This book is good for new and experienced dog owners.
Workman Publishing is just now releasing The Complete Healthy Dog Handbook, a guide for dog owners to give even the least-experience dog owner the information to know what problems can be treated at home, and how, versus those which should be seen by a vet immediately. Author Betsey Brevitz, DVM, who wrote the Hound Health Handbook four years ago and has now expanded the reference to cover all dogs, discusses issues from puppy-proofing your home and removing goo from your dog’s coat without scissors through assembling and using a canine first aid kit, to saying goodbye and getting through the death of your dog.
The book’s organization invites use as a reference but the text is readable as well as informative. The book’s first two parts go over a lot of background that dedicated dog owner may want to read at leisure—but jump directly to Part 3 and you have emergency-room triage at your fingertips: first aid basics, poison control, a guide to handling injuries and emergencies.
If you haven’t yet chosen a dog, Part 1, on preventive health care, starts with a chapter on choosing a healthy dog or puppy. Comprehensive and realistic, this chapter walks you through the comparative advantages and disadvantages of choosing a pup or older dog and of getting your dog from a breeder, pet store or rescue shelter. The other chapters in this section advise you on keeping a puppy healthy and keeping an adult dog healthy.
Part 2 covers common illnesses, by category. These include symptom categories (itching and skin disease, vomiting), causation (worm, flea, tick) and physical area (eye and ear, heart, bladder and reproductive, etc). Each of these has a very helpful summary page that gives you a quick list of symptoms for which you should call your vet ASAP and those you can treat at home or just watch.
Need to call the vet immediately? This page helps you decide.
The book’s Part 4 introduces you to other resources you might use, listing pet health insurance providers with summaries of the kinds of protection offered; discussing alternative and complementary medicine like chiropractic and holistic options; and discussing how to find a veterinary specialist. The book closes with some helpful websites for dog owners, a comprehensive index, and a page set up for you to record your own animal’ medical information.
I would wholeheartedly recommend this book for families like the Obamas, who have just gotten their first dog, for the confidence that comes with knowing more about how to care for your dog. But it has much to offer even to experienced dog owners. I will probably give a copy this book to a friend who’s thinking about what kind of dog to get to fill the hole left by the recent death of the family’s mid-sized dog … but I’m definitely keeping my review copy for my own use!
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