What you would see is they will stop eating for days. They start not doing the behaviors they usually do in interacting with our owners and things like that. Dogs tend to be very social critters with their owner. When they stop caring about their family members, sometimes it’s a sign that they're not feeling well.

It depends on the tumor. For instance, sarcomas tend to be locally aggressive tumors of connective tissue. Some dogs will live years with those with supportive care and palliative therapy. It depends on the type of tumor that we're dealing with or the type of cancer we're dealing with, where it is, how big it is, and things like that.

There again, it depends on the individual case. It depends on how aggressive or advanced the particular cancer is. By the time it's detected, some dogs will live weeks to months, while others will live for years. Lymphoma patients, for instance, can live several years.

Some chemotherapy agents can cause changes in the blood parameters and decrease the immune system transiently. Those patients are monitored to make sure that their body is safe to have the chemo. That's one side effect, and you can get nausea with certain chemos, but we try to combat that ahead of time with anti-nausea agents.

I would say surgery is probably the most common treatment option for most. Then we have some tumors that tend to be more aggressive and metastatic. Those will need chemotherapies, and as we had talked about earlier, chemotherapy does not typically make animals sick and feel awful. People think it does in humans, so that's not typically what we want for their last days, months, or years on earth. We want compassionate care. Then radiation therapy is also very common. In tumors like melanomas, for instance, we can sometimes remove them and then do immunotherapy or antibody therapy or vaccine therapy. There are all kinds of things out there that we can do.