Canine Corner - Pets

• Taking care of your ageing dog
• Dinky and Cindy
• Answers to your questions

Taking care of your ageing dog

Over six months

After your dog has reached a healthy six months you can reduce the frequency of worming to once every two months. You might want to reduce the number of meals to about four per day and increase the vitamins and minerals based on its weight. Regular brushing of the coat is essential. Baths can be given once or twice a month. Bathing too frequently will dry out the coat and make it very susceptible to skin rashes. After every bath clean the ears out with cotton wool and cologne or olive oil. Also brush the teeth with a toothbrush and a little toothpaste. The teeth and gums will stay healthy without much care for the first four years of the dog's life. However, when problems begin later in life it may be too late to train the dog to allow his teeth to be brushed.

Tick control is again crucial. Filaria may now become a problem. Preventative medication for filaria is not currently available in Sri Lanka but hopefully will be in the near future. Filaria is very prevalent and can, in the long run, cause serious problems.

Exercise is an essential part of your dog's life. Check on the exercise requirement for your breed of dog. As an example, to keep a German Shepherd in topping condition requires three to five miles of slow jogging per day. How many people provide even half this amount? Just think how bored you would be if you had to stay indoors with nothing to do from 8 am to 5 pm every day. Naturally your dog wants to run around and play and have extra attention when you return from work.

At the age of 6 to 9 months you must start formal training with your dog. There are many good books available and it's fun and rewarding to do it yourself. There are also many professional trainers available for help and advice. You can also try your Veterinarian as a source of help and information.

With careful tick control, filaria control, regular worming and vaccination, good nutrition and correct grooming, adequate training and exercise, regular and routine Vet. check ups; you should have a happy, healthy and relatively trouble free dog up to 8 years of age.

Senior citizens (over eight years)

Once you have reached this stage, again a little bit of extra care and a few precautions are required. Your dog should now be considered a senior citizen. Good grooming practices are essential to keep its ears, teeth and coat in good condition. Dental problems can begin. Digestion is less efficient and extra nutrients may be required. Exercise intensity should be reduced but adequate, low intensity exercise is critical to good health.

Regular veterinary check-ups to monitor kidney function etc. and diagnose illness in its early stages is important. Make sure you don't neglect your routine vaccinations, worming, tick and filaria control. Minor illness, small nutritional deficiencies, obesity and inadequate exercise can have exaggerated effects at this stage of a dog's life. From now on preventive medicine is the key. The life span of a dog ranges from 10 to 15 years depending on its general health. Take good care of your senior companion and give him/her the extra attention needed to have a healthy and peaceful old age.

Dinky and Cindy

Reader Yvonne F.

Keerthisingha sent us this photo of her two adorable pomeranians, who she says are so intelligent they understand every word she says.

"Dinky and Cindy, often called Nangi are very happy together and it's absolute fun watching them play hide and seek. When Dinky is asked 'where is Nangi?' he runs aound frantically till he finds her, often in someone's arms or hiding behind a door."

Dinky is very much the gentleman, says Yvonne, and will wait patiently when milk is served till Nangi has had her fill, before taking his share. Yvonne has now decided to get them a double bowl so that they can share their drink.

Readers are invited to share their pet pictures and stories in this column.

Please send in your contributions to:
The Pet Column,
c/o The Mirror Magazine,
P.O Box 1136,
Colombo.

Answers to your questions

From Dr. Janaki Collure

Q: Can a dog be bathed while on medication?

A: Normally medicines are prescribed when the dog is not well. A sick dog should not be bathed, because it can aggravate the illness.

Therefore it is not advisable to bathe the dog when he /she is on medication.

Q: Should a dog be bathed when she is in heat ?

A:Yes, of course. You can bathe her as usual.

Q: Is it good to bathe a female dog the day after mating?

A: Yes, of course. If she is in good health it will make her feel better and will not affect the mating in any way.

Q: Is it alright to give chocolates to dogs?

A: No. Chocolates contain Theobromine which is a compound that is toxic for dogs. The lethal dose ( LD 50) of Theobromine in dogs is reported to be between 250 and 500 ms/kg (2/3 to 11/3 oz of baking Chocolate/ Kg Body wt.)

The predominant clinical signs of chocolate ingestion in dogs are vomiting, diarrhoea, hyperactivity, occasional depression, excessive urinating, cardiac irregularities, muscle tremors, seizures and coma, sometimes terminating in death.

Therefore, you should never give chocolates / chocolate cakes to your pet dog. By any chance if you notice that your dog has eaten a fair amount of chocolates / chocolate cakes it is advisable to take the dog to the vet. immediately.

Q : How important is it to control ticks ?

A: It is extremely important to control ticks right from the beginning when the dog is a pup. Ticks often carry parasites that are highly hazardous to dogs. When these ticks suck blood from the dog, the parasites enter into the dog's blood stream and make the animal severely sick (Tick fever) and this may even cause death.

As a preventive measure therefore, it is important to control ticks. There are many veterinary products available in the market.

Contact your vet. surgeon for further information on effective tick control.

Please send in your queries to:

The Vet Column,
C/o The Mirror Magazine;
P.O.Box 1136;
Colombo.

Booklovers' paradise

Are you one of those people who are crazy over books? Well, I am and there is nothing that could stop me from walking into a second hand bookstore, even when there's not a cent in my pocket. Not all old bookstores, however, stock what we're looking for.......that endless variety of books, from classics to comics and there are many times I've turned away disappointed. Yet, sometimes you strike gold.

Hidden by the bus halt on the seaside on Galle Road, Wellawatte near hotel Ranwanlanka, the external appearance of this particular bookstore is quite nondescript, revealing nothing of the 'treasures' inside. It would be more fitting to describe this little shop as an archive, rather than a bookstore.

From books published early this century to the latest best-sellers, you can find them here, stacked on wall racks that go all the way up to the ceiling. Finding what you want is sometimes like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, but who knows what you may unearth during your search?

The old bookstore is well-known to Wellawatte folk who could give you precise directions as to its location. Often the place can be found crowded with university students in search of reference books, historians, and even parents in search of school textbooks which are outdated, or teenagers looking for romantic or thrilling adventure stories.

A book lover himself, Piyasena Senanayaka, the owner, started out as just a collector of books.

"After having left my job in 1951, I came across some interesting second-hand books. I put up a small stall on the Wellawatte pavement. In no time, people gathered around the stall and began paying me two or five cents for borrowing books. If the books were really good ones, I later sold them for about 25 cents. That is how I started," Piyasena said.

Inspired by the desire to preserve old yet valuable books that would otherwise be thrown away, today he has won the repution of having the largest second hand bookshop in the Wellawatte-Dehiwela region.

"As a young man of about twenty five years, I was quite fond of collecting books of Seeman Ananda and Chandrasena Silva," he said.

Although his collection initially included only Sinhala books, as demand grew, Piyasena expanded his business to include English books and magazines as well. Citing some such magazines, he says that 'School Girl' was one of the favourites amongst his female customers at the time. Now he also has a large collection of Tamil magazines, novels and other textbooks.

Today his book and magazine collection numbers over one hundred thousand. The little dark room of books will offer you anything from Reader's Digest volumes, Mills and Boons, Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and Kumarodayas to encyclopaedias, bibiliographies, reference books on various subjects, dictionaries etc.

Going through one section of his collection, I came across a book written by the late S.W.R.D Bandaranaike, "Towards a new Era', Karl Marx's "Das Kapital", along with Asia Week editions of American encyclopaedia and thesaurus, plays by Anton Chekhov, a Greatest Classics Collection of Emily and Charlotte Bronte, an analysis of Elizabethan poetry to name a few.

Books on computers, accountancy, literature, history, French, Tamil, German and books on chemistry, biology, and meditation, electronics, gardening, plumbing, and even childcare can all be found in this little store.The selection of magazines too is varied from back issues of Femina to Time, and Newsweek. That is not all, if you are a struggling student, there are also books to help you study and past question papers in any medium you desire.

"Even before I realized it, my book stall had become a book shop and now I have many customers from the very old to the very young coming in search of books of their taste," Piyasena said.

He is not choosy in the books he gathers. Instead, he believes that there is someone who values each book. Although you may have no interest in a particular book, there will be someone else who will, he argues.

With a small profit margin, books flow into the store from many people. Of course, sometimes, the books are damaged and may need to be put aside.

But a lucky customer may be in for a bargain for when he comes across an enthusiastic soul, Piyasena has been known to give away books free as a means of encouragement.

His only sorrow is that there is very little reading done by the youth of today. "It is important for young people to read. But there seems to be very little interest among teenagers and young adults. Shops like ours not only give them an opportunity to obtain books at a cheaper price but also to open themselves to an unimaginably vast store of knowledge and a lesson into the past," Piyasena said.

Running the store with one of his sons Piyasena Senanayaka is content that he has done some service to society, by preserving books for a small but appreciative group of people.

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