[Mutts and Cats]

Hi Patricia A. Your description of your doxie stealing pizzas is hilarious, but what a frightening experience with his lepto shot. I really can’t believe now that I let my vet give my dog a lepto shot so soon after his first seizure. He didn’t seem to have any immediate reaction to it, but I will never know if it contributed to the seizures that followed. My vet had been pretty persuasive about lepto so I was doing it annually for all of my dogs, but I didn’t last year because I started feeling the risks of reaction outweighed the benefits. I don’t live in an area that should be really high risk. But then a friend told me her dog had recently died of lepto. She doesn’t live in my area, but about 400 miles away, in a similar climate. So of course I freaked out and made an appointment for the shots. My dog had his first seizure 3 days before that appointment so I had not yet come upon the information out there showing a possible link between vaccinations and seizures. I was horrified when I did start reading that afterwards.

Thanks for the heads up on plug-ins and the Hartz shampoo. I don’t use either, but I’m always eager to consider any suggestions that anyone has for ANYTHING that might help. My approach has been to try to identify things in his environment, or that he is eating, that could possibly be a trigger. To get to the root cause, instead of attempting to control them with anti-seizure meds. Although if they should start to become more frequent, then I will go with meds.

Sounds like you know what your dogs like and what foods they do and do not do well on. I wish that I could get to a place where I could be more confident about how to feed mine. Mine like fat and both seem to do ok with it, but of course I realize that “seeming to do ok” doesn’t mean that all is well internally. And I’ve been overdoing it lately. My strategy used to be high protein, moderate fat, but then my seizure research caused me to change that strategy for the seizure dog and consequently they have both been eating pretty high fat. But some posting with Aimee definitely has me thinking I should move the other direction again.

On the copper issue, if you are feeding poultry based foods then it is pretty unlikely that you will see that problem. The S&C poultry foods that I have looked at have very reasonable levels, like around 20 ppm or below. So it sound like that is not something you need to worry about. One less thing!

Hope things start going a little better for your mother. She is lucky to have a caring daughter like you. My mother is in assisted living, over 1,000 miles away. So I’m always a little on edge that I am going to get a call saying that she is in the hospital, or worse . . .
You take care too PA. M&C.