Dog dental health, longevity research, and what I wish I had known before Cooper.
For most of Cooper’s adult life, we did one vet visit a year. Annual wellness exam, vaccines, heartworm test, done. That felt responsible. That felt like what you were supposed to do. And for…
A few months after bringing Birch home, he had a round of antibiotics for a skin infection. Anyone who’s been through antibiotics with a dog knows what comes next: days of soft stool, gurgly…
The morning I realized Cooper had arthritis wasn’t dramatic. He just… didn’t want to get up. I called him for breakfast and he stayed in his bed, looking at me with that apologetic…
The hardest thing about kidney disease in dogs isn’t the diagnosis. It’s learning that by the time most dogs show symptoms, 65 to 75 percent of kidney function is already gone. I…
I found the lump on Cooper’s gum on a Tuesday in March. I’d actually been doing an oral check — something I’d started doing casually after reading about dog dental health — and…
When Cooper turned seven, our vet said something that stuck with me: “His body is working differently now than it was at three. His food should reflect that.” I’d been feeding him…
There was a night, about eight months before we lost Cooper, when I woke up at 2 a.m. to the sound of him pacing. Not the “I need to go outside” kind of pacing. This was different — slow,…
I spent a small fortune on joint supplements for Cooper and honestly wasn’t sure if any of them were doing anything. He’d been slowing down around age seven — taking longer to get up from…
Does Dog Food Actually Affect Dental Health? What the Research Says When I started digging into dog dental health after losing Cooper, I hit a wall of confident, contradictory advice. “Feed…
Bringing Home a New Dog After Loss: How I’m Giving Birch a Better Shot Than Cooper Had For a while after Cooper died, I was certain I’d never get another dog. Not because I didn’t…