Ange is our cheerleader
After 20 years at York Street, Angela Topping moved to Devon 4 years ago but you can see from these pictures she’s still at the heart of the London Vet Clinic. Ange works from home five days a week, answering your telephone calls, reminding us vets to do things, leaving gentle reminders on the screens on our desks but each August she invites the entire team to stay with her and her family in Devon for ‘Angfest’ weekend. This year the team agreed that Paloma is our very best dancer! Children, partners and our great selection of dogs loved the weekend. Thanks Ange. For the few who were on their own summer hols, we’ll see you at our annual Christmas dinner.
Paloma with her rescue dog, Peppa
Adam’s Bodie, with Amy, Adam and Faith, hopes in vain for a handout
Amanda and friend…
Poppy and her servant, Jess
“Thank you Kensington & Chelsea”
Grass seeds in dogs’ ears, eyes, through their skin or between their toes are a perennial and painful summer problem. This year’s wet winter followed by the summer draught caused wild barley to proliferate everywhere.
This is what ‘grass seeds’ looked like before they were removed from Kensington & Chelsea’s parks and open spaces.
When I caught up with Roderick who manages Little Wormwood Scrubs where I walk my dogs, I thanked him for his thoughtfulness in carefully and selectively cutting every patch of dangerous wild barley on the Little Scrubs. “I filled up 30 black bags with those clippings.” he explained, “Parks told me to cut it, rake it, bag it and not put it in the compost. It’s been cut back in all the parks and open spaces in the borough.”
If there’s anyone from RBKC reading this, on behalf of London’s dogs, thank you for your thoughtfulness. We’ve been removing grass seeds from dogs all summer but it would have been worse if it were not for the borough’s intervention.
York Street hosts London Veterinary Neurology
The London Vet Clinic hosts a variety of referral vets at 84-86-88 York Street. These men and women provide you and your companions with convenient, highly experienced advice without your having to travel to more distant referral hospitals. One of the experienced specialists we host is John Parker (www.londonveterinaryneurology.co.uk). We ask for John’s help with problems involving the brain, spine and nerves. When advanced imaging such as MRI or CT scans is beneficial he organises these aids locally.
Some background. John qualified, with distinction, from the University of Bristol in 2007. After a residency, in Neurology at the University of Cambridge Veterinary School, he gained his DipECVN (Diploma in the European College of Veterinary Neurology) in 2011. He remained at Cambridge for five more years working on a Wellcome Trust funded PhD before becoming Head of Neurology at a referral hospital that was eventually acquired by a corporate veterinary business. John wasn’t comfortable with “corporate policies and politics” and joined us 18 months ago.
John sees people and their pets on Saturdays at 84 York Street. He has provided recent explanations for inexplicable yawning, sloppy walking, a loss of symmetry to the eyes, falling over and ‘behaving like a happy drunk’. The surgical outcomes of his interventions for intervertebral disc disease are impressive. John sees referrals from other vets at York Street.
A Christmas present for dog people
Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Recently, he wrote tenderly about taking his elderly Havanese Butterscotch for her last visit to the vet’s. (If you’ve recently been though a similar loss, feel free to skip the next paragraph.)
“We understand death,” he wrote.” as a part of life, and it is our knowledge of mortality that shapes our understanding and makes us human. They don’t. I’m still haunted by our ailing, elderly dog’s large, trusting liquid eyes looking out at us in the moments before her death: Hey, this is all right, right? We’re just here at this crazy doctor place we go to like always, and them we’re going home? That was what broke my heart. Butterscotch trusted us absolutely, and we were about to kill her. For her own good, because she was suffering so, because her once rich and bountiful life had been reduced to a painful daily struggle, all of that. But she was alive and then she wasn’t, and she didn’t understand it and we had done it to her.”
Haven’t we all been there? It was Butterscotch’s gaze that Gopnik could not forget but then he was lifted up, by a book, The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History. I bought a copy and heartily suggest it as a work of humane scholarship. The author, Thomas Laqueur, is emeritus Professor of History at the University of California. This is the jacket cover, Bartolomeo Passerotti’s 1585
Four hundred years later we’re still painting the dog’s gaze. This is Joan Brown’s 1972 The Dancers in the City.
Thomas Lacquer’s The Dog’s Gaze is published by Penguin who long ago published over 30 of Bruce’s dog and cat care books under their DK imprint. We have copies of some of these books in Finnish, Estonian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Polish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish free to anyone who wants them. The reception team will show them to you.
Bruce’s September Blog
For animal welfare reasons, some countries such as Norway and the Netherlands are banning the breeding of breeds with extreme features or pervasive health problems. These breeds include Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, French Bulldogs and Pugs. Should we ban the breeding of ‘unhealthy’ breeds? Read Bruce’s new website blog, Should we ban unhealthy dog and cat breeds?
And finally…
The 25-35 degree weather we had in July and August meant fleas have been able to reproduce two to three weeks after hatching from their eggs. They’re everywhere. If you have wildlife in your garden, especially hedgehogs, you probably have fleas. If they’re in your home, as well at treating your dogs and cats, treat your home with products that prevent fleas from hatching.
All the best
Bruce & the York Street team