When a dog becomes itchy and start scratching, it can lead to skin disease and give a lots of pain to him. This can be upsetting and distressing for the owners too. Unfortunately, there are many reasons, which can cause itching in your furry pal such as parasites, Eczema, diet, allergies, dirty coats, infections etc. It is really important to relieve itching in dogs before he scratches to such an extent that he brakes his skin and causes an open sore and get infected. Make sure, that you take your pooch to the vet for check up as soon as you notice a problem. The veterinarian can help to identify the cause and advise a treatment plan. In the meantime, here are some of the things, which can help you to relief the itchy dog. Parasitic Treatments: Check your dog for any parasitic infestation, as this can also lead your dog to be itchy. If it is fleas or ticks, be sure to wash his bedding, vacuum your carpets and upholstered furniture on regular basis. You also need to treat your dog to eliminate the parasites. There are numerous flea and tick products available in the market like Frontline Plus or Advantage - these are spot-on solutions to kill fleas and ticks and further protect your dog from parasitic infestations. You can we use collar for example Seresto collar or Scalibor tick collar to prevent from infestation in your pooch. Balanced Diet: It is important that your pooch gets well-balanced diet with all the nutrients, vitamins, minerals etc. This will help to keep your dog in tip top condition, and even reduce the itching and scratching in him. Check out, if your furry pal is allergic to some sort of food or any ingredient, as this can be also the cause of his skin irritation. Your vet will recommend a hypo-allergenic diet for your pet or you can choose to cook the food for him with the best suited ingredients. Grooming: If your dog have minor itching problem, it can be reduced by giving a bath to your dog, using a mild shampoo; which is suggested by your vet. In some of the cases, it is not advisable to shampoo your pup, specially if his skin is dry. Instead, of shampooing you can bath your dog with oatmeal, by brushing gently to remove the debris from the coat, Ensure that you don't rub on the damaged skin. Treatments: Your vet will prescribe treatments to treat the underlying problems contributing to your dog's persistent scratching. He can advice antibiotic treatments to clear up the existing skin infections or hot spots. The above stated pointers can help you to relieve itching in dogs, but make sure you consult your vet and not try to deal the situation by your self. He will advise you the best suited treatments after diagnosing the cause, to alleviate your dog from itching. Dog owners usually come up with their sharing that their dogs understand their feelings very well --- and to support this statement, now science has also come up with the proof. Recently, a group of animal researchers and scientists has come up with a study that confirms that dogs know when a person is angry, sad or happy and they can very well understand the difference between the two. Ludwig Huber – a prominent researcher at Veterinary Medicine Vienna's Messerli Research Institute stated that through their studies they have found that the dogs can distinguish between angry and happy expressions in humans. He further added that the four paw animals can decipher that these two expressions have different meanings, and they can do this not only for people they know well, but even for the strangers – very well they have never contacted them before. To dig deeper on finding how well can canines differentiate facial expressions, Huber and his team had trained the canine babies to figure out either happiness or anger by studying the pictures. The canines were shown 15 different faces – just the partial faces were shown shunning the whole picture. The aim was to see whether the dogs could understand emotions by simple looking at the eyes or the mouth. Dogs who identified the happy faces were treated with a reward and others who identified the angry faces were also rewarded with treats. Following this, the dogs have to undergo four different tests.
In this study, researchers directed dogs to find either the happy face or the sad face, and the dogs selected the ones by pressing their noses to a touch screen. At the end of the test, the dogs ended up selecting the angry and happy faces correctly 70 out of 100 – which can’t be taken as a luck as the trained canines picked up the right facial expressions. Above all, dogs were able to find the happy faces quite accurately and based on this, researchers acknowledge that canines can feel the emotions by the facial expressions. And, the study claimed that the dogs can apply what they’ve learnt in the new situations too. So, once a dog learns what her angry master looks like, she could apply the same to recognize an angry stranger. Moreover, the study has also aided to find out that the dogs know that the smiling face is related to positive feelings while a frown is associated to something negative. Overall, according to the study, we can say that the dogs used their memories of real emotional human faces to fulfil the deciphering task. |
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