My name Stacey Spillman, and I teach on the professional and clinical skills course here at the university. I am going to talk to you today about basic dog and cat care. Although, instead of looking at the basic needs such as food, shelter, and water, we're actually going to be looking more at the veterinary role and what kind of advice that you can give owners to enable animal to have a better life. Well, just take a look at some of the general advice that vets will give owners regarding health info, and we'll go into some more specific details towards the end of the lecture. The first thing we'll talk about is pet selection. It's incredibly important for the long term welfare of the animal and for the human animal bond. So, for the overall life of the owner and the animal, picking the right species is important, whether it's going to be a dog or a cat or another small mammal, people need to consider the size, its final growth size, that's going to affect how much it costs, and the general lifestyle conditions. People will need to have a good think about grooming and decide, if it's a long haired animal, if it's something that they're going to be able to manage. Some animals need to be groomed every single day. So, for example, you wouldn't necessarily want to put a very long-haired dog with a pension or that maybe had arthritis. The next thing we'll have a look at is diet. So, there's lots of dietary problems. The most common one by far is obesity, although you can also get malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, things like that. They're quite rare. Obesity is a serious problem for quite a few pets, and it often has a link with the owner's lifestyle as well. So it can be a delicate subject to deal with in practice, something that vets have to really get comfortable talking about and approaching people about this kind of a sensitive issue. The next thing we'll talk about is spaying and neutering. I won't say a lot about that, except that most vets advise spaying and neutering. There's real serious problems with pet overpopulation. Lots of really good animals are put down every year. So, it's important that owners know to take responsibility for that, and have their pet spayed or neutered around the age of six months, although some people wait until dogs have had a first heat to do this. Getting a new puppy or kitten as a fun time in the owner's lives. And it's something that vets can offer a lot of advice about to help make sure that the animal grows into a healthy pet. So, one of the most important things is that animals need to stay with their mother until they're weaned. For both cats and dogs, that's usually at least six weeks, although sometimes they can be weaned a little bit earlier if, for example, and maybe they're orphaned or their mothers not taking them anymore. But some animals will actually not be weaned until maybe eight or nine weeks. So, there's a wide range, but it's important for owners to know, not to take animals that are really, really young, because that means they probably haven't had a chance to be properly weaned yet. Another important bit of advice that vets give out is about puppy and kitten vaccines. Most kittens and puppies will start their vaccines between the ages of 6 and 10 weeks. And most of them are going to need at least two vaccines to keep them up to date. In some areas, rabies is also really common. So, they will also need rabies vaccine as they get a little bit older. Puppies and kittens are also going to need regular warming when they're really young. And it doesn't really matter if they haven't been outside yet or not. They can actually get them from their mother. If their mothers ever had an infection during her life, even if she doesn't actively have the infection at the time, she can pass on larva to the puppies or kittens while they're still in the uterus, which means that they're actually born with them. And so, vets need to be able to advise about a regular dosing regime for the client to make sure that they are cleared of that before they are older. The other, and last thing I will say about puppies and kittens is the type of food they need. They actually need a species-specific diet. That means a diet that's actually made either for dogs or for cats, and it needs to be something for growing animals. So, something that's going to provide them with the nutrition they need to fully grow. Adult dogs and cats are also going to need vaccines and annual health checks. The annual health check may just be have a feel for lumps and bumps and a little bit of a talk with the owner to see if any problems have come up over the year. For older animals, it might also involve a blood test to see if there's any diseases that could be caught early. Last little bit that we're going to talk about today is about parasite control. So there's external parasites and internal parasites. And the external ones are things like fleas and ticks, and internal ones are mostly worms, different kinds of worms. So, you have intestinal worms that live in the gut, heart worms in some areas where there's mosquitoes, and lung worms. So, it's very important that the vet be able to advise on products that will prevent infection from those parasites. So, I've just provided you today with some very basic elements of care from the veterinary perspective for dogs and cats. Obviously, there's a lot more to it, and you'll be giving a lot of medical advice as well, but it's just enough to get you started on the routine things that you would be saying a lot as a vet.
