Sick Pets: What Symptoms to Look for to Maintain Optimum Pet Health

Let's look at the role pets play in our lives. We're a very mobile society, I can't imagine growing up as a child without having that furry, four-legged family member. In the internet world we live in, our kids are so high tech that pets help bring them back to high touch. That's why it's so important to have pets in the family.

Studies have shown that it tends to be the woman in the house that is usually the caretaker of pets. They tend to be more intuitive, and they tend to notice if something isn't right with the pet before somebody else might notice, or before it gets so bad that now it's an emergency call to the vet. It's about knowing your pet's health.

A great way to know your pet's health is to give them a checkup, from nose to tail. To do this:

Start with the nose. It's a wives' tale that the nose should be cold and wet. Is the nose dry, cracked, wet? Is there discharge? Is it hard? These are all things to take notice of.
Check the eyes, check the pupils. Are they dilated, pinpoint, unequal? All these things have meaning behind them. The whites of the eyes - are they yellow, red, or white? Is there any kind of discharge or staining? That can tell you something.
Check the ears. If you have ever smelled a yeast infection, you never tend to forget that. Touching your pet improves the human-animal bond.
Then you want to come down the spine. You're checking for any pain, sensitivity, heat.
One of the first things to go is the hair coat. That's something where a groomer is totally on the front line and an advocate for pets out there as well.
Come up and check the ribs, and that's a great place to check for breathing as well.
And then you're going to come down the length of the legs to the paws. It's kind of pulling taffy. You kind of stretch the legs out, and you feel the dew claws, the paws, the pads, the nails.
And then of course pets are symmetric, which means one side is like the other, so we're going to do the other leg, and coming back we're going to do the back two legs the same way we do the front ones.
Then roll your pet over on their back and check their belly. Check the abdominal area, the mammary glands. The abdominal area shouldn't be hard or have any pain response. You want to check the genitals, and the anal area.
And it's called a nose to tail. We end up with the tail.

Jane H. Hinchey is the host and founder of My Pet Problems [http://www.mypetproblems.com].

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