How often do you brush your teeth? We’d love that to be the number of times you brush your cat's teeth. But really though, most cats, my cat included, are not interested in me brushing her teeth. Some cats are excellent at brushing. And you can kind of play around with different techniques; whether you use a tiny toothbrush or the little finger brushes, or even a little gauze pad, you can let them mess or chew on certain things with the toothpaste on it. In an ideal world, all joking aside, brushing is recommended if your cat does allow that. It's great for dental care. And several times a week would be the recommendation, but we don't want people getting hurt. We don't want to stress the cats out and force it upon them. We can try other little things such as water additives or dental chews—those can be some different ways to work on home dental care for cats.

What's even more important is to get your cat in and get an exam because when they come in twice a year, we can catch issues before they get really bad. And I know we struggle getting cats in; more dogs come in than cats. It can be more challenging to get them in without them whining and crying. The cat comfort kits can help, so there are no excuses for missing those annual and semi-annual wellness visits.

Of course, I don't know human medicine that well. But human allergies are mainly of the inhalant variety. So we have the hay fever-like symptoms, watery eyes, stuffy nose, even some coughing, and sometimes a postnasal drip. And dogs can have some inhalant components. But for the most part, dogs allergies are contact related. In other words, there are things that dogs are touching, laying down on, and are experiencing in the environment as they run through grasses and things that are causing contact allergies. So they are different, but they have some similarities also. But that's the main difference.

For sure. We have dogs that I would notice in their chart that every September, they come in. And that's because we're going to have certain things bloom or pollinate during that time of year. And so that dog might be highly allergic to that thing. And I always tell people your dog may be allergic to numerous things. And as long as they stay in low amounts in the environment, it's not a problem. But as they increase, you're going to start to see symptoms. And as they decrease, the symptoms will begin to go away. And what we're going to do is we're going to help that dog during that peak time when they're having issues in the season with topical therapies and oral medications, making sure that we have the infections under control. And for those reasons, you do need to work with your veterinarian to make sure you're on the best treatment plan, so your dog can feel comfortable and you can all sleep well at night.

The only way to test for a food allergy is to do an elimination diet trial. You can home cook food, which is probably the purest form of doing that. And we would help you to formulate a diet. We also use a couple of effective commercial diets. The most crucial thing is when we do a food trial, you cannot feed anything else because that could contaminate and ruin our results. We generally would put a dog on a diet for a minimum of six weeks. And if we see the symptoms get much better, that's great. Unfortunately, many dogs that have food allergies also have other allergies, so it may be a combination of things. In general, though, a food allergy is a smaller component of what most dogs experience, but it can be a very significant one for those that have it.

Contact allergies refer to the primary allergies that dogs have when they're walking around or laying down in your house. Some dogs are allergic to house dust mites, and they're everywhere. No matter how clean your home is, you have house dust mites. And you probably have some mold there too. So the dog is exposed to them on their skin, and the antigens of these substances penetrate through the skin, and the dog's body creates what is essentially an over-response. And that's going to cause the histamine release, which causes the itching and discomfort for your dog.