Dr. Monica Tarantino

Dr. Monica Tarantino I am a small animal veterinarian sharing insight and info to help keep your beloved pets happy and he

09/05/2026

Do we need to talk about the crying? Because I think we do.

You're sitting on the floor next to a dog who is completely fine. He's asleep. He's breathing. He had a totally normal day. And you're crying about him anyway, while he's lying right there, and then you feel awful about it because what right do you have to grieve a dog who hasn't gone anywhere.

I get messages about this constantly and I don't think most of you know that everyone else is doing it too.

It's called anticipatory grief. It's when the grieving starts early, before anything has actually happened, and it is so common with senior dogs because you can see where this is going. You know roughly what the next couple of years look like. Nobody had to tell you.

And here's what I really want you to hear. This is not you wasting the time you have with him. It's not you giving up on him early either, which I know is what a lot of you are secretly afraid it means. The people who feel this the hardest are almost always the ones paying the closest attention. You're grieving because you understand exactly what you've got. That's not a flaw in how you're loving him.

But you can't carry that on your own for two years. And so many of you are, because saying it out loud feels dramatic, and nobody wants to be the person crying about a dog who's fine.

So tell someone. Another senior dog parent will get it in about half a second. Your vet will too, I promise you. We see this every single week and nobody in that room thinks you're being ridiculous.

And then go put your hands on him. He has no idea any of this is happening. It's just Tuesday to him and you're on the floor for some reason ❤️

Follow for the parts of loving an old dog that nobody warns you about.

09/04/2026

"Senior dog" is close to useless as a category. A nine year old with clean bloodwork and a fourteen year old with kidney disease and arthritis are not the same animal and should not be on the same plan, and yet most of the time they are.

So here is how I sort them in my head.

The first is old and healthy. Nothing is wrong yet. The whole job here is screening and muscle. Bloodwork and blood pressure twice a year rather than once, because what you want is the trend line and not a single snapshot, and keeping the weight down and keeping her strong, because the muscle she has when things start going wrong is what she gets to spend later. This is the group people ignore completely, because nothing looks broken.

The second is old with one thing. Arthritis, or kidney disease, or a murmur that has started doing something. This is the easiest group to do well with, because there is a target. Treat the thing properly, recheck on a schedule, and you get a lot of quality back for the effort. Most of the wins I see are in this group.

The third is old with several at once, and this is where it gets genuinely hard, because the treatments start arguing with each other. The anti inflammatory that would help the arthritis is harder on the kidneys. The fluids that help the kidneys are harder on the heart. There is no protocol for this. It is a negotiation, every few months, and the goal stops being to fix anything and starts being the best available compromise for this particular dog.

The mistake I see most is people running type one care on a type three dog, or panicking and running type three care on a dog who is simply old. Both of those waste the time you have.

So which one have you actually got? It changes everything that comes after ❤️

Follow for a way to think about your senior that holds up.

09/04/2026

Cognitive dysfunction in dogs is badly underdiagnosed and the reason is almost never the vet. It is that the signs look like personality, so nobody thinks to mention them.

The night one is the biggest. A dog whose sleep has flipped, up and pacing at three in the morning, dead asleep at midday. Owners tell me about this as a complaint about their own sleep, and nobody ever puts it in the same sentence as her brain. Why would you?

Then there is the getting stuck. Standing at the hinge side of a door. Walking into a corner and just staying there. Ending up behind the toilet. What that usually is, is a dog who started a plan and lost it partway through and now has no idea what she was doing.

The one that hurts people most is the greeting. She used to come to the door. Now she lifts her head and puts it back down. Everyone reads that as her getting old and tired and slightly less bothered about them, and it is really not that. The circuit that connects "that is my person" to "get up and go" is what is fraying. How much she loves you is not stored in that circuit.

There is also asking for food she has already had, staring at walls or into the middle of a room, and anxiety turning up in a dog who has never been anxious, usually as the light goes in the evening.

Two things I need you to know. This is not behavioural and it is not her being difficult, so please stop apologising for her. And it is far more treatable than people assume. Not curable. Treatable. There are diets, there is a medication, and there is a real difference to be had from routine and light and enrichment, and the earlier you start the more of it you get.

If you read that list and recognised three of them, that is your reason to bring it up. Just say the sleep is inverted. Your vet will take it from there ❤️

Follow for the senior dog signs that get written off as personality.

09/04/2026

Here is the other hill I will die on. You are not being too much.

I know a lot of you are sitting on something right now. Something small. The way she has been holding her head. That she is drinking a bit more than she was. That she seems off and you cannot say why, and you have decided it is not worth an appointment because you can already hear yourself trying to explain it and it sounds like nothing.

Please ring anyway.

The people who notice every small change are the ones who catch things early, and I mean that as a flat description of what happens in my exam room and not as a nice thing to say. Old dogs do not decline all at once. They decline in tiny increments that only make sense to somebody who sees the dog every single day, which is you and not me. I get eleven minutes with her once or twice a year. You have all of the actual data. Which of us is more likely to spot it?

And "I cannot explain it, she is just off" is a completely legitimate reason to be seen. It is one of the more useful things an owner can tell me, because it usually means something has changed that does not have a name yet. I would far rather see a well dog and find nothing than see a sick one four months late.

The thing I would change, if I could only change one thing, is the apologising. People come in and open with sorry, this is probably nothing, sorry to waste your time, sorry to be that owner. Nobody in that building thinks you are being ridiculous. This is the job. This is the whole job.

If you have been sitting on something for more than a week, that is your answer. Make the call ❤️

Follow for permission to be the owner who rings about everything.

09/04/2026

"Is my dog too old for anaesthesia" is one of the most common questions I get, and I want to take it apart properly, because the way it usually gets answered is doing real harm.

Old is not a diagnosis. There is no age at which a body stops being able to metabolise an anaesthetic drug. What changes with age is that there is more likely to be something else going on underneath. Kidney values that are not what they were. A heart murmur. A liver clearing drugs more slowly. Less muscle and less fat to buffer a drop in temperature or blood pressure. Every one of those is a genuine risk, and every one of them is measurable before you start.

So the question is not her age. It is what her workup shows, what the protocol is, and what the alternative to the procedure actually looks like.

That last part is where people go wrong and it is the one I would push you on hardest. Choosing not to anaesthetise is also a choice with consequences, and they just arrive slowly enough that nobody counts them. A rotten tooth left in a mouth is infection and pain, every day, for the rest of a life. A mass you decided not to biopsy is still a mass. Not doing the thing feels safe because nothing happens in the next twenty four hours. Where do you think that pain goes in the meantime?

So the questions to walk in with. What did the bloodwork and the blood pressure show. Is there a reason to do a chest x ray or an echo first. Who is monitoring her while she is under, and are they doing anything else at the same time. Is she on IV fluids. How are her temperature and her pain managed on the way out. And what do the next two years look like if we do not do this.

A vet who is confident in their anaesthesia will happily go through every one of those with you. If the answer to how they monitor is vague, that is your information right there.

She might genuinely be too high risk. That is a real outcome and sometimes it is the right call. It just has to come from her actual numbers and not from a birthday ❤️

Follow for the questions to ask before you say yes or no to your vet.

Old dogs have my heart. So many of them just want to belong to someone who will love them again.Have you adopted an old ...
09/04/2026

Old dogs have my heart. So many of them just want to belong to someone who will love them again.

Have you adopted an old one? Share their name and how old they were when they came to you. 🤍

👇 Comment WATCH and I'll send you my free Chronic Pain in Older Dogs guide.

09/03/2026

It was two years in May since we lost Orwell.

I do not think anyone tells you how long it actually goes on for. There is a stretch at the start where everybody is kind about it, and then a much longer stretch where nobody brings him up at all, and you are still doing it, still catching yourself, and now there is the extra layer where you feel strange even mentioning him because it has been two years and surely you should be finished by now?

You are not finished. That is not how it works with an animal you lived alongside every day for a decade.

Something I have noticed doing this job is that people grieve dogs in a way they are not permitted to grieve them out loud. There is no leave for it. Nobody sends anything. You go back to work the next morning and someone asks how your weekend was. And the whole time you are moving through a house that has a shape in it where he used to be. The bit of floor by the door. The sound he made getting up. The fact that you still do not walk on that side of the hallway.

The other thing nobody warns you about is that it does not arrive on the anniversary, mostly. It arrives on a Tuesday in November when a dog with his exact walk crosses the road in front of you.

So this is the post where we say their names. If you have lost one, put their name in the comments. Just the name is enough. I read them all, and I think there is something in seeing a hundred strangers doing the same thing you have been doing on your own in your kitchen.

His presence here is still very much felt ❤️

Follow if you would rather not be the only one still talking about your dog.

09/03/2026

She is almost sixteen and she runs this house, and I am completely at peace with that.

Twig has terms. Terms for how play starts, terms for where she sleeps, terms for what happens when a visitor comes in and fails to greet her first. She has never been food motivated in her life, not once, not for anything, so I have never had the shortcut most people have with a dog. Everything with her has been negotiated.

And somewhere in the last couple of years I stopped negotiating and just started agreeing.

I want to say something about that, because I get a fair amount of pushback on it, mostly from people who think an old dog with no rules is a dog who has been given up on. I would argue it is the other way round. The rules were always there for a reason, and the reason was nearly always a future. No bed, because of the joints later. No food from the table, because of the begging later. Wait at the door, because of the manners later. Later than what, now?

At almost sixteen with kidney disease and arthritis I am not managing a future. I am managing a Tuesday. So the whole calculation changes. If she wants the sunny patch in the middle of the hallway where everyone has to walk around her, the cost is that we walk around her, and the benefit is that she is a nearly sixteen year old dog lying in the sun.

The only rules I still hold are the ones that keep her body safe. No stairs unsupervised. No jumping down off furniture. She takes her medication whether she has opinions about it or not, and she has plenty.

Everything else is hers.

Tell me the rule you have stopped enforcing for your senior. I want to know who is running your house ❤️

Follow for permission to spoil your old dog.

09/03/2026

Meet Keller the low rider senior from the Carolinas🐕💕 What do we think of him so far? Next up… meeting Abuela and the crew👵🏽🐕🐕

09/02/2026

So many of you keep asking about the ramp we built for Becca, so here it is.

The reason we built it is the part I actually want to talk about. Becca stopped getting up on things. The couch, the bed, the back step. And for a while we read it the way most people read it, which is that she was old and tired and had stopped caring about being up there with us.

That was not it. She still wanted to be up there. She had just done the sums about the landing and decided against it, over and over, until not trying became the normal thing.

This gets missed constantly with senior dogs. A dog in pain very rarely limps into the room and announces it. What she does is stop doing the thing that hurts, and she does it so gradually that it looks like a change in personality. She is mellowing. She is slowing down. She is finally calm in her old age. Is she, though? Half the time what you are watching is a dog editing her own life down to the parts that do not hurt.

And the editing makes it worse, which is the cruel bit. Less jumping means less muscle. Less muscle means the joints carry more load. More load means more pain, so she edits further.

A ramp does not fix arthritis. It keeps her using the leg, and it puts one thing back on the list of things she still does, and both of those matter more than they sound like they should.

Ours was plywood, carpet offcuts and about an hour on a Saturday. It was ugly. She used it every single day for years.

Look at what your dog has stopped doing this year and pick one of those things to make easier for her. Just one ❤️

Follow for the small changes that give an old dog back some of her house.

Address

Charlotte, NC

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Dr. Monica Tarantino posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Dr. Monica Tarantino:

Shortcuts

Share

Category