An increasing number of veterinarians, like Sarah Barnes, are devoting their practices to ending pets’ lives rather than saving them.

In 2010 Barnes, a former emergency room veterinarian, started Eleos Veterinary Service that exclusively offers at-home euthanasias in Northern and central New Jersey.

“Ultimately it provides a lot more privacy for the family,” she explains, adding the procedure is less stressful on pets because they don’t have to go a veterinary clinic. Rather they die in a familiar environment surrounded by those who love them. (more…)

When Pam Turner is ready to leave the house each morning to go to work, she reaches for the car keys – and the dog leash too. That’s because Aragon, her Golden Retriever-Labrador mix, is a “grief counselor” at Turner Funeral Home in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. (more…)

If you love puppies  — and, let’s face, who doesn’t? – I’ve got the perfect volunteer job for you.

Guide Dogs for the Blind, which provides highly trained service animals to visually impaired people, needs volunteers to temporarily house and train its puppies.

Qualified volunteers receive their tiny canine charges — Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, or their mixes — around 8 weeks of age to teach them basic obedience, good house manners, and begin introducing them to the real world. That means these pups go everywhere you go — grocery stores, restaurants, even PTA meetings — to become familiar with life’s sights and sounds. (more…)

The next time you check-in to a hotel, a cold nose and wagging tail might greet you.

 Rescue dogs are increasingly joining the staffs of hotel chains nationwide including the Fairmont, Kimpton, and Ritz-Carlton. And in the posh ski resort town of Aspen,Colorado, where world class hotels abound, concierges happily arrange for tourists to spend the day hiking, shopping or snowshoeing with a shelter dog. (more…)

Here’s a timely and interesting press release I received today and wanted to share with you …

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have left lasting impacts on the American population. While many human rescuers are showing respiratory health problems a decade later, their canine colleagues have had minimal setbacks, according to the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine 9/11 Medical Surveillance study.

With nearly $500,000 of financial support from the AKC Canine Health Foundation (CHF), the study monitored the long-term health impacts on 95 search-and-rescue dogs deployed to the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Staten Island landfills. Researchers also compared their health to a control group of non-deployed search-and-rescue dogs.

“The most striking thing is that many of the humans that responded have developed reactive airway diseases, such as asthma, sinusitis or other chronic infections in their nasal sinuses. The dogs on the other hand have fared extremely well,” explained Dr. Cynthia Otto, DVM, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine associate professor of critical care and principal investigator of the research. “They’re not developing any problems with their lungs or sinuses. That is a real surprise.” (more…)