Real men love cats!
In this week’s Pet Connection syndicated newspaper feature, Dr. Marty Becker shares one of veterinary medicine’s most closely kept secrets:
I live on a horse ranch in Northern Idaho, in a part of the country where losing an arm in a logging accident is considered the cityfolk equivalent of a scratch. My poker buddies are men who eat nails for breakfast.
The men up here like to project a Rambo-like image to the outside world, but inside there’s sometimes a secret love that they won’t freely admit, even to their own wives and especially to their veterinarians.
You see, real men don’t own cats. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.
Now, let me explain.
One of the things I’ve always gotten a kick out of as a veterinarian is watching somebody bring a cat in, holding the animal lovingly, and then hurriedly passing it off to the receptionist like a furry hot potato, mumbling: “This is ma’s cat. I’m just dropping it off for her.”
Or, “This is my girlfriend’s cat, and she asked me to bring it in for her.”
As veterinarians, we’re more than happy to oblige any request for care, but we know a dirty little secret that’s not very well hidden. That little pussycat is their beloved pet, too. It’s just that they can’t admit it. Or worse yet, show their affection.
Because real men don’t own cats.
Get the rest of the truth from Dr. Becker right here.
Rolan Tripp, DVM, and Susan Trip, MS, discuss what to do when two dogs in a household keep fighting with each other, and in “The Buzz,” Dr. Becker and Mikkel Becker Shannon uncover yet another way in which dogs can smell just about anything:
A Belgian Malinois named Alba has been catching rule breakers in Maryland’s North Branch Correctional Institution, where inmates have been smuggling in cell phones. The phones often are hidden in pieces and in difficult-to-detect places such as shoe heels, book bindings and toilet pipes. But Alba and other specially trained dogs are able to detect the specific scent that cell phones carry. The state’s five cell phone-sniffing dogs in Maryland’s prison system found 59 phones last year, according to Wired magazine.
Want more? Read the entire Pet Connection for this week, or view it here in the PDF version we sent to our client newspapers.
Dog Behavior Training | steveniam | September 1, 2009
