What About My Senior Pet?

Welcome to the Pet Doctor Blog. I am Dr. Dean Severidt and I’m here to just answer some of the questions that some of our listeners and viewers have been asking and one of the questions that I’ve got this week is from Frank and it’s just asking kind of in general, “What about my senior pet,” and obviously as times change and dogs and cats are both taken cared of better, we’re seeing them live a lot longer, not uncommon for dogs to be 16 years old; not uncommon for cats to be 18 to 20 years old nowadays and with that, we’re starting to see a lot of the senior problems that we see in people where maybe we didn’t see that ten years ago.

So there are some things that you need to be watching for and some things you need to be doing, just to help your pet as it starts to age and I think one of them is, “What is a senior pet? When does it become a senior?” Well, most things you read, and I believe this is pretty close is a dog ages about seven years for every human year. So if you’ve got a seven year old dog, that’s like a 49 year old person and I think that sticks very true until they get a little bit older and as they get older, obviously, some of these dogs live to be 16, 17 or 18 years of age, I don’t think it is equivalent to over a hundred years of age, so I think it slows down.

But getting up to that point, I think everything kind of falls into those categories pretty accurately and once you become 49 or 50 years old, over 50 as a person, they are wanting to do some things. They are wanting to do some blood tests on you, do some more physical exams on you than they used to and that’s just kind of the catch things before they become a problem and that is exactly what we recommend.

So once your pets reach that age, I recommend they come in twice a year for a physical exam. Once again, if they are aging seven years in one, if we go to the doctor every five years, we are still going in twice over that time period, so I think it is very important that they are not coming in once a year, but they start coming in twice a year and when they come in, we’re probably going to recommend some evaluations and some tests and some of the things we might do is if they’re a little bit arthritic, we might suggest we take some x-rays, but we’re certainly going to want to do some blood work and we do blood work because there are so many diseases out there that we cannot diagnose just by looking at your pet, but if we do some blood work, we might find some things that are starting.

We might see some early signs of kidney failure. We might see early signs of diabetes, something with the liver, possibly some thyroid issues and these are all things that the blood will tell us and then we can maybe get into some treatments that might prolong your dog’s life and not let one of these problems become more severe and shorten your dog’s life.

So a lot of different things that we can pick up with that, so very, very important that you do that, so when your vet’s offering to do blood work and asking you if you want to do it, it’s a definite yes. That’s something you definitely want to do if you want to keep your pet healthy as they get older.

Now the other thing you need to real concerned with about when your pet gets older is their weight. A lot of pets, as they age, just like people are going to slow down a little bit; they’re not quite as active and when that happens they start to put the pounds on and when you put the pounds on, you’re going to run into all kinds of medical problems; you’re going to have more arthritis, you’re going to have more diabetes problems, so lots of things can develop as a result of being overweight, so you want to make sure that pet isn’t gaining weight or isn’t overweight and if you look around, most of the dogs are obese. It’s just the way of life, we feed them way too much, we don’t exercise them enough, so as your pet gets older, it even becomes more and more important that you watch that and you get them on good diets that will control the weight, if they are obese, at Pet Doctors of America, we carry a food called RD for reducing diet and it’s an excellent food to help control the weight on dogs and that’s something you need to consider.

At bare minimum, you need to put these pets on some type of a geriatric or senior diet and dog food companies aren’t just making those to appeal to users; really of good value to them. As the pets gets older, they don’t need as many calories, they don’t need as much protein and a lot of things are changing their system, and so these senior diets fall into that and that’s something you definitely want to consider.

So the other thing you want to do is make sure—even if your pet doesn’t want to exercise as much, you get it out and exercise it. I am a firm believer in exercise, I do it for myself. We take our dog out everyday and make sure she exercises and I think it is very, very important that you get your dog out and exercise it, whether it would be go for a walk, whether it would be go to the beach and run your dog—whatever it is, get those dogs out and exercise them. That’s going to keep their joints more healthy, it’s going to keep them thinner, less obesity problems and it’s just overall going to make them a healthier pet and then certainly, as your pet ages, anything that starts to change, obviously, you want to have that checked out. If your dog starts coughing, has wheezing problems, if your dogs all of a sudden is drinking a lot of water where he didn’t before, those are all signs that something might be going on. You certainly want to get that pet in, have it evaluated and see if there’s a problem and if so, get it treated earlier.

And just with all of the aging process, just lots and lots of new things, we see a lot more cancer and we’re seeing a lot of things we didn’t see years ago, so just more reasons to have your pet go into the doctor, see the veterinarian and have a lot of this stuff diagnosed a lot earlier.

So hopefully that’s a little bit of information on the senior pets. I hope that answers Frank’s question and just keep watching us. I thank you for watching us and being here and keep sending your questions and we’ll try to answer as many of them as we can.

Dr. Dean Severidt

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