I am happy to report that Jake is home now and apparently feeling MUCH better :D ! He will be on oral medication for a week, and we will will transition him from a bland diet to his normal food over the course of the next several days.
Missy got her rabies vaccination this morning, so now I can renew her Chicago dog license. This year they changed how the dates work. It used to be that a dog license was valid from May 1-April 30 across the board; now it is valid for one year starting from the date of that particular dog's rabies vaccination.
Details on Jake's medication and diet, and some more thoughts about small animal vaccinations in general are in MORE...
Jake
Medications:
Metronidazole, 500mg, 2x daily for 7 days
Pepcid AC (famotidine), 10mg, 2x daily for 3 days
Diet:
Hill's Prescription Diet Canine i/d (canned)
phase back into regular diet over several days
Vaccinations
Many of the veterinary teaching hospitals have revised their small animal vaccination protocols over the last couple of years to recommend routine vaccinations every three years rather than annually for adult animals. But it is still likely that your own vet clinic continues to recommend yearly vaccinations, and that if you board your pet or participate in competitions or training classes you will still be required to show proof of annual vaccinations.
I have very mixed feelings about that. I personally believe that annual vaccinations are more than the immune system needs to deal with, particularly for the older pets. My pets have never suffered some of the more severe vaccine reactions (those can include vaccine induced feline sarcomas and anaphylactic shock in canines or felines) but that doesn't mean I'm totally comfortable with vaccinating as often as once a year. Now that all of my pets are in what would be considered their senior years, I wish that more of the good boarding and training facilities in my area were more open to accept titers in place of the annual vaccinations, at least for the older pets.
Coincidentally, the June 2002 issue of Whole Dog Journal arrived today with an article Protection Against Parvovirus and quite a bit of it concerns the whole to-vaccinate-or-not debate. I may blog more on the subject after I finish reading the article.
Glad to hear Jake is home & doing ok.
*bighugs* Im so glad to hear that Jake is doing well. Hes to cute to be sick :P I hope things continue to get better!
Ooo, so glad he's home and doing better!! :)
Glad to hear Jake is better! Wouldn't it be nice if our critters told us they were feeling bad BEFORE they got really sick? ;)
Yay!!! Jake's home! I'm so glad he's ok!