Dog Talk ® (and Kitties Too!)

#992A: Scott Simon’s charming memoir “Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known” looks back at his life with a succession of funny and tender recollections of the animals who have shared his journey.

#992B: Tracie welcomes veterinarians Joe Wakshlag and Justin Schmalberg — renowned for their knowledge about nutrition and the company they created, Integrative Veterinary Innovations, that gives simple recipes to use with their IVI Blend to naturally balance home-prepared diets.

#991A: Camille Perri talks about her new novel, “Social Animals,” and what she discovered about the people and their pooches in dog parks through her own experience as a first time "puppy mama" during Covid.

#991B: Dr. Angela Lennox has so many letters after her name they barely fit on a page! She is triple board certified — in addition to her DVM she has DABVP (Avian Practice), DABVP (Exotic Companion Mammal Practice) and DECZM (Small Mammal Medicine). She owns the Avian and Exotic Vet Clinic in Indianapolis and when she isn't looking after the non-traditional pets, she’s doing pro bono work in wildlife rehabilitation with her non-profit called Rewilding Indiana. 

#990A: Thomas W. Laqueur talks about how he gathered the magnificent images of dogs in art in his beautiful book “The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History,” which gives a sweeping view of how closely the two species have been connected across time.

#990B: Janet Scott discusses how she and her husband Jim founded the pet food industry’s first truly “natural” food decades ago — so when they returned with a new company, Rawz, after both their sons had devastating accidents, they decided to give 100% of their profits to charities! They wanted top shelf preparation for their premium ingredients — and thus their kibble is “air dried.”

#989A: Rick McIntyre talks about a lifetime of being the most prolific watcher of wildlife in National Parks — from grizzlies to moose to wolves, for which he is most well known, as he describes in his memoir “My Life With Wolves: How I Became the Storyteller for the Yellowstone Packs.” 

#989B: Dr. Maggie Placer, the Science Program Manager for EveryCat Health Foundation, discusses how their nonprofit financed a study of the genetic changes in tumors from 500 cats in five countries. Scientists found similarities in human breast cancer, suggesting this research might become a building block in treating people.

#988A: Greger Larson, Director of the Paleogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network in the School of Archaeology at Oxford University, discusses recent discoveries about how much earlier humans lived alongside dogs, and how that changes scientific understanding of how and when wolves diverged into ancient dogs.

#988B: Hannah Palcic adopts special needs dogs and makes it seem not all that difficult, relating it to being a type I diabetic herself and how you can accommodate gracefully to physical challenges.

#987A: Clair Linzey, Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre of Animal Ethics, and Professor of Animal Theology at the Graduate Theological Foundation, was raised by a chaplain father who was renowned for his work promoting animal ethics and our moral obligation to consider animals. Clair Linzey oversees a department that explores human behavior and attitudes towards animals around the globe. 

#987B: Eleanor Lerman’s short stories in “King the Wonder Dog - and Other Stories” include dogs in the lives of all her characters, who are grappling with isolation, ill health, old age, or just being human — and how these dogs are witnesses to their lives and often their salvation.

#986A: Canadian novelist Thomas Wharton has put his fertile imagination and historical knowledge to work in his newest book, “Wolf, Moon, Dog,” inventing scenarios from the wolf’s perspective throughout chapters in human history. 

#986B: Dr Kevin Toman in California specializes in evidence-based solutions to pain and aging and helps people anywhere seeking those interventions — highly recommending Ellevet CBD and Rapamycin among other treatments.

#985A: Dr. Erin Troy who owns the Muller Animal Hospital in Walnut Creek, California, is a Certified Veterinary Pain Practitioner who shares her extraordinarily successful experiences using the one-time injection Synovetin OA — both personally with her 18-month-old Lab (who suffered from joint arthritis even so young), and in her clinic with numerous dogs whose lives were turned around from this once-yearly injection with no side effects. 

#985B: Oliver Starr, known as "The Wolf Guy" to 300,000 followers actually shares a wolf habitat in Lake Tahoe with a pack that he and his wife have raised and live amongst. His book "The Wolf Lover’s Guide to Raising Dogs” sheds fascinating light on how we can get closer to our own dogs.

#984B: Dr. Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH, talks about the study of dog genes, her appreciation of Citizen Science and the international community of scientists studying how to keep dogs (and possibly humans?) healthier for longer.

#984A: Dr. Sean Wensley in England talks about his book "Through a Vet's Eyes: How to Care for Animals and Treat Them Better," which describes the many ways people are unaware of suffering of the animals around them — and the ways we could avoid or alleviate those discomforts.

#983A: Lorin Lindner runs the Lockwood Animal Rescue center north of Los Angeles, where they are full to capacity with wolves and wolf dogs brought when people discover that they should never have been pets in the first place.

#983B: Dr. Stephanie Clark, board-certified companion animal nutritionist, licensed animal technologist, and assistant director of special services at BSM Partners (which formulates and manufactures pet foods for companies seeking their expertise) talks about how much misinformation is floating around about the various modalities of pet food on offer in the marketplace and the burden on pet owners to make sense of the marketing claims about the benefits of the various versions of pet food.

#982B: Nev Fisher, Executive Director of the Coalition for Pet Progress in St Louis, discusses the importance of shelters working cooperatively — which often they do not, to their own detriment. Nev discusses how multiple shelters in one area all share the same goal — the rescue and rehoming of pets — but unfortunately often find themselves in competition for community support and funds. She talks about how her organization has turned this around in St. Louis.

#982A: Peter Abrahams (the real name of author Spencer Quinn) is back with another catchy title for his most recent Chet & Bernie K-9 mystery and explains how he's able to channel the interior voice of Chet the dog, from whose perspective all 16 books in the series are told, and put himself inside the mind of this stream-of-consciousness pooch and his gumshoe human partner, Bernie. 

#981A: Dr. Michelle Dulake discusses her Fera Pets collagen supplement — how much it helps the body but also knowing the reliable purity and potency of the sources of bovine and chicken breast cartilage that it is made of.

#981B: Dog trainer Ineke Vander Aa in Belgium wrote “Dogsitivity: A Guide to Living With Highly Sensitive Dogs” because she is what is technically called “highly sensitive” in people (which leads to her theory on why goats appeal to her so much!)

#980A: Jay Ingram displays a smorgasbord of ideas in his book “The Science of Pets,” making clear why he is so highly celebrated in his native Canada, with his particularly sassy style of combining deeply researched science with highly personal ideas and conclusions about what pets are, why we keep them and what they can tell us about our own species.

#980B: Ric Browde is the CEO of Wings of Rescue, a nonprofit that organizes charter flights to rescue thousands of dogs and cats a year and transport them to places of safety and adoption. It's a complex and challenging business, for which his former career as a songwriter and record producer prepared him because there was constant traveling for tours — but he says pets are better behaved than rock stars. 

#979A: Dr Bob Menardi talks about Synovetin OA, a treatment for osteoarthritis in dogs and cats that involves a one-time radioactive injection into the joint, providing relief for up to a year. He explains that Synovetin OA was developed based on human treatments in Europe, where it has been used for knee arthritis, and is now available in the United States for veterinary use.

#979B: Sean Wensley's lyrical book — “Through a Vet’s Eyes: How to Care for Animals and Treat Them Better” — describes the wonders of animals in nature as juxtaposed with a clear-eyed examination of how humans must improve the way we raise captive animals as pets or products. His book is not yet available in the US but can be ordered from Blackwell's [https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Through-a-Vets-Eyes-by-Sean-Wensley/9781856754750] in England with free shipping.

#978A: Dr. Linda Rhodes's “Breaking the Barnyard Barrier” is a memoir that is a fascinating chronicle of the pushback and misogyny that confronted her as a young veterinarian determined to get hired as a dairy cow doctor.

#978B: Dr. Annie Valuska, a behaviorist with a PhD in animal behavior, talks about how Purina is funding three research projects on the human-animal bond, with two of the grants going to studies being conducted in Hungary. 

#977B: Julie Hirt is a professionally trained animal communicator who explains what her training as an intuitive taught her about how animals are able to connect with her — allowing peoples’ pets to speak through her.

#977A: Dr Carmela (Carrie) Britt — board certified in sports medicine and rehabilitation for dogs, focuses not just on her canine athletes but on improving mobility for aging pets by first addressing their pain which is usually under-managed or not controlled at all.

#976A: Dr. Joe Wakshlag is a research veterinarian (who also has a Ph.D in pharmacology and teaches at Cornell University) who is an expert on CBD and recently lectured at the annual veterinary conference VMX about the enormous healing value of cannabinoids for pain management in dogs and cats — and why other veterinarians need to trust Ellevet, the leader in the field. 

#976B: Kathleen Donnelly talks about her newest National Forest K-9 thriller, “Buried Lies,” an engaging novel focused on the extraordinary way these dogs work with their human partners in solving crimes.

#975A: Patricia McConnell is renowned for her ground-breaking theories of dog training in her famous book “The Other End of the Leash.” Now she has aimed for the moon — writing fiction for the first time in her 70's — and opened up a whole new world in the glorious novel “Away to Me,” a murder mystery set in the world of sheep herding dogs.

#975B: Dr. Bonnie Wright — one of only 200 board-certified veterinary anesthesiologists in the U.S. — is also an acupuncturist, who explains the medical science behind the centuries-old practice of acupuncture in what she calls “evidence-based acupuncture.” 

#974A: Holistic veterinarian Dr. Robert Silver has spent decades studying and using functional mushrooms to treat many pet ailments — just as Chinese medicine has employed them for human healing over centuries. His book “There’s a Mushroom for That!” gathers his lifetime of knowledge about mushrooms and cannabis for other veterinarians and pet owners to reference.

#974B: Every Anglophile (British or otherwise) loves the magazine "Country Life,” which takes readers inside grand country estates across the UK. The publication’s Deputy Features Editor, Agnes Stamp, talks about the huge delicious book she has created called “The Country Life Book of Dogs,” which brilliantly juxtaposes views inside these houses and the dogs who live there — in life and in art. 

#973B: Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert, was on the team that sequenced Tasha’s genome, the first purebred dog studied twenty years ago. She and her colleagues at the NIH have been studying the DNA of many dog breeds since then, discovering which genes are responsible for what physical and health characteristics, allowing them to guide dog breeders in making  decisions to avoid naturally occurring diseases, knowledge which is valuable for human disorders, too.

#973A: Kennedy Green was the #1 Junior Pekingese handler in the USA in 2025 (having just turned 12), working with Dr. Kelly Fishman, an integrative sports medicine veterinarian, who both talk about what it takes to keep Lincoln, a special breed of toy dog, in top physical condition, to compete in the 150th Westminster Dog Show.