Month: March 2019

Vet Ethics: Can you be cruel to a robot pet?

Popular culture has started to examine the question of whether it is wrong to harm robots. In the series Westworld, the android inhabitants of a Wild West-style theme park are sometimes treated decently by the human visitors. But they are often mistreated and deliberately damaged, sometimes sadistically and immorally. Or […]

Abstracts: Urinary heat shock protein-72: a novel marker of acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease in cats

Acute kidney injury (AKI) in cats is associated with high mortality, partially attributed to late recognition of the disease when using currently available markers. Feline chronic kidney disease (CKD) has a variable progression rate. This study aimed to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of urinary heat shock protein-72 to urinary […]

Solving a piece of the DFTD puzzle

Scientists have long puzzled over how and why the fatal facial tumour disease that continues to ravage populations of Tasmanian devils in the wild became a transmissible cancer, given tumours usually grow exclusively in the organism where their cell of origin derives from. An international study that involved scientists from […]

Abstracts: Plant-based (vegan) diets for pets: a survey of pet owner attitudes and feeding practices

People who avoid eating animals tend to share their homes with animal companions, and moral dilemma may arise when they are faced with feeding animal products to their omnivorous dogs and carnivorous cats. One option to alleviate this conflict is to feed pets a diet devoid of animal ingredients-a ‘plant-based’ […]