Cat Behavior & Training
Indoor Cat? Outdoor Cat? Why Choose?
Christine Hibbard, CTC, CPDT-KA, Katherine Ayres, PhD We know that outdoor cats live shorter lives subject to disease and injury, yet many cat owners believe that their cats cannot be happy unless they go outside. I think one of the reasons people believe this is that many cats suffer from environmentally deprived environments without their [...]
Urine Trouble
Louisa Beal, DVM Wally was a nine-year-old male Persian. His owner was dismayed because he had recently begun urinating in the house. He was destroying her carpeting. Wally had not only missed the litter box several times, but had urinated on the owner’s bedspread, her clean clothes in the laundry basket and the rug in [...]
Adopting a New Cat
Christine Hibbard, CTC, CPDT-KA National Adopt a Cat Month means that many of us will either be introducing a new cat to our home or at least contemplating whether adopting a cat is a good idea. Cats are very different from dogs in that regardless of whether you’ve socialized your cat well as a kitten [...]
Work It Kitty!
Katherine Ayres, PhD The work-to-eat movement has grown steadily in zoos and is really starting to take hold for companion animal owners as well. For those who are not familiar with work-to-eat, the theory behind it is that cats and dogs evolved as predators and predator/scavengers respectively and should not eat food in a bowl [...]
Aggression
Keep Eye on Dog. Is One Most Important Thing I Tell You.
Greta Kaplan, CPDT-KA, CDBC In high school, I played on the varsity squash team. Squash is not widely played in the United States, so many readers won’t be familiar with it. It bears some resemblance to handball, though it is several centuries older, and the court has foul zones, so accuracy is required. Players on [...]
Dogs Biting Children
Christine Hibbard, CTC, CPDT-KA This is Dog Bite Prevention week so I thought this would be a good time to discuss the latest research and resources for understanding why dogs bite and preventing dog bites. If we can prevent dog bites to children, we ought to be able to prevent dog bites to adults, or [...]
Don’t Touch Me There!
Louisa Beal, DVM Mario, a West Highland White Terrier had snapped at a two year old girl. If Mario couldn’t be trusted around children, his owners would have to get rid of him. The knee jerk response to this would be to try to modify the behavior of the dog. Mario’s behavior is definitely unacceptable. [...]
What Do I Do Now? Conflict Behavior in Cats and Dogs
Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB Some time ago, I wrote an article titled Pass It On, Redirected Aggression in Cats and Dogs. In that article, I wrote: “Redirection of a behavior is one of three forms of conflict behavior seen in animals, and humans. The other two forms of conflict behavior are “approach-withdraw” and “displacement behavior,” [...]
In The News
Anti-Tethering Legislation
Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB A bill has been introduced into the Washington State Legislature to limit long-term, unsupervised tethering of dogs in the state. Specifically, the current form of the bill (and these bills change frequently before final passage, so this is just the latest that I understand) seeks to: ban outdoor tethering of dogs [...]
Are Pit Bulls Inherently Dangerous?
Christine Hibbard, CTC, CPDT If you speak with any of us at Companion Animal Solutions, follow our blog or work with us, you know the answer to this question. No, we do not believe that Pit Bulls are inherently dangerous. So why am I writing about this topic again? In September, I got a phone [...]
Police Shooting Dogs
Christine Hibbard, CTC, CPDT Maybe it’s social networking, all the yahoo group memberships, Facebook and Twitter but about once a week someone sends me a story about police officers shooting a dog. I even saw that Pat Miller wrote an article about this in the most recent edition of Whole Dog Journal. Then I got [...]
King County “getting out of the shelter business”
Christine Hibbard, CTC, CPDT The writing has been on the wall for years. First came the September 2007 citizens committee report calling shelter conditions in King County “deplorable”. If you’ve followed the KCACC oversight committee education work being done at kcaccexposed.org, you know that the staff that works at Animal Care and Control and at [...]