Marty and Laura tackle the big itch of ear mites, how to prevent, diagnose and treat them in your cats (and even dogs.)

“There are hundreds of mites in these cats ears, so it's no question that they are intensely itchy,” Marty said, while Laura opined the image was the stuff of nightmares.

“When we see an ear infection in a cat,” Marty said, “it's ear mites or somehow related to ear mites. And in a dog it may start as ear mites, especially if it's a young dog. But almost always the ear mites on a dog go yuck. I'm not living here, it’s not where I want to be.

“You're going to know they have mites because they're scratching all the time and they get discharge that looks like coffee grounds in there. It's not blood, but it can look like blood. But the cats can be so intensely itchy, pyritic, that they will literally scratch the back of their ear raw.

"I don't understand why, but it leaves a residual problem. I can look at a cat's ear and look at the owner and say, did she have ear mites when she was a kitten? And they go, ohh, yeah...

“As soon as you bring a new kitten into the house, you want to keep them isolated. So put them in a separate room, a few garages warm enough. You can do that, or you can put them in a bathroom or laundry room or somewhere. Even a dog crate is at least some kind of seclusion until you get your first appointment with your veterinary clinic to test the kitten for leukemia and FIV to make sure that they're not exposing your cat.

“We want to check for mites. So very quickly we're going to want to get those kittens in and get them treated, dewormed, put on Revolution, or other flea and tick products.”

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

Marty and Laura tackle the painful topic of cruciate ligament ruptures in dogs. They talk causes, prevention, treatment and new research that’s giving hope to eradicating the painful condition specifically in Labrador Retrievers.

“Statistically, five to 10% of Labradors will end up with a cruciate tear,” Marty said, “although there's a lot of variables in that. Certain breeds like greyhounds and corgis, they don't tear cruciates. Sometimes it's the age of spaying or neutering, sometimes there's definitely differences within the line of dogs. So there's a lot of variables.

“If your dog is 3-legged lame (in the rear) and it's persistent, you should seek veterinary care. But you don't have to go in on emergency over a weekend or at night. Now, if it's a dangling fracture, you need to go in,” Marty noted, but a cruciate tear is not an emergency.

“You can have a flat out tear, you can have a fray, you can have a partial tear. Eventually a fray or a partial tear is going to turn into a full tear. And so you can see these degradations, these changes inside the cruciate ligament that we don't still fully understand or need to understand better, and we will, but at this point we don't really have a great understanding of some of these dynamics because there are so many differences.

“Spaying and neutering definitely has a relationship in a lot of large breed dogs with the severity and the likelihood of which they're going to develop cruciate disease. So we know if we spay or neuter dogs before skeletal maturity, which is somewhere between 15 and 18 months depending on the breed, we're going to increase their risk of torn cruciate. In Labradors that increases by 20%.”

https://puredogtalk.com/captivate-tag/cruciate-ligaments/

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.

Marty and Laura tackle a huge subject with kidney diseases, symptoms and treatments. From diabetes to poison to communicable diseases, kidney health is critical to your pet.

“A lot of people take kidneys for granted,” Marty says, “because they heard you can donate a kidney, so you must not really need to have two kidneys. You really do need the reserve of an extra kidney in case something goes wrong with one or both. Just like almost all of our organs, they're duplicated, so we should have two and they should both work effectively. So we need to take good care of our kidneys and that of our dogs.

“The most common (symptoms) are changes in water consumption and changes in urination. Now, other things that frequently cause that are going to be diabetes, which happens in dogs and cats, Cushing's disease, which happens in dogs, which is an adrenal gland dysfunction, and other things like pyometra, high calcium that can be related to different forms of cancer. So there can be other things that we're looking for.

“But we're going to start looking at kidneys, diabetes and Cushings disease in the dog most commonly. And so you're basically going to go in, tell the vet that your dog is drinking too much, urinating too much. We're going to get blood work and urinalysis as our basic starting point. But that's not the only place we're going to go. We're going to start with those two things because if the dog is still able to concentrate their urine, well then that tells us something different than if the dog’s urine was really dilute and the BUN and creatinine start to go up.”

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.