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1 month ago | 
orovillemr.com | Joan Merriam
Back in 2021, I wrote a column about collars and leashes … but since that was four years ago, and we all know how fast things change these days, I thought it might be time to revisit the subject and see what’s new. Dogs have worn collars for millennia: evidence suggests that some form of neck restraint was used on dogs as far back as 8,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia.
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1 month ago | 
chicoer.com | Joan Merriam
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1 month ago | 
whole-dog-journal.com | Joan Merriam
Dogs are famous for eating a wide variety of non-food items, some disgusting—like feces—and some just weird—like Legos, or a ball of twine. Just this year, a 7-month-old Bernese Mountain Dog named Luna was brought to an emergency veterinarian, where x-rays showed a severely dilated stomach filled with not just food, but foreign objects, some of which were lodged in her intestines.
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1 month ago | 
theunion.com | Joan Merriam
Let’s say you and your pup are out on the Yuba River enjoying a day of fishing in the cool spring air. You’ve caught a couple of spring-run Chinook salmon along the way, and laid them in your cooler . . . but you don’t realize that the cooler lid is slightly askew, so when you sit down to enjoy your lunch, your dog decides to do the same. With one of your salmon. No big deal, you figure. Salmon is good for dogs, right? Not always. In fact, it can be deadly. How?
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2 months ago | 
chicoer.com | Joan Merriam
Let’s say you and your pup are out on the Sacramento River enjoying a day of fishing in the cool spring air. You’ve caught a couple of spring-run Chinook salmon along the way, and laid them in your cooler — but you don’t realize that the cooler lid is slightly askew, so when you sit down to enjoy your lunch, your dog decides to do the same. With one of your salmon. No big deal, you figure. Salmon is good for dogs, right? Not always. In fact, it can be deadly. How?
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2 months ago | 
whole-dog-journal.com | Joan Merriam
You can find them from Portland to Poughkeepsie, from Boston to Blackwater…in fact, you’ll find them almost every state in the nation. Despite their sweet-sounding name, they’re one of the most noxious and detested plants in North America: the foxtail. They can also be deadly to your dog. First, let’s get some nomenclature out of the way. Foxtails are a weedy grass in the grass family of Poaceae, which includes everything from wild rice to bluegrass to sugarcane.
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2 months ago | 
theunion.com | Joan Merriam
Your dog is gleefully running back and forth along the trail, when suddenly you hear a scream of pain and he stops cold, holding his back leg off the ground. Your mind starts racing as you head toward him: has he stepped on something like a piece of glass? Has he been bitten by a snake? No, chances are that he’s injured his cranial cruciate ligament, his CCL. But what is the CCL?
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2 months ago | 
chicoer.com | Joan Merriam
In my last column, I talked about cranial cruciate ligament injuries: what they are and how they happen. So, let’s say the worst has happened and your dog injures her CCL. Your veterinarian says that the best treatment option is surgery … but what does this surgery entail? There are four basic types of CCL surgery: Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy, Extracapsular Repair, Tibial Tuberosity Advancement and Lateral Fabellotibial Suture.
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2 months ago | 
chicoer.com | Joan Merriam
Your dog is gleefully running back and forth along the trail, when suddenly you hear a scream of pain and he stops cold, holding his back leg off the ground. Your mind starts racing as you head toward him: has he stepped on something like a piece of glass? Has he been bitten by a snake? No, chances are that he’s injured his cranial cruciate ligament, his CCL. But what is the CCL?
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Mar 24, 2025 | 
whole-dog-journal.com | Joan Merriam |Joan Merriam lives
Archeologists have found skeletons of livestock guardian dogs lying side-by-side with sheep and goats in sites dating back 6000 years. Their images appear in pictographs found in the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh in ancient Mesopotamia, and in third to second millennium B.C.E. petroglyphs in central Kazakhstan.
