Heart Wisdom Animal Talk Blog
Dedicated to improved health, behavior and wellness for pets and the people who love them.
Tips to Protect your Pet during a Storm The NOAA’s official hurricane season starts June 1 in the Atlantic and mid-May in the Eastern Eastern Pacific, so you want to make sure you have a plan for how you will protect your pet. Both seasons end on November 30. With the potential for storm activity, this is a critical time for pet owners in the hurricane zone to mark their checklist and get supplies. In the event of a hurricane or tropical depression, particularly the stronger category storms, it is NOT safe to let your dogs or cats out to go potty. Reasons for this include: storm surges (walls of water up to 20 feet high), winds in excess of 74 mph (for the weakest hurricanes), inland flooding and power lines down. Keeping your pet inside and having an indoor toilet solution for dogs and cats with the Pet Loo […]
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A reminder to get happy!!! This is SO much fun, I just have to share it with you. It may not seem to have much to do with animals, but it does, trust me. When we are stressed, depressed, upset or worried, we share that energy with our pets and it brings them down too. But when our spirits are happy, that is the energy we share with them. I personally am watching this video every day. I even get up and dance at my desk any time I need a happy break. You don’t have to take my word for it, check out what my client said after I shared this with her: “Val, I have to tell you, this is now my official theme song!!! I put it on my phone and spent hours Saturday in the beautiful sunshine walking 4 miles around a beautiful wooded path listening […]
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Helping Pets with Depression and Anxiety Any responsible pet owner will know that their pet can experience as wide a range of emotions as humans. Love, joy, stress and depression are all mental states that can be found in cats, dogs, horses and even fish and mice. Unfortunately, this is still met with skepticism by some in the veterinary world and trying to find treatment for pets with depression or other mental health problems can be difficult. However, the same alternative treatments that work with humans can have highly beneficial effects with animals. via GIPHY Understanding the Problem The first problem is to identify what exactly is the cause of your pet’s depression or anxiety. This might be such things as changes in habitat or diet. If you have recently moved home then all the sights, scents and sounds have changed for the animal which can be very distressing. Your pet doesn’t understand […]
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Older horses still have a lot to offer a rider, but often they’re discounted as being past their prime. It’s understandable for someone to be wary of a horse whose retirement to greener pastures may not be too far in the future, but just like people, senior horses can be senior athletes. And there is plenty of research to back that up. Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, has conducted numerous exercise studies on the aging equine athlete, including the effects of training on the senior’s heart rate, maximum aerobic capacity and thermoregulation. “Many eventing and endurance horses compete into their teens, and retired racehorses have second careers that run the spectrum of activities,” says Kenneth McKeever, Ph.D., FACSM, professor of equine exercise physiology and associate director for research at the Equine Science Center at Rutgers. “Our mission at the Center is to prevent problems and to care for the […]
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Want to get positive results from your dog? Here’s how! A major mistake most dog parents make is to offer affection to their dog from the beginning. Then, later they may get around to exercising their pet at some point. Or they may take their new dog for a walk, or even just turn them out into a yard expecting them to exercise themselves. Or they might throw the ball for a quick game of fetch for a little while. And at some point the dog will finally do something wrong, dangerous or destructive so they will make some attempt at discipline (which is usually ignored by their pup). Dogs don’t approach ‘friendships’ like humans This “let’s be friends” approach makes sense from a human perspective. We usually approach others wanting to be liked and we try to be friendly, right? Like we would with another human that we just […]
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