Weekend activity: wildlife photographer of the year

Teri the elephant: close up of skin on trunk (c) Anne Fawcett

If you're in Sydney this weekend and actually having the weekend off, it might be worth making your way to the Australian Museum for the opening of the annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. 

The exhibition is on from 9.30am-4pm Saturday and Sunday and looks fantastic, especially THIS incredible photo of a green sea turtle and this image of a giant otter treading water. The competition has been running for 48 years, and - fittingly - received just over 48 thousand entries.

What is anthrozoology? AND: Pet health and toxins

Anthrozoologist Associate Professor Pauleen Bennett

Last month I had the pleasure of interviewing the inspiring Associate Professor Pauleen Bennett - President of the International Society for Anthrozoology and Chair of the Australian Anthrozoology Research Foundation.

Anthrozoology is the study of human-animal interaction, and Pauleen is an inspiring scientist and animal lover. I don't want to give away too much, but she is one of the few people I interviewed who has an explicit plan to save the world - and pets are involved.

For those of you who live in Victoria, Pauleen is giving a series of lectures. I feel like I always come away from her lectures with a plan of action. If you're interested, book here.

In other news, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Lissa Christopher interviewed me for a story about toxins that affect the health of dogs. You can read it here - and even if you don't feel like reading a lot, its worth a visit just to see Nick Glavin's GORGEOUS photo of Rosie the boxer.

Information overload and the veterinarian

My friend Glenn's inbox. The man does nothing by halves, but he never gets to the bottom of the pile.

Its hard to switch off in the digital age, and one thing we have to cope with increasingly - everyone does - is information overload. I read this passage from a book called Finding Balance in Medical Life by the late Dr Lee Lipsenthal.

(NB Dr Lipsenthal died in 2011 from oesophageal cancer. His website remains  active with some interesting links).

“In the 1940s there were three major medical journals in the United States: all three were monthly subscriptions, two of which were newsletters. Keeping up with the literature meant pouring yourself a cup of coffee on a Sunday, sitting in your comfy chair, and reading for an hour. Since that time, the volume of medical literature has grown exponentially. More research is being done worldwide, and it is more accessible than in the past. In addition, the average physician receives multiple journals, including throwaway journals, weekly. It is impossible to keep up with the literature anymore, yet when we see the overwhelming pile next to the bed, we feel incompetent as physicians and scientists. After all, we were told ‘if you don’t keep up with the literature, you are not enough’. One colleague of mine was told, ‘if you don’t keep up with the literature, people will die’. What a ridiculous guilt trip. This creates anxiety and frustration for us all. It hits one of our shared personality traits smack in the face – perfectionism.” P18.

Doesn't that sound adorably cosy! (Not the bit about people dying - the bit about sitting down with a cuppa on Sunday morning and being "current" an hour later. Maybe with a cat on one's lap?)

I think the big mistake we make is to even consider bring on top of current literature possible...and it isn't just journals. Conferences, symposia, websites, lectures, webinars, social media etc. etc. Information is proliferating and so much of it is actually helpful...but we are finite creatures!

So I am interested to hear, from vets and non-vets alike, how do you cope with masses of information? How do you "keep up" with the literature?

Small animal surgery: history of the anastomosis

An intestinal anastomosis (http://www.wjes.org/content/figures/1749-7922-4-30-2.jpg)

The anastomosis is a surgical technique frequently performed in small animal practice, most commonly following resection of a non-viable intestine. (And the most common reason for non-viable intestine in our practice is the presence of a foreign body, i.e. something the dog or cat should not have ingested but did...like a tennis ball, a peach pit or rubber).

Anastomosis is also performed by vascular surgeons or anyone wishing to join two sections of a tubular structure. And back in the days before we had lovely disposable intravenous lines, it was used by a very bold pioneer to save a five-day-old child with anaemia. 

The episode is documented in The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr Alexis Carrel and their quest to live forever by David Friedman, which - if you are interested in the history of medicine and science - is a worthy read. 

Friedman writes that the event occurrred 

“...on March 8, 1908, when Carrel received an unexpected visit from Dr Adrian V.S. Lambert, a Professor at Columbia University’s medical school. Lambert’s wife had given birth to a daughter who exhibited symptoms of melena neonatorum, a rare disease marked by bleeding from the nose, mouth and anus.

When none of the known treatments proved effective, Lambert frantically searched the medical literature for alternatives until he found Carrel’s paper on anastomosis. Perhaps a direct blood transfusion using Carrel’s new technique would save his daughter’s life. Lambert was desperate: he knew that no one in New York – not even Carrel – had ever attempted such a transfusion on a human patient.

Even so, Carrel agreed to do the procedure, rushing with Lambert to his apartment on West Thirty-Sixth Street, where Carrel found the baby’s anxious mother, the father’s two brothers, and the sick infant, unconscious and white as a sheet. After a brief discussion with his wife, Dr Lambert said he would be his daughter’s blood donor.  (This turned out to be a lucky choice, as very little was then understood about blood groups).

The baby was taped onto an ironing board next to the Lambert’s dining room table, where Lambery lay down. Carrel would anastomose an artery in Lambert’s wrist to a vein behind the child’s knee, thus joining the healthy father to his sick daughter, so that his blood would replace that being lost by her. After Carrel began cutting, one of Lambert’s brothers blotted up the blood with a dishtowel. Once under the baby’s skin, Carrel – working without the magnifying lenses today’s surgeons take for granted – occluded the appropriate vessels, severed them, then used his revolutionary anastomosis method to join them end to end.

Carrel’s Nobel-winning innovation involved placing stay sutures in the two vessels he planned to join; once gently tugged, those stays transformed two round vessels into two triangles, which Carrel sewed together, one straight line at a time. As every tailor knows, it’s easier to sew a straight line than a curved one.

What Carrel the surgeon knew was that sewing in a straight line prevented the tissue from being linked from buckling, and so prevented damage to the vessels inner lining. This in turn eliminated the possibility of clotting and infection, the problems that had defeated all previous attempts to devise a workable anastomosis method.

Soon the vascular bond was complete on the Lambert infant – no small feat, considering that her vein was thinner than copper wire and flimsier than wet tissue paper. Within moments the baby’s colour changed from white to pink, then red. “You’d better turn it off, or she’ll burst!” one of Lambert’s brothers said, his joy tinged with anxiety. Two decades later Carrel attended his patient’s twenty-first birthday party.” (p10-11).

The reference this account is based on is an article by SW Lambert (Melena neonatorum with report of a case cured by transfusion, Medical Record 1908; 73: 885–887).

But the anastomosis - like so many advances in modern medicine - has a checkered past. This case was used to defeat an anti-vivesection bill in parliament at the time, and Carrel himself experimented prolifically on animals and was a proponent of eugenics. Friedman tackles these very important issues in his book. 

Canine emotions - what do we know?

Are dogs capable of feeling complex emotions? 

According to psychology Professor Stanley Coren in his recent essay on canine emotions (you can read it here), dogs are more or less emotionally equivalent to a two-year-old child.

That is, your dog is capable of feeling excitement, arousal, distress, contentment, disgust, fear, anger, joy, suspicion, shyness, affection and "love" (sometimes I think the definition of the latter varies wildly between people)...BUT...

He argues that, based on current research, it is unlikely that dogs feel more complex emotions: guilt, pride and shame (and - since I am not a psychologist - I'd love to know how love is not a complex emotion?)

Having interacted with many dogs, I'm not sure I agree...and of course we have to be so careful about making generalisations as there is huge variation between individual dogs (and two year old humans!).

Ecology Professor Mark Bekoff wrote an interesting response (you can read it here)

While this conclusion is extremely interesting, it remains a hypothesis in that the necessary research has not really been done. So, until the detailed research is conducted we don't really know "that the assortment of emotions available to the dog will not exceed that which is available to a human who is two to two-and-a-half years old."

Of course delving into the emotional world of animals via cleverly designed experiments will only ever take us so far, and raises the problem of other minds, exacerbated by the fact that animals cannot report subjective states.  (It does raise the related, important question though: how much evidence of subjective states do we need before we treat animals as sentient beings?).

Rabies in Australia?

Any Australian bats may carry Australian Bat Lyssavirus.

I'm working on an article on Australian Bat Lyssavirus infection in horses. Tonight, 60 Minutes screened a segment on the death of an eight year old child, Lincoln Flynn, from ABLV.

It was absolutely heartbreaking. ABLV was first identified in Australia in 1996. Since then there have been three human deaths attributed to the virus (all in Queensland), and now we know that some horses have also died as a result of the disease.

You can read more about Australian Bat Lyssavirus Infection here. Like rabies there is a long incubation period and infection is invariably fatal. Once clinical signs appear, post-exposure prophylaxis doesn't help.

It was very sad hearing Lincoln's parents describe their experience, but incredible that Lincoln was able to communicate some important messages - including how he contracted the virus - even in the terminal stages of his disease.

Anyone with any potential contact with bats should be mindful of the risks of zoonotic disease (read here). Thorough wound care (including washing the wound with soap or iodine and rinsing thoroughly) followed by Post-exposure prophylaxis is recommended in the event of a scratch or bite.

Importantly, this is an area where more research is desperately needed, as one thing we really don't understand is the current risk to human and animal health posed by this infection. 

Winter is here: keep pets healthy by keeping them warm

Farf appreciates the heater...from a safe distance.

Farf is a little rescue pomeranian. When the temperature drops, he enjoys basking in front of the heater, relaxing in a warm bed and...well...basking in front of the heater.

Farf relaxes on his RSPCA pet bed. Extra padding is especially important for senior dogs with arthritis.

Remember that pets should not be left unattended in the presence of an artificial heat source - that includes the humble hot water bottle. Thermal burns can occur easily and might not appear for days after the event.

Farf continues to enjoy the heater...

BTW, Farf is a beautiful rescue dog whose owners are absolutely besotted with all 1.5 kilograms of him.