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	Is it all right to put human hand cream on the pads of your dog's feet? Never use medications for animals without the approval of your veterinarian. If your dog have dry, cracked pads on the bottom of its feet, I have found the massaging vitamin E oil on the pads several times a day will most definitely help. Is there any natural flea and tick control I can use? Any flea spray that contains pyrethrums, which is a chemical derived from certain flowers, is very safe for dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits and even birds. It's important also to keep the animal's environment clean, as well as your house and although no veterinarian on the planet will agree with me, I have found that giving a dog or cat daily doses of Brewer's yeast and garlic pills will help keep fleas at bay, if you're starting with an animal who is not suffering from a severe infestation.

I have a 1-year-old Bichon Frise dog, which has been paper-trained, but now I want to train him to do his business outdoors. Is it still possible to retrain him? Its never too late to house train your dog to go outdoors. However, you have to be sure that that's the only place the dogs allowed to go now. You can't teach a dog to use paper in the house and then expect it to automatically go outside. The paper is no longer an option now for the dog. The best way to reinforce this fact is to confine the dog to a training cage when it is unsupervised. As soon as you take the dog out of the cage, take it outside to eliminate. If the dog goes, praise it thoroughly and allow it to run loose in the house. If the dog does not go, and you are sure that he didn't, then bring it back in the house, put it in the cage and try again in 5 minutes later. Consistency is the key in training any animal. If you could follow the dog around the house all day long, and correct it when it makes a mistake, it would learn right away. But in today's lifestyles, that is not possible. And this is where the training cage will make your life easier as well as your dogs. I have spoken with dog owners who regularly feed their dogs vegetable matter. What are the benefits of doing this? Are any guidelines or suggestions to follow when preparing vegetables for my dogs to eat? The ancestors of dogs are wolves, and wolves really cannot digest properly any vegetable matter. Primitive man, who kept tame wolves, would not, of course, give them the best, juicy cuts of meat when times were bad. These tame wolves were forced to live on whatever the primitive masters gave them. The tame wolves that could survive this diet lived and reproduced and their offspring were also able to survive on less than meat diet. So therefore, we can consider today's modern dog an omnivore rather than a carnivore. Therefore, vegetable can be part of a dog's diet. All dogs love to eat raw carrots and my wife cooks a vegetable stew of carrots, potatoes, leeks and all sorts of stuff and feeds it to our dogs whenever she has the time. In a situation like this "if it's good for you, it's good for your dog". How do I determine if a brand of dog food is good or not? Read the label. If the first ingredient listed is pure meat product, such as chicken or lamb, that is O.K. If it says that the first ingredient is poultry-by-products, look again. If the first ingredient is a grain like corn then that dog food is surely not good. Remember that dogs cannot see color, so if the dog food has colored bits in it you know that is put in for your benefit, not the dogs, so since the dog is eating it don't worry about the color. It is all a matter of being an educated consumer. I have the dumbest dog in the world. My father said we could hire a dog trainer. Is it better to give the dog to the trainer or to have the trainer come to our house? Actually you should look for a trainer that gives group-training classes. You need to be trained as well as the dog and you won't learn anything about dog behavior if the trainer takes the dog away. In a group class your dog will benefit a great deal from interacting and socializing with the other dogs and you will also get to socialize with other owners of dogs "dumber" than yours.