Yes, we always recommend that you take at least a week to transition your dog's food from one food to another food. It gives the bacteria a chance to change which bacteria it needs to break it down. Sometimes the fiber content of one food is different from another. We don't want any shock to their little gastrointestinal system. So make your changes slowly and I think you'll be more successful.

Not really, as long as you use a shampoo that's pH balanced for a dog. I believe you can bathe them just about as often as you need to, because some dogs play a lot outside. When they're puppies, some dogs soil themselves in their crates. You just give them a good bath and get them cleaned up.

That's actually kind of an interesting question. And it's something that I've toyed with and I don't routinely do because it's, if I'm being blunt, it's a hard sell. Like it's hard to convince somebody, "Let me do X-rays on your cat. They're completely normal, but let me do X-rays on your cat as a baseline." To answer your question, what’s the benefit? If we do X-rays on a one-year-old cat who has no clinical signs or problems of anything at all. That X-ray should and usually will be normal. That's great. What does that provide me? That's the baseline that we're talking about.

Fast forward 10 years. And then now that same cat comes in and now he's sick or now they’re behaving differently, and for whatever reason, we have to shoot X-rays again. Well, I can always go back and pull their films from when that cat was one year old, and compare to now at 11 years old and I will typically see differences. The baseline gives you the normal for that said animal that you can use for the rest of its life to compare back against. Is it always going to come into play? Maybe not, but that's the point of a baseline is to know what normal is.

The same thing applies to blood work. Why don't we do wellness blood work? To know “A”, that the animal is well and also if it is, to know what's normal for that animal. We do this so, if at some point down the road, they become ill with any kind of condition, you have something to compare to. And it's comparing apples to apples. It's not just some cat, it's that cat from X amount of time ago. And that's the benefit of baseline radiographs and baseline blood work.

I said at the beginning, it was a hard sell because it's hard to convince people to do that and to spend a hundred, $200, whatever it is, for X-rays when they don't have a problem, but that would be the benefit of it.

When it comes to the tools we use - X-ray and ultrasound - it’s a matter of hoping that the cat is cooperative enough with you to lay still. That's it. With an X-ray, we typically want to get a lateral view with them on their side of whatever we're shooting, whether it's abdomen, chest, or even an extremity. If you want a lateral view coming from the side, then you typically want what we call it a VD ventral dorsal. So you want it from the bottom to the top. So we put them on their back and we kind of stretch them out that way. And that's what we try to do. Some cats will do that quite readily. Some cats will not. Sometimes they require a bit of sedation to allow us to position them properly and get good images. Obviously, we don't want to sedate animals if we don't have to, especially sick animals, but sometimes in order to obtain a clear diagnosis and do it justice, you have to use sedation. You just can't do it on an awake cat who's fighting and trying to bite you. So sometimes they have to be sedated. Ultrasound is almost identical to that. We have a little V-shaped cushion that we'll put them in and we'll normally have my technicians holding them, giving them affection, and they do whatever they have to do to keep them occupied or distracted. And an ultrasound's very non-invasive—it's a little probe that you use after wetting their skin down with alcohol or some sort of a contrast agent. You roll the little probe around to see what you need to see. Again, some of them require sedation. It just depends on the cat. The last two modalities - CT scan, MRI - are seldom done in common general practice. But if they do have to be done, those animals often have to be under general anesthetic or very heavy sedation because they can't move. Those scanners are such that you cannot have people in the scanner with them holding a cat in position. The cat has to lay there perfectly positioned and not move. Good luck doing that on an animal that's awake.