Zoey has really taken to blogging. She asked me to help her create a blog just for and about her and other canines. She says she wants to spotlight dogs like her. So there is no time like the present to start the New Year off with www.Zoeytherescue.blogspot.com


Zoey wants to remind you that there are tons of animals that need a FUREVER home. Also shelters need donations not only monetary but many other items too. She says to take in consideration that there are lots of humans who donate to wonderful, much-needed causes to help humans but there is not enough humans that donate to help save animals.


Disclaimer: All content provided on this blog is for informational/entertainment purposes only. I make no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link.


Friday, May 13, 2016

Is Pet Insurance Worth the Cost?

Mama's friend asked her to check Consumer Reports to see what they recommend about pet insurance. Dad will want to read this also. 

A cat whose owners have pet insurance

Like medical coverage for people, pet insurance policies are complicated. Here’s what we found when we analyzed the coverage from three health insurers.
Consumer Reports /  Mandy Walker / Last updated: March 30, 2016

Two years ago, Elizabeth Newsom-Stewart’s cat Fawkes ate part of a lily plant leaf. Newsom-Stewart, then a veterinary student at Cornell University, immediately knew the danger he was in, and rushed him to an animal hospital.

“Some lily plants are toxic to cats” she says, and may cause kidney failure. “Symptoms can take 12 to 24 hours to show. By the time kidney failure occurs, it’s almost always fatal.”

Emergency treatment, which included three days in intensive care, medication, tests, and lots of IV fluids, cost $1,783. But just three months before, Newsom-Stewart bought pet insurance, and it covered $1,327 of the bill. And Fawkes, now 4, made a full recovery.

A serious illness or injury can take a financial toll, even when the patient is a pet. Cancer treatments can easily run $5,000; surgery to fix a torn ACL from, say, a poorly executed jump off the sofa can cost about $3,300. Pet insurance is sold with the promise that by helping to cover some of your pet’s medical bills, you won’t be forced to consider “economic euthanasia” in the most dire circumstances.

But as helpful and emotionally comforting as it might be, is insurance really worth the price?

About 1.4 million pets in the U.S. and Canada were covered by a plan at the end of 2014, according to the North American Pet Health Insurance Association, a trade group. That’s less than 1 percent of about 174 million pet cats and dogs, but up from 680,000 policies in 2008. Some of the increase may be linked to a surprising fact: Pet insurance is one of the fastest-growing optional employee benefits.

Major policy providers include the ASPCA (through Hartville), Embrace, Healthy Paws, PetFirst, Petplan, and Trupanion. Most cover only cats and dogs, but one company, Nationwide (formerly Veterinary Pet Insurance), also insures birds, rabbits, snakes, turtles, and other animals.

How the Plans Works
Like people insurance, pet policies come with a variety of deductibles, co-payments, and premiums. Unlike people coverage, you usually have to pay the vet bills in full and wait for reimbursement. But Trupanion launched a service in February that can disburse payments directly to vets on the day of service. The company says about 60 percent of its bills are already processed that way.

The cost of coverage can increase depending on your pet’s breed (purebreds cost more to insure because they’re more prone to some hereditary conditions), age (plans may cost more as your pet gets older), the rising cost of veterinary care, and the coverage options you choose, such as your deductible amount. Embrace and Healthy Paws pay a flat percentage of covered costs after your deductible is met. Other companies calculate reimbursements based on the “usual and customary costs” of vet care in your area. Embrace lets you pick the annual maximum amount it will cover each year ($5,000, $8,000, $10,000, or $15,000); Healthy Paws and Trupanion have no annual ceiling.

Almost all policies exclude pre-existing conditions and may exclude breed-specific conditions (or charge you more to cover them).

What They Cover
You can pick a plan that insures costs due to accidents (such as injuries caused by motor vehicles), or accidents and illness (including arthritis, cancer, and colitis). Some providers also offer wellness coverage for certain routine care, like annual exams, flea and tick treatments, and vaccinations. Eighty-one percent of pet insurance policies are accident and illness plans for dogs; 14.6 percent provide the same kind of coverage for cats and other pets. Only about 4 percent of the market is made up of accident-only and wellness coverage.

The insurance trade group says that accident and illness coverage per year averaged $473 for dogs and $285 for cats in 2014. Accident-only policies ran $158 and $132, respectively.

To compare costs, we asked four providers—Embrace, Healthy Paws, Nationwide, and Trupanion—whose parent companies comprise roughly 75 percent of the market, to estimate what their accident and illness policies would cover for a specific dog and cat. After initially agreeing, Nationwide decided it would only provide data for its policy that had accident, illness, and wellness coverage, so we didn’t include the company in our analysis.

We used the vet bills of Guinness, an almost 12-year-old Labrador mix from Westchester County, N.Y., and Freddie, a mixed-breed cat from Fairfield County, Conn., who’s almost 9.

Guinness had few health problems over the years until he was diagnosed with skin cancer last fall. Treating him required two costly surgeries and expensive follow-up care.

Freddie has been relatively healthy; he had one pricey dental cleaning under anesthesia, and has been prescribed cat food and medication to treat infections. We did our analysis assuming that their owners had signed them up for coverage when they were just a few weeks old, and we adjusted each medical-care charge into present-day dollars to judge how their expenses would have been covered.

Playing the Odds
For Freddie, only the Healthy Paws policy would have paid out more than it cost, in part because of its lower premiums.

If you have a pet like Guinness with a costly condition or illness you want to treat, we found that pet insurance may pay out more than it costs you. In our exercise, a Healthy Paws plan was the only one that paid more than it cost.

But if his owner continues to cover cancer treatments, all three plans may be worth it. In 2015, for example, Healthy Paws and Trupanion would have reimbursed the owner over $3,000 more than they would have charged for coverage. Embrace would have covered more than $4,000 over the cost of its plan

Of course, our results are for a single cat and dog; vet bills are different for every animal, and there’s no way to predict whether your pet will become sick or injured. But if you’d like help with unexpected, large vet bills, a plan may be worth considering.

Talk with your vet about the medical costs your pet’s breed will usually incur, and ask about his experience with different pet insurers.

Download sample policies from insurance websites and read them thoroughly for limitations, exceptions, and co-payments. Consider skipping wellness coverage if possible and paying for it out of pocket. Last year routine vet care cost cat owners just $196 and dog owners only $235, according to the American Pet Products Association.

If you don’t want to pay for pet insurance, consider starting an emergency savings fund for pet care instead. If you find you need help with a big pet medical bill, the Humane Society has a list of organizations that may help pay for it.

Photo of a dog outside in a field for article about the cost of pet insurance

More Ways to Save
Take steps to keep your pet healthy to trim medical costs
  • Ask your vet which vaccines you can skip. Some effectively prevent serious and costly diseases, says Louise Murray, D.V.M., a veterinarian and vice president of the ASPCA’s Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital in New York City. But ringworm, for example, is a mild condition and its vaccine isn’t that effective, she says.
  • Guard against parasites. Fleas can cause life-threatening anemia, and ticks can spread Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. An inexpensive topical solution can keep the bugs at bay.
  • Spay or neuter your pet. Doing so can help prevent health problems, including some cancers. Many shelters or chapters of the ASPCA provide low-cost or no-cost spayor neuter surgery.

Editor's Note: This article also appeared in the May 2016 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Good advice





Do you know how to approach a dog correctly? Approaching a dog so that it does not feel threatened can help prevent dog bites from occurring.

May 15-21 is National Dog Bite Prevention Week.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

The Real Top Dog



Cesar's Way / May 1, 2016

By Cesar Millan

When you hear the term “alpha male,” what do you think of? You probably see some loud, powerful, overbearing man in a position of leadership — a CEO, professional athlete, or drill sergeant.

These images all tend toward negative stereotypes about masculinity: insensitive, loud, opinionated, and pushy. An alpha male resolves conflict by escalating it and then winning in combat, whether actual or symbolic.

So when people use the expression “alpha” in the dog world, they tend to think of the same negative images, seeing the alpha as the aggressive leader who will attack and kill any challengers. But that’s never what the term meant in the dog world. The alpha is just the dog (or mating pair) leading the pack

To put it in perspective, here’s one example of an extremely alpha male: Gandhi.

That may seem surprising. After all, wasn’t Gandhi a pacifist, determined to achieve his goals through peaceful resistance instead of armed conflict? He never gave the impression of being physically strong and was never loud or bossy. Nobody could seem farther from being the classic alpha male, right?

And yet Gandhi led his fellow Indians into a revolution that took on one of the world’s most formidable empires, and they won, becoming an independent nation again.

Gandhi’s secret to being a great leader was his calm, assertive energy — and this is also the key to being a true alpha, whether you’re a dog or a human. A leader cannot lead through fear or intimidation. They may be able to control their followers for a while, but it’s a following created by coercion. Since it’s not based on trust or respect, it will fall apart at the first opportunity.

After all, how many dictators wind up being assassinated by their own military or inner circle?

The difference with humans is that we will follow an unstable leader who uses strong-arm tactics to bully us into control because they often use arguments based on emotion, usually fear of the unknown.

Dogs don’t work like this. If an unstable dog tries to become the alpha, the other dogs will either not follow at all or, if it becomes too extreme, they’ll gang up and drive that dog from their pack without hesitation.

Researchers found a perfect example of a true alpha in the Yellowstone Park wolf pack. He was a male known as M21. He never lost a fight to a rival, but he never killed a rival he defeated. According to Yellowstone’s biological technician Rick McIntyre, one of M21’s favorite things to do was to wrestle and play-fight with the wolf pups. But what he really loved, McIntyre explained, “Was to pretend to lose. He just got a huge kick out of it.”

Of course, the other big difference between human, wolf, and dog alphas is that the canines have always allowed either males or females to assume the leadership role. They don’t decide based on gender. They decide based on energy. It looks like humans are only just catching up to that one.

So the secret to being the alpha is to always have calm, assertive energy to earn your dog’s trust, respect, and loyalty. The only thing that changes is the degree of assertiveness you may have to use. A timid dog requires very little assertiveness provided that you’re calm enough, and it goes up the scale from there. An aggressive dog requires a much more physical correction.

The only dogs I’ve ever had to put into a submission position are those that are trying to be overly dominant themselves. This isn’t a technique that I learned from any trainer or behaviorist, though. I learned it from the dogs themselves. It’s exactly what a mother dog will do to correct her pups when they’re out of line — roll them on their backs and hold them down until they submit. She isn’t trying to intimidate or coerce them, though. She’s making a simple statement of fact: “I’m the one in charge here.”

The secret to being the alpha — the Pack Leader — is to find the right balance between being calm and being assertive and remembering that a true leader will use whatever technique is necessary to maintain control, but always from a place of love.

Stay calm, and let your dogs respect you.

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