Paid subscribers will receive an article once a week for 6 weeks covering a different topic that you can save, print, and share with pet-loving friends and neighbors.

At the end of the series, I will begin another series on preventive wellness from the perspective of Classical Chinese Medicine and the cycles that mirror the internal workings of the body with the external workings of the greater ecosystem we reside in, a true ecological medicine.

This one is going to get a little personal, not because we are talking about sex organs, but because of my background. Here is where you get to learn a little bit more about me and my history working with dogs and cats.

When I was graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a major in Ecology and Environmental Biology, I was trying to decide what my next step in life was going to be. I had become fascinated with neurobiology and animal behavior after being inspired by an amazing professor whose specialty was canine behavior, Marc Bekoff, Ph.D. I took every class he offered, and was invited to sit in on his graduate-level course, co-taught by the philosophy department, on the consciousness of non-human animals. Here we were, talking about the inner life of animals in the late 1980s when many people still did not think they experienced pain.

I was seriously considering applying to grad school and studying urban feral cat behavior. But the boyfriend had one more year of school, we wanted to travel after that, and I needed a break, so I started looking for a job to hold us over. I still wanted to work with animals and found a position as a kennel tech at the local county animal shelter. I actually foisted a raucous 2-year-old Rottie mix onto Marc Bekoff when he came to visit the shelter, who became somewhat famous as his companion and teaching dog. Read about Jethro here and an end-of-life essay.

Thus began my 8-year stint working in the animal shelter field. I was a kennel tech: cleaning, watering, feeding, examining, and evaluating all the animals coming into the shelter. I was an adoption counselor: interviewing and helping match the right dog to the right family. I was a euthanasia technician: euthanizing the sick, old, and those we did not have space for. And my second job out of veterinary school was a shelter vet for Espanola, New Mexico’s animal shelter, where I spayed and neutered up to 30 dogs and cats a day - at least that was my record.

Espanola Animal Shelter, my first (actually my second) job out of veterinary school.

My year as a shelter veterinarian coincided with the adoption of early-age spaying and neutering - spaying and neutering puppies and kittens as young as 8 weeks of age, as long as they weighed at least 2 pounds. Before you wince, look at the whole picture. At the time, shelters were inundated with dogs and cats. County shelters across the country were euthanizing hundreds of dogs and cats every day due to lack of space. And the no-kill shelters were filling up as soon as they opened their doors. The whole idea was to never allow an intact animal to walk out the doors of the shelter, making sure they could not reproduce, so hopefully, one day we could stop killing healthy dogs and cats with nothing wrong with them except the lack of a good home.

Unfortunately, today, shelters are still killing perfectly healthy dogs and cats without enough homes to go around. Many of the COVID puppies were returned like damaged goods, and nonprofits are the first to suffer in tough economic times. And we have discovered the health problems that occur when the reproductive organs and hormones are removed before the animal has fully developed. We, very quickly, saw the effects of early removal of hormones on long bone growth, due to a delay in growth plate closure. This, in turn, affects joint conformation and stability.

If you’ve had a puppy or kitten in the last twenty years, you got the same advice I did coming out of vet school: spay or neuter around six months of age. Then along came early-age spaying and neutering, which I assumed was only being done at shelters, but it turns out it was also adopted by many private veterinary clinics.

I want to reexamine that advice with you today — not because it was given in bad faith, but because it was built on the hopes of controlling the dog and cat population and decreasing the euthanasia numbers, not individual health data. We didn’t have the data yet. Now we do, and it’s more complicated — and more interesting — than “just get it done early.”

This is the last email in this series, and I saved it for last on purpose. It’s the one where “it depends” isn’t a cop-out — this is another issue with many answers, all dependent upon your individual dog and lifestyle. By the way, “It depends!” is the favorite answer of Dr. Xie, my acupuncture teacher and founder of Chi University, another teacher I was blessed to cross paths with on my professional path.

What does this surgery, at this age, do to the individual animal’s long-term health?

The clearest signal has come out of UC Davis, where researchers have spent over a decade tracking joint disease and cancer rates in dogs neutered at different ages, broken down by breed. The pattern that’s emerged: size and breed matter enormously.

Read more

Paid subscribers will receive an article once a week for 6 weeks covering a different topic that you can save, print, and share with pet-loving friends and neighbors.

At the end of the series, I will begin another series on preventive wellness from the perspective of Classical Chinese Medicine and the cycles that mirror the internal workings of the body with the external workings of the greater ecosystem we reside in, a true ecological medicine.

Flea and tick prevention is one of those areas where the conversation in most vet clinics goes something like this: ‘We recommend this product — here’s a year’s supply. Apply it whether you have fleas or ticks, every month, for the rest of your pet’s life.” Full stop.

One of my favorite questions to ask pharmaceutical reps is this: “You are telling me, the veterinarian, to recommend my clients give this product every month for the rest of the dog’s life. Have you tested it out to see if there are any side effects from giving it monthly, year after year after year?” They usually get very quiet and go give someone else their sales pitch.

Giving these monthly would be fine if these products were harmless and had no side effects. But to kill an insect like a flea or an arachnid like a tick, it must be highly toxic, at least to the bug. When they are designing insecticides, they try to find a chemical or other substance that is more toxic to the target bug than to the mammalian species that also comes into contact with it.

Sometimes they succeed in finding something that will kill the insect quickly, but will take some time to build up in the mammalian body to cause harm over a longer time period.

As people who love our companion animals, we do not want to put anything toxic on or in them.

But we also do not want blood-sucking insects on them, making them uncomfortable and potentially giving them other serious diseases like Lyme.

So what can we do?

• We need to understand the life cycle of the bugs and how we can stop them at each stage;

• We need to provide layers of prevention, from the external terrain to the internal terrain;

• We need to know what to use if we have to reach for a chemical preventative in a severe outbreak. And what to avoid at all costs.

Read more

Paid subscribers will receive an article once a week for 6 weeks covering a different topic that you can save, print, and share with pet-loving friends and neighbors.

PREQUEL: I just diagnosed a good friend’s dog with heartworm disease this past week. Living in South Florida, it rarely gets below 55 degrees, and we have mosquitoes all year long. The incidence of heartworm infections in dogs entering the county shelter averages about 1 in 3. I recommend heartworm prevention to all of my clients in South Florida and give it to my own dog.

Heartworm preventative got a bad reputation online almost a decade ago. It became lumped in with flea and tick prevention, two very different things. You do not have to look far to find claims that heartworm prevention is killing our dogs. As trust in veterinary recommendations began to erode, monthly heartworm prevention became a target.

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard this: “Why should I believe that giving my dog a chemical every month is a good thing? It’s poisoning them!”

Here is why you need to consider it.

Heartworm is a serious parasitic infection that kills dogs and shortens their lives. The risk of being infected depends on your geographic area, mosquito prevalence, and temperature. It is becoming more prevalent around the United States, and drug-resistant forms are appearing around the Gulf States region.

Once a dog is infected, treatment carries its own risks, the most dangerous being a pulmonary embolism caused by a segment of a dead worm lodging in a lung artery. The infection itself can create scarring in the pulmonary artery, leading to permanent heart disease.

Geography Matters

Heartworm is transmitted by mosquitoes, which means risk varies substantially by geography, season, and climate. In the Gulf Coast states and the Southeast US, year-round, consistent prevention is strongly warranted — mosquito exposure is high, and the parasite is prevalent. In northern climates or high-altitude regions, the risk profile is different. This doesn’t mean prevention is unnecessary — it means the conversation should include where you actually live.

I have lived and practiced in two heartworm endemic areas: The Rio Grande River Valley in New Mexico and South Florida. I have seen more than my share of heartworm-positive dogs. My own “heart dog” was treated for heartworm in the shelter when she was only 3 years old. I have seen dogs in late-stage heart failure secondary to heartworm infection. In the shelter where I worked during my first year out of veterinary school, we had a heart that looked like it was filled with spaghetti in a jar of formaldehyde on the receptionist's counter, to educate dog owners.

Read more

Paid subscribers will receive an article once a week for 6 weeks covering a different topic that you can save, print, and share with pet-loving friends and neighbors.

Vaccines are one of the most genuinely useful tools in veterinary medicine. They’ve eliminated or drastically reduced diseases that routinely killed pets: distemper, panleukopenia, parvo, and rabies.

And — vaccines are one of the areas where the standard approach has historically been ‘more is better,’ without always asking what the individual animal actually needs.

And yes, there are large financial incentives behind the vaccine industry.

Vaccinations play a role in protecting animals from deadly viral infections. I have held puppies and kittens in my hands too many times, watching them die from distemper or panleukopenia, and there was nothing I could do to save them. I have watched viral infections sweep through animal shelters in a matter of days, killing the young and old. I have also witnessed the protective effects of vaccines alongside the adverse effects of over-vaccination.

I was blessed to have one of the preeminent veterinary immunologists, Dr. Ronald Schultz, as my immunology professor in veterinary school, back when science still followed the scientific process. He tested vaccines for pharmaceutical companies and was one of the first to question the policy of annual vaccinations for our animals. He lectured to my veterinary school class in 1996 on the use of vaccine titers to determine the need for boosters - 30 years ago! This is not new information; it is information that corporate veterinary medicine is ignoring. Three to four vaccines a year per patient, at $35 per vaccine - you do the math.

I believe in responsible use of vaccines, taking into consideration all of the following factors:

1. The lifestyle and risk factors of the individual animal: travel, exposure to wildlife, exposure to stray populations, and viruses endemic to the animal's environment.

2. Health factors: prior reactions to vaccines; an immune system that is already overwhelmed and dysregulated (e.g., allergies, cancer, autoimmune disease).

3. The type of vaccines and duration: killed, modified live, self- replicating RNA, mRNA, thimerosal- free, 1-year, 3-year, combination, or single.

4. Immunology: checking vaccine titers and taking into account memory cells that confer lifelong immunity - more on that later.

5. Local county laws: the only vaccine regulated by law is rabies because it is a public health risk and has no treatment. People have died, and continue to die, from rabies. It is important to understand how it is transmitted and the risk factors for exposure.

How vaccines actually work, durable immunity, and titers

A vaccine introduces the immune system to a pathogen — or a piece of one — without causing disease. The immune system mounts a response, produces antibodies and memory cells, and, the next time it encounters the real thing, responds faster and more effectively. The memory cells can last for years, often a lifetime, hidden away in the bone marrow.

Read more

Read more

Paid subscribers will receive an article once a week for 6 weeks covering a different topic that you can save, print, and share with pet-loving friends and neighbors.

Welcome — and thank you for being the kind of person who loves animals enough to ask questions concerning their care.

I’m Dr. Josie, a veterinarian with over twenty-five years of clinical experience and a background in various healing modalities, including Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine, Reiki, and various schools of plant medicine, to name a few.

I’ve spent my entire career working at the intersection of conventional and holistic medicine — and one of the things I’ve noticed, again and again, is how much better outcomes are when pet owners understand what’s actually going on.

Not because they become their pet’s doctor.

But because they become their pet’s best advocate.

And they learn to listen to their best friends, understanding behavioral cues and the underlying intuitive messages.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to walk through some of the most important — and most misunderstood — areas of pet health:

THE BASICS:

• Nutrition: the building blocks your animal’s body runs on

• Vaccines: what they do, what they don’t, and what the schedule doesn’t always show

• Heartworm prevention: understanding the disease and the medicine

• Flea & tick prevention: how to weigh the risks and the options

• Spaying and Neutering

These topics are considered preventive healthcare in the conventional veterinary world. They are what you are sold on when you walk in the door of a conventional veterinary practice. Just look at the posters on the wall and the food lining the shelves of your local veterinary clinic.

What most people do not understand is that the choices you make early in your pet’s life regarding these topics establish a trajectory of wellness, or lack thereof, for your pet’s entire lifespan. Do not worry if you have an older pet and made these decisions years ago, or you adopted a pet who already had everything done to them. It is never too late to get them on a healthier path.

These are also the topics everyone has an opinion about online. The internet is full of contradictory information about them. I will tell you right away: there are no black-and-white answers when it comes to health care. What works for one animal may not work for another. However, some choices carry higher risks than others, and some are so risky that I cannot conscientiously recommend them. I will let you know what those are, and then you can make your own decisions.

I want you to understand the basics well enough to make the right choice for your individual pet, lifestyle, and circumstances. Once you understand the basics, I can introduce you to a powerful preventive wellness program built on the true foundations of health.

Each email ends with a short list of questions you can bring to your own vet. Not to challenge them — but to have a real conversation. The best veterinary care happens in partnership, and that partnership starts with you knowing what to ask, then finding a veterinarian willing to discuss the options.

And please, find a real-life person, preferably one knowledgeable in the working of your animal’s body, whom you can ask, before heading off into the land of AI. Remember, Chat-GPT and Claude do not have hearts and souls, even though they would like you to believe that they actually care.

Here is a video on my thoughts on AI.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started.

With care,

Dr. Josie

P.S. — We start off with nutrition, which is genuinely foundational. It affects everything else in this program. Subscribe and watch your inbox, or visit my Substack page, drjosie.substack.com

P.P.S. If you need help choosing what is best for your pet or a second opinion, I am available for one-on-one consultations. Email me to set up an appointment: consultwithdrjosie@gmail.com