Stop Taking Your Dog for a Walk! (Try a Saunter Instead) By Chris Zink DVM PhD DACVSMR Pretty well everyone agrees that taking your dog for a walk is just about the best exercise your dog can get, right? Maybe… or maybe not. What is Exercise Anyway? When we talk about exercise, we are typically talking about a physical activity that improves or maintains our dog’s fitness. The components of fitness are strength, proprioception, balance, flexibility, proprioception, and aerobic capacity. So let’s analyze whether walks make our dogs fitter. Do Walks Build Strength? The focus of strength ..read more

The Gift of Being the Only Dog By Chris Zink DVM PhD DACVSMR Some roads lead on from what you know To what you need to find — Della Mae My very first Golden Retriever, Cajun, was the dog who really got me hooked on canine sports. We competed in obedience, conformation, hunt tests, and the then-new sport of flyball. All that time spent developing a whole new relationship with Cajun through training and competing led to my interest in canine sports medicine and rehabilitation, and the rest, as they say, was history. When Cajun was older, I had moved to the United States (from Canada ..read more

It's a Real Pain By Chris Zink DVM PhD DACVSMR “MAKE him do it!”   “He’s just giving you the doggie dew claw!”   “Pick him up and throw him over the jump!”   These were some of the comments I heard as I tried to understand why my experienced obedience dog would not jump the bar jump. This was a long time ago, but it is a lesson I have never forgotten.   Bannor, my beautiful Golden Retriever, was 9 ½ years old and we were just coming off a winter break, hoping to get the last 15 points we needed to complete his Obedience Trial Championship (OTCH). We had spent a ..read more

Who is That Dog in the Mirror? By Chris Zink DVM PhD DACVSMR Does your dog think about itself?   How we perceive ourselves, or our self-image, greatly influences how we think, feel, and relate to the rest of the world. You recognize, for example, that you have a physical body, and you might describe yourself as tall, short, athletic or clumsy. You also know that you have a social self – one that interacts with different individuals and groups in different ways, depending on the situation.   The concept of “self” was frequently thought to be limited to humans and just ..read more

Yeast - Yuck! By Chris Zink DVM PhD DACVSMR We have all seen dogs that have reddish-brown tear stains under the eyes. But lots of dogs also have red-brown stains on the fur of their mustaches, ears, between the toes, and at the base of the toenails. People often dismiss these stains, thinking they are just part of the way the dog is. In fact, they are not normal at all. The reason for these brown stains? Yeast! Yuck!   I was prompted to write this article because someone showed me the above photo of a very happy dog. At first I thought that the dog was just ..read more

Inflammatory Food? By Chris Zink DVM PhD DACVSMR and co-authored by Donna Raditic DVM DACVN Fifty years ago, the sugar industry quietly paid researchers at Harvard University to indicate that dietary fat was the major nutritional cause of heart disease (1). Their study was published in the prominent New England Journal of Medicine, and it laid the foundation for decades of nutrition misinformation perpetrated on the public by well-meaning organizations such as the American Heart Association. Given that there are only three basic components of nutrition – fat, carbohydrates ..read more

Build Stamina - Prevent Injuries! By Chris Zink DVM PhD DACVSMR Stamina is the strength and energy that allows your dog to sustain physical and/or mental effort for long periods of time. Increasing your dog’s stamina reduces fatigue and exhaustion and therefore helps prevent injuries. That’s important to all of us, whether we have a competition dog or a family dog. ​ Stamina is often confused with endurance, but they are quite different. The easiest way to think of it is that stamina defines your dog’s physical and mental ability to perform any k ..read more

Cody strained at his leash as he entered my examination room. A brown and white pitbull mix with soft eyes, large neck and shoulder muscles, and a beautiful sheen to his coat, he rubbed the side of his big body against my legs then flipped over onto his back, begging for a belly rub. His tongue lolled to one side of his mouth and he sported a silly grin. On the inside of his left knee I could see a prominent scar from recent surgery.  Cody had ruptured his cranial cruciate ligament (CCL), a structure that supports the knee joint, about 4 months previously. He had endured a leng ..read more

Proprio – what? Proprioception is from Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own,” and capere, meaning to grasp. Thus, proprioception means to grasp one’s own position in space, including the position of the limbs in relation to each other and the body as a whole. Proprioception is how a baseball player hits a 3” ball going 95 mph with a 2 ¾” bat. It’s how your agility dog flies over the dog walk placing its feet in exactly the right spots on a narrow board. Check out the dog in the image above – his right rear foot has about one inch to spare! It’s how your athletic dog snags a t ..read more

Overload. Despite how it sounds, it may be a good thing for your dog’s fitness and health!   Strength is a major key to canine health and longevity. A dog with strong muscles is less likely to suffer injuries, both acute injuries and chronic injuries such as arthritis, which is one of the most common conditions in senior and geriatric dogs. And of course, for those of you who enjoy training and competing with your dogs, strength is strongly correlated with speed, which is a component of many dog sports. The overload principle is one of the major conc ..read more