I would say they can get most of the same types of cancers that humans get. I'm not too versed in how many different types humans get, but for instance, lymphoma humans get, so many dog owners are familiar with that. Breast cancer, a lot of owners are familiar with that. Dogs can get that. There is some that overlap.

We do a lot of palliative therapy. We control nausea. We don't want our patients to feel any pain, and we want to have the most positive end-of-life experience between the owner and the patient. We try to make things as painless and as pleasant as it can be in those situations.

It's tough to say, and it's a very personal decision every owner has to make. My advice is when your dog is having more bad days than good days or when your dog stops doing the behaviors that make them happy. That's often their interaction with their owners or their pack members. It may be that it's getting time, at that point, that the dog doesn't feel very well and may be getting close, but that is a decision typically that's between you, your family members, and your veterinary team. We have that discussion to see when everybody thinks it's time.

No, not necessarily. Pretty much every cancer has treatment options, and that ranges from curative surgery to palliative therapies where we keep them comfortable for long periods. Some tumors aren’t resectable, or surgery is probably not going to remove the cancer, but it's slow-growing, and we can keep them comfortable for a very long time. And to dispel the myths, we do compassionate cancer care with dogs and cats. We don't want them to feel bad while they're going through chemotherapy, and most dogs and cats do very well on chemotherapy. There's often a protocol for the individual dog, the owner’s budget, and the owner's schedule to make the dog feel a lot better and extend their life.

It depends on several things. Sometimes we can figure out what type of cancer a dog has based on a fine needle aspirate, where I stick a needle into a tumor, for instance, and look at it under the microscope. Certain tumors are relatively easy to diagnose that way, like a mast cell tumor in the skin is an easy one to diagnose that way. We can diagnose some of them in the office. For others, we take a biopsy sample. We take a little piece or the whole tumor in some cases and send that to the laboratory. A veterinary pathologist looks at them and does histopathology and gives us that diagnosis.

It is with many types of cancer. It depends on the type of cancer, but with certain tumors like mast cell tumors, we can remove them. Depending on the location of sarcomas, we can remove them. Many times, those are curative surgeries. Surgery is often an excellent option for many different types of cancers— not all of them, but many of them.