DogAge: How Young Is Your Dog

Rating:
Summary: Skip It!
Review: I am a veterinarian in NYC and had a chance to preview this "book". The ideas presented in it are nothing new and are rehashed from other titles. It appears to me a superficial stab at making a quick buck. Spend your money elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Finally, a book to help dogs be safer and live longer
Review: I recently adopted a 6-year-old lab mix, and I've been pretty anxious about taking care of her. This book helped ease my fears tremendously. It not only provided a pretty neat quiz about how to help her live longer, it also gave specific advice about how much to feed her, how to tell if she's getting fat, the medical conditions her breed is prone to, plants to keep her away from, and an extensive list of medical problems and diseases and how to spot them before it's too late. Best of all though, the author provided up-close stories about the dogs (and their owners) who visit the veterinarian's exam-with some sort of preventable condition or injury. You can imagine the stories. I highly recommend this book to all dog lovers.

Rating:
Summary: Dog owner's manual with an extra
Review: This is a general "owner's manual" for raising a dog, with an extra. While it touches on all of the normal aspects of dog raising (e.g., choosing a breed, training), its primary focus is on the dog's health. Much of the book's detail is in issues relating to the dog's health -- expected, I suppose, from a book written by a veterinarian. An advantage of this book over many others of the same type is that it reflects what is current (for instance, its discussion of treatment for fleas reflects today's products). In addition, its discussion of what to do about injuries is more extensive than many.
The extra is the www.dogage.com scheme of evaluating your dog's health. This scheme identifies an equivalent human age for your dog from answers you supply to a set of questions. Repeating the DogAge exercise periodically (such as every six months) would seem to be a convenient way for reminding a dog's owner of any health issues the dog might be facing.
A book like this belongs in every dog owner's reference library.