Dog dental health, longevity research, and what I wish I had known before Cooper.
When I brought Birch home — a scrappy little mixed-breed pup with floppy ears and an underbite — I swore I’d do things differently than I did with Cooper. Cooper was my 13-year-old Lab who…
I remember the moment a vet first told me Cooper was overweight. He was six. The vet did that thing where she pinches the ribs — I’d seen it done before but never really understood what she was…
I am not going to pretend this is an easy post to write. It isn’t. It’s the post I needed to read before I had to have the conversation, and it’s the one I didn’t find when I…
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,…