The Senior Pet Mistakes That Lead to Emergencies

Your dog didn’t wake up “old” overnight and your cat isn’t “just slowing down.” Aging is a life stage, not a diagnosis, but it can quietly stack the odds toward arthritis pain, kidney disease, cancer, and heart trouble. We talk through what counts as a senior pet in real life, why a Great Dane ages differently than a small dog, and why some breeds need earlier vigilance because of known risks like valvular heart disease.

From the emergency vet perspective, patterns show up fast: puppies often arrive with parvo, pneumonia, or low blood sugar, middle-aged dogs with injuries and certain hormone diseases, and seniors with complicated illnesses where one problem uncovers another. We dig into the subtle signs owners often miss, like gradual weight loss, reduced tolerance for walks, changes in sleep or appetite, coughing with exercise, and breathing shifts that can point to congestive heart failure. You’ll also hear practical home safety tips for older pets, including why slick floors and pool areas can be more dangerous for seniors with weaker muscles or declining vision.

We also make the case for a simple, high-impact habit: a thorough veterinary exam every six months for senior dog care and senior cat health. It is less about doing “more stuff” and more about tracking trends, catching murmurs early, spotting dental pain, and noticing mobility changes before they become emergencies. If your pet seems stoic, we explain how veterinarians ask the right questions and why a short, vet-guided anti-inflammatory trial can sometimes reveal hidden arthritis pain.

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To learn more about Frisco Emergency Pet Care visit:
https://www.FriscoEmergencyPetCare.com
Frisco Emergency Pet Care 
11201 Preston Road 
Frisco, Texas 75033 
469-287-6767 

Transcript

Welcome And Why Seniors Matter

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Frisco Emergency Pet Care Podcast, your trusted source for expert insight into emergency veterinary medicine. Hosted by Dr. Mike Lasasso, Chief of Staff at Frisco Emergency Pet Care, this podcast brings you essential information to help protect the health and safety of your dogs and cats. Serving North Dallas with 24-7 emergency and critical care, the team at Frisco Emergency Pet Care is here when every second counts. Now, let's begin.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

As pets age, their needs change. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's dramatic, and sometimes we just can't see the signs. A few proactive habits can add comfort, safety, and even years to a senior pet's life. Welcome everyone. I'm Julie Schwenzer, co-host and producer with Dr. Mike Lasasso, the chief of staff at Frisco Emergency Pet. Dr. Lasasso, it's always good to be with you.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Oh, it's always good to join you too.

What Age Counts As Senior

SPEAKER_00 1:05

So I have a question before we get into the health and safety of senior pets. Is what age do you consider a dog and cat, just because they're the most common pets, to be senior? Does it vary with the breed? And then if we can get into signs that they're like, these are these are senior furballs now.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Sure. I think we probably start considering, as a general rule, dogs and cats seniors at seven or eight. Uh really large breed dogs, we probably move that down to five for the Danes and the Mastiffs. For cats, I think you could definitely argue that it would really be more like nine or ten. They tend to have longer lifespans. It's probably somebody has written a definition that I'm not aware of, but as far as I know, that's still where we kind of draw the line.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

In health-wise, what are

Common Senior Illnesses To Watch

SPEAKER_00 2:00

some signs that your pet is Asian? Because I know there's some older dogs and they're they're quite athletic and playful, but what does it mean to you to see like an elderly pet?

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Well, as I as I tell my kids, right? And and I mean I've got so much white in my beard now that I have children older than the doctors that I hire. So I have been around a while and I've seen some things, and as I tell my children, age is not a disease. They keep looking at me like it's you know time to put me out to pasture. Age isn't a disease, but with advancing age, things certainly can start to break down and and go wrong. So we see more cancer situations. We certainly see things like the arthritides, arthritis, whether it's in the hips or the shoulders or the elbows, are very painful. Um to sometimes organ dysfunction is of course we always think of, or most of us think of cats and kidney disease as being just a uh a function of aging. Seems that cats like to try to outlive their kidneys, and you really can't do that very well. Um, so those are the big problems. We also see um heart problems. So going back to your uh what defines a senior, I would say that most cavaliers, as cute as those little spaniels are, are probably considered senior at six, just because of the propensity for valvular problems and and congestive heart failure in those dogs, really quite early. So it's not that they're necessarily so old, but they definitely require advanced or more in-depth vigilance. You're looking for more problems, you're paying closer attention to that pet, to its to its behaviors, to its respiratory patterns, which are things that most people don't pay attention to at all, to be quite honest, because nobody's taught you to do that.

What The ER Sees By Age

SPEAKER_00 3:59

So at the emergency clinic, do you not see as many senior pets because of you know the what kind of normal treatments you do? And if you do see them, is it because it's like an extreme circumstance, like a euthanasia request or something?

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Not necessarily. We have a pretty broad range, but we see different age categories for different problems, right? So we see very young puppies, those are typically going to be parvos, the contagious pneumonias, especially if they're coming from a pet store. We will see puppies of the toy breeds for a lot of hypoglycemia issues, low blood sugar, because they run around a lot, but if they don't eat, they don't have any storage tank to pull from, so they have problems. The middle-aged dogs, we see a lot of injuries, we see a lot of dog fights. There's some health problems like Addison's that we tend to see in middle-aged dogs. And in the advanced, the older dogs, we don't see quite as many dog fights. They certainly do get into them, but not typically as often. We see a lot of them for more complicated illnesses because a lot of them have got comorbidities. They come in because they've gotten into something and they're vomiting, but oh, as it turns out, we have some form of kidney dysfunction that we have to deal with. The the coughing poodle that comes in that has been coughing for a couple of months and we thought it was just bronchitis. And it turns out when we put the ultrasound probe on their lungs, their lungs are really wet because they've got pulmonary edema, water in the lungs, secondary to having congestive heart failure, and you know, nobody knew. So it is definitely a different set of diseases that we see in the older guys.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

And I know a challenge that we have as uh senior dog owners of labs, American Lab and the English lab, is that you know, you try to find that balance. You don't want to put them under too much stress or or make them, you know, it's not just about saving money, it's about giving them like a very nice, peaceful, you know, fun life, but we still need to get them checked out. I mean, what do you recommend

Why Twice Yearly Vet Visits

SPEAKER_00 6:04

that's not too much? Because I mean they're pretty senior.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

I think that the most veterinarians would recommend that instead of the annual checkup that once you hit that senior spot that you get seen twice a year. I mean, if you think about it, if we use the old adage, it's not really true, but it works well enough, right? That the dog ages seven years for every one of ours. Well, if you take your dog in to see your veterinarian every six months, that's like you going to your own physician once every three and a half years. And most of us would agree that even as relatively healthy adults, we probably should be seeing our physician at least once a year. So I'm not saying you need to take them in monthly, but I think that touching base and having conversations about more subtle behavior changes makes sense. They don't necessarily need to be vaccinated, it doesn't need to necessarily have a procedure tied to it. Just an exam and a conversation. How's he or she getting up and moving around? Are we seeing any changes in food that would indicate we're having any kind of dental problems? Is there a heart murmur developing? Are they gaining weight? Are they losing weight? Uh, that's something that the veterinarians should be tracking that most pet owners don't is weight change until the day they wake up and they go, Oh, he's he's lost 20 pounds, which is great. I would love to lose 40, except when you start at 60 and you lose 20 and you get down to 40, that's 30% of your body weight. That's almost certainly not a desirable change. But if it happens gradually enough, people don't pick up on it. But if you've got somebody that's weighing them every six months, that certainly jumps out. So a lot of those things are kind of important to to track and to continue to have conversations.

Falls Slips And Home Safety

SPEAKER_00 7:54

And then are senior dogs and cats more prone to heat stroke and other things that they could be more sensitive than to than younger dogs?

SPEAKER_02 8:03

I don't know if they're more sensitive to to heat. The real thing that sensitizes animals to heat is their ability to breathe really well. And that's tied a lot to anatomy, which ties back to breeds and the relatively horrible things that people have done as we as we breed and develop these dog breeds that can't reproduce or breathe on their own. But senior dogs certainly are at risk of uh of falling, I hate to say falling and not being able to get up, right? But falling or slipping on slick surfaces because they've lost some muscle mass. And so when their legs start to slide out, they don't have the adductor strength to keep them in, especially next to pools. It's not typically the puppy that falls in the swimming pool, it's the older dog who either didn't see that it was coming because their vision has really degraded, or they slipped because it was raining or snowing, or it was icy, and they didn't have as good a control falling in. I would think those of, you know, thinking of my own backyard, those would be the risks.

Hidden Pain And The NSAID Clue

SPEAKER_02 9:12

You know, as Bubbles gets older, she has a harder time and hates moving on any kind of slick surface. Some of that is decreased muscle mass, some of that probably is some arthritic problem that we don't necessarily recognize that she has. Dogs almost never complain about hip pain, they just move really slowly. And one of the things that we've done for decades is what we call the Remidil response test. Now, nobody really uses, well, I don't use Remidil anymore. I use the knockoff, I use the generic carprofen. But if you take an older dog and you put them on a safe NSAID, and you do that twice a day, or in the case of Gallup, once a day, and you do that for seven days, and your dog acts like he's four years younger, well, NSAIDs are not some kind of fountain of youth. They don't make me any younger, and they don't make my dog any younger. But if they make my dog feel that much younger, there was a lot of pain present that I was not appreciating as a dog owner. If Remedel makes your dog run faster and for longer, and it makes him feel like he's a puppy again and he keeps up with the younger dog much better, then we had a problem before that we weren't addressing. And long-term EDS or some other strategy to help an arthritic problem we didn't recognize is going to be important.

Exams Screening Questions And Closing

SPEAKER_00 10:42

I was also curious what you recommend then for our senior pets to identify that they might have a health issue or they're suffering and pain because they are pretty stoic a lot of the time. We can't tell until it's extreme, you know, that oh my gosh, they weren't feeling well this whole time. Is there a recommendation that you have for like how often they maybe should get a blood test or a urine? What should be checked and that more often?

SPEAKER_02 11:04

The very least, but yet the most important, is simply having an exam by your veterinarian every six months that is thorough, that helps identify those problems, and you know, gives them an opportunity to ask questions that you may not have thought of about how well are they sleeping, how well are they eating, has their tolerance for walking decreased? Um, you know, that can point to could point to an arthritic problem, also could point to some forms of heart disease. Do they get winded? Do they start coughing if they exercise quite a bit? Those are things that they may ask based on what they find on physical exams that pet owners wouldn't know to even start to consider or think about because you're not, as pet owners, not trained to think in those kinds of ways, but you're also not trained to listen to dog hearts and try to detect murmurs, and that's kind of what we do. So it's a very important part of especially general practice, is examine those dogs, and the more frequently they see your dogs, the better they know your dogs and recognize say, hey, this is different than it was the last time I saw your dog. This wasn't like this. So yeah, I think that's a real valuable to build that relationship and building the relationship just like any other relationship requires putting the time in and letting your dog know you're a veterinarian and and even more importantly, vice versa.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Yeah, well, thank you so much, Doctor. Um, you know, senior pets deserve all the love and support we can give them. We appreciate you.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Yes, ma'am. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Thank you for listening to the Frisco Emergency Pet Care Podcast. To learn more, visit FriscoPetER.com. Call 469-287-6767. Or stop by 11201 Preston Road, Frisco, Texas, 75033. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Frisco Emergency Pet Care is always here when your pet needs us most. Until next time, take care of your pets, and they'll take care of you.