The breed pages on this site keep running into the same handful of subjects and then having to move on. Dozens of them tell you to learn the signs of bloat, or to ask a breeder for a DNA test, or that a flat face has a cost — each in a sentence or two, because a page about a breed is not the place to explain gastric dilatation-volvulus properly.
These are those explanations. Six subjects that apply across a great many breeds, written once and linked from the pages that raise them.
Gastric dilatation-volvulus is the reason so many of the breed profiles on this site end with the words learn the signs of bloat. It takes a healthy dog and kills it the same day, it is commonest in the deep-chested breeds people most want to own, and the single thing that changes the outcome is how quickly the dog reaches a surgeon.
4 min read
A pug, a French bulldog and a Persian cat all have roughly the same amount of soft tissue in the nose and throat as their longer-faced relatives, packed into a skull that has been bred considerably shorter. Everything on this page follows from that single fact, and none of it is the animal's personality.
3 min read
Merle is one of the most attractive coat patterns in dogs, and it is the one with the clearest rule attached to it. Two merle parents can produce puppies with two copies of the gene, and those puppies are frequently deaf, blind, or both. It is entirely avoidable, and it is worth understanding before rather than after buying a mottled puppy.
3 min read
The single most useful thing a buyer can do is ask for test results and then actually look at them. This matters because of one piece of genetics: for a recessive disease, a carrier is entirely healthy and indistinguishable from a clear animal. You cannot see it, the breeder cannot see it, and no amount of the puppies are all really healthy substitutes for a test that costs less than a bag of food.
3 min read
This claim is attached to poodle crosses, to several cat breeds and to almost every curly-coated dog, and it is the most persistent piece of misinformation in pet buying. The short version is that the allergen is not the hair, so a breed that sheds less does not solve the problem — though there are things that genuinely help, and they are worth knowing.
3 min read
Every photograph on this site was taken by somebody with an animal that would not sit still. Most of what makes a good pet photograph is not equipment: it is where the light comes from, how low you get, what you focus on, and whether you were willing to wait.
4 min read
Grooming comes up in nearly half the breed profiles on this site, and the advice is different every time because coats are not one thing. A husky, a poodle, a wire fox terrier and a Sphynx need four unrelated routines, and the commonest grooming mistakes come from applying one coat's rules to another.
5 min read
Sixty-one of the breed profiles on this site mention teeth, and small breeds and flat-faced breeds get their own warning every time. Periodontal disease is the commonest diagnosed condition in dogs and cats, most animals have it by three, and almost none of them show it — because an animal in pain keeps eating.
4 min read
Fifty-six of the breed profiles on this site say some version of keep this animal lean, and the reason is not appearance. In the best long-term study anyone has run, Labradors fed to stay lean lived a median of nearly two years longer than their own littermates fed normally — the same genetics, the same home, a different bowl.
4 min read
Thirty-nine of the breed profiles here end with some version of this animal does not do well left alone all day — most often for the breeds that were created specifically to be companions, which is a design decision people are rarely told about at the point of sale. It is one of the most common welfare problems in pets and one of the most preventable.
4 min read
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
Twenty-two 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
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.