Do You Hear What I Hear? Noise Aversion Beyond Thunder and Fireworks
Noise aversion isn’t only about thunder and fireworks. Many of your patients are suffering daily from noise aversion to everyday environmental events.
What can the veterinary professional do? In this webinar, sponsored by Zoetis, board certified veterinary behaviorist and Fear Free Executive Council member Dr. Lisa Radosta discusses a variety of treatments that can help patients with noise aversion live happier lives.
Care of Hospitalized and Boarding Patients
Dr. Rachel Abrams
Join Fear Free Practice Certification Manager Dr. Rachel Abrams for an overview of the path to practice certification and a discussion about preventing and alleviating FAS in your hospitalized and boarding patients.
Fear Free Design Ideas
The built environment affects the mental and physical well being of people and animals. What can you in your Fear Free Certified hospital to further foster a low-stress and healthy environment? In this webinar we will give you tips and tools for implementing Fear Free design into your spaces.
What’s that you smell?
We know that dogs’ and cats’ sense of smell if far superior to ours. What can we do to to optimize their olfactory experience? In this webinar, Fear Free Practice Certification Manager Dr. Rachel Abrams will take a closer look at Optional Facilities Standard 4.8 “Cleaning protocols to improve olfactory experience for pet are in place.”
All webinars in this series open with a brief overview of the path to practice certification and conclude with a live Q&A session.
Fear Free Facilitates Clinical Success
Dr. Ralph Harvey
Join board-certified anesthesiologist Dr. Ralph Harvey for tips and tricks to taking your Fear Free sedation efforts to the next level. This webinar will feature a case discussion as well as sedation hacks you don’t want to miss!
Fear Free: Evolving to the Hospitalized, Emergent, and Sick Patient, sponsored by Zoetis
Dr. Tamara Grubb, PhD
In this webinar, board certified veterinary anesthesiologist Dr. Tamara Grubb, PhD, discusses the interconnectedness of pain with fear, anxiety, and stress, and examines therapeutic and diagnostic strategies for both. Topics covered include the relationship between FAS and pain, diagnosing and treating both pain and FAS, reducing FAS in the hospitalized patient, and FAS and pain in the emergency setting. The relationship of pain with fear, anxiety, and stress (FAS) – a relationship that works both ways – is crucial for veterinary professionals who seek to treat their patients’ physical and emotional health. How can the veterinary professional best understand, diagnose, and treat both pain and FAS?
Case Management of Fear, Anxiety, Stress, and Pain, sponsored by Zoetis
Ralph C Harvey, DVM, MS, Diplomate ACVAA, UTCVM
Pain adversely affects the fearful, anxious, and stressed patient. These clinical issues are tightly interrelated, and we best manage them together. In this webinar, Dr. Ralph C. Harvey, a specialist certified by the American College of Veterinary Anesthesia and Analgesia, presents clinical cases demonstrating effective management of this deleterious continuum so as to enhance favorable outcomes for patients, clients, veterinary personnel, and practices.
We all know that cats are tough to decode. They hold their secrets tightly, refusing to share how they feel. Old cats are especially wily when it comes to concealing illness or pain. Being able to see through their camouflage is key to keeping them healthy and serene in their golden years.
In her lecture “It’s Not Just Old Age: Optimizing Health Care for Senior Cats,” presented earlier this year at the Western Veterinary Conference in Las Vegas, Susan Little, DVM, board-certified in feline practice, shared some of her secrets for questioning owners and examining cats to get at the truth within.
Dig deep. Owners might not mention certain things because they assume changes they see are normal in an old cat instead of realizing that they could be related to disease or pain.
One study found that 55 percent of owners don’t know that cats can have kidney disease without appearing sick, and 38 percent don’t know that senior cats can develop osteoarthritis. Subtle signs of sickness that owners might attribute to old age or fail to connect to illness include not using the litter box, being less social or less active, eating or drinking poorly, weight loss, a change in sleeping habits, and bad breath.
We often hear that it’s important to ask open-ended questions to gather details, but Dr. Little recommends a combination of open- and closed-ended questions because so many variables influence the answers, including the cat’s age and the owner’s level of experience with cats. She likes to start with open-ended questions and then narrow her focus with closed-ended questions.
“I’m still learning to take a good medical history,” Dr. Little says. “It’s an art; it’s a real skill.”
For instance, instead of asking, “Have you noticed any changes in your cat’s litter box use,” say “Tell me about your cat’s litter box use.”
That’s a good way to get detailed comments about urine output, stool quality, and litter box behavior that owners might not think to mention. If the owner says, “He forgets where the litter box is,” maybe he didn’t forget, Dr. Little says. Maybe the litter box is downstairs in a dark basement and it hurts to go down the stairs or it’s too dark in the basement, and he can’t see very well anymore. These types of questions can give you a bigger, better picture of what’s going on with a senior cat.
It’s a cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the fact remains that pictures help. Show owners a fecal score chart with actual pictures of poop, not just line drawings, and ask them to point to the one their cat’s poop resembles.
“Not all owners know what is normal, especially if the cat’s stool is like that all the time,” Dr. Little says.
Know how much the cat eats. Many owners don’t measure food; they just keep the bowl topped up. For free-feeding owners, ask them to weigh the bowl of food morning and evening for a few days or even a week. The difference tells you how much the cat actually eats.
Before owners come in, ask them to complete a questionnaire on their cat’s pain levels. This should be done at home so the answers can be thoughtful and not rushed. One to consider is the Feline Musculoskeletal Pain Index, available from North Carolina State University.
It’s also a good idea to ask owners to fill out a diet history form at home or ask them to use a smartphone to photograph the bags or cans for everything they give their cat.
“People always forget what they feed the minute they walk in the vet’s door,” Dr. Little says.
Other useful assessment tools to give owners, in advance if possible, are the free downloadable brochure How Do I Know If My Cat Is In Pain?, free nutritional and other health guidelines from World Small Animal Veterinary Association, and checklists from the Indoor Pet Initiative, including a health history questionnaire and environmental needs for senior pets.
In the next post, how Dr. Little conducts successful exams with senior cats.
This article was reviewed/edited by board-certified veterinary behaviorist Dr. Kenneth Martin and/or veterinary technician specialist in behavior Debbie Martin, LVT.
In this one-hour module, client service representatives will learn how to quickly assist pets entering with FAS, educate clients about Fear Free in person and on the phone, guide them in preparing their pets for future visits, provide resources and referrals, organize community outreach activities, and create protocols for the whole team to follow.
This module is open to all professionals that are already signed up for the certification program.
In this one-hour module, you will learn what natural functions scratching serves for cats; common owner responses to scratching and the problems associated with them; and the potential fallout from declawing cats. Most importantly, you’ll come away with several safe and effective alternative solutions to the problem of unwanted scratching, and a made-for-owners handout to help guide them in the right direction.
This module is open to all professionals that are already signed up for the certification program, and is RACE approved for 1 hours in the category of Scientific.