what an owner does in the first few minutes changes the outcome more than anything a vet does afterwards.
· 3 min read
Deafness comes up again and again in the breed profiles here, and almost always attached to a colour: white cats with blue eyes, double merle dogs, heavily white-marked breeds. That is not a coincidence, and the reason it happens is the same reason it is predictable — which means it is also testable.
· 3 min read
Rescues are full of the animals whose breed profiles on this site carry a warning — the high-drive working dogs, the giant guardians, the adult constrictors, the parrots that outlived their owner's patience. Adopting one is the single most useful thing an individual can do about any of it, and it goes better when nobody expects the animal to be finished on arrival.
· 3 min read
More breed profiles on this site tell you to ask for hip scores than mention any other named condition. That advice is only useful if the number means something to you when it arrives, and a hip score is one of the least self-explanatory numbers in dog buying — low is good, the scale is not out of ten, and the same figure means different things in different breeds.
· 4 min read
Dozens of the breed profiles here mention patellar luxation, and almost all of them are small dogs. It has a giveaway sign that owners consistently read as a quirk rather than a symptom: the dog skips a step, holds a back leg up for a stride or two, and carries on as though nothing happened.
· 3 min read
Ear infections turn up in profile after profile here — the spaniels, the retrievers, the swimming breeds, anything with a heavy drop ear. What most of those entries cannot fit is the single most useful fact about them: an ear that keeps getting infected usually has an underlying cause that has nothing to do with ears, and treating the ear alone is why it keeps coming back.
· 4 min read
General guidance, not veterinary advice. Anything about a specific animal — a symptom, a diet, a decision — is a question for a vet who has examined it.
