That should never happen. You should pick dog foods to begin with that you know you can trust. Anything from Purina and Hills and Royal Canin make excellent choices. And you should feed them appropriately within the guidelines that they recommend or that your veterinarian has suggested. But if you fed them something and they vomited it up, they had diarrhea, they were lethargic—all of those are good clues that that was not sitting well with them at all.

We use an elimination diet when we think a dog has either a gastrointestinal or a skin problem related to its diet. When dogs have an allergy or a hypersensitivity to food, it's generally the protein, the beef, the chicken.

And of course, the most common protein that we feed dogs sometimes is milk protein. It's not ever very often a grain that’s causing you hypersensitivity. So a hypoallergenic food or elimination food is picking a food that has a single protein, and probably one that you've never been on before.

So if you're always feeding chicken, we might try a lamb food and also a single carbohydrate source so we can eliminate all the other possibilities. Then we feed them that for about 12 weeks, during which time your dog's GI problems or skin issues are hopefully better.

Then you can then slowly add back a few things. And if the dog does well on them, then that is not something they were allergic to. So that's how we do that.

We really don't recommend that you feed them human food. There are so many needs for dogs that you should feed them the particular lifestyle that they are in. And then they can be supplemented with some dog treats, for sure, but people food - even things like grapes that are healthy for us - can be very toxic to dogs.

So the best thing to do is just, across the board, say that you're not going to feed your dog people food. They'll be less likely to become overweight. They won't beg from the table so much. They will be healthier if you follow that recommendation.

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.