How to Tell if Your Dog Is Sick

"Hi I'm Dr. Adrienne Mulligan of Camp Verde Veterinary Clinic in Arizona and I'm here today to talk to you about taking vital statistics on your dog on behalf of expertvillage.com. There will be times when you wonder if you dog is sick or if your dog is in a emergency crisis and whether or not if you should be running to the vet. A couple of things that I wanted to sort of debunked are myths about how to tell if a dog is healthy. One this is whether there nose is moist or dry and well it may be true but if your dog has a dry nose he may be sick but, it doesn't mean that every time his nose is dry that he is sick because his nose moisture would come and go based on the outside humidity, on the outside dryness. On to your tear production on his part cause tear production if lets say if he got a runny eye because he got allergies that could make his nose more wet. So that is not a real reliable indicator but heart rate, temperature, and respiratory rate are all three things that are very important plus the color of there gums. That is very important. When you call a veterinarian he may ask you to tell him if your dog has a temperature or if there gums are pale so these are things you want to know how to check. When you check a dogs gums you want to lift the lips and look at the color of his pink under his lip and above his teeth and that is a nice pink color he is probably in good shape. If it is to dark, to blue, to red, brick red, or to white, then your dog is probably in series trouble. That is the first thing to look at. The next thing is to try to check a pulse. You can just place your hand against the side of a dogs chest and then if you feel that right behind the elbow so if you locate the elbow and press your fingers against the ribs right at the point you can feel the heart beat. Then you can take a watch and count that heartbeat. Sit down. Sit. You could count that heartbeat for 15 seconds and then multiply that by four. So a typical dogs heart rate is about 120 beats per minute. So I'm counting his and he is right about 120 beats per minute. Then I'm going to try to take a temperature. You could buy these at any Wal-Mart or any basic drug store and you want to lubricate it. It is a good idea to use some KY jelly or some Vaseline and lubricate it and lift there tail. Insert it just barely into there anus. It doesn't have to go very far. Turn the button on to beep and it would take about a minute before it would beep and tell you what the temperature is."