Rating: 
Summary: The Dog Owners Home Veterinary Handbook
Review: An incredible resource. This excellent book provides dog owners with a wealth of practical, accurate information to help guide reactions to symptoms. We now go to the vet much more informed, and are also able to better appreciate the care the vet gives. The section on poisons is extremely helpful, giving the nefarious and varied symptoms good description, and offering effective home remedies which add valuable time to you getting your pet into treatment. All dog owners should own, and read thoroughly, this book.
Rating:
Summary: Best Home Vet Book
Review: Explains in enough detail without getting overly technical. Really helpful in coming up with questions for the vet in follow-up care, and in explaining what's going on in your sick dog. This is a must-have for intelligent dog owners who want to be educated veterinary health care consumers but aren't vets themselves. It could be stronger in nutrition, but otherwise near perfect.
Rating:
Summary: Undeniably the best
Review: I am continually amazed by the ability of the authors of this book to present clear and pithy, yet absolutely comprehensive, information about what seems to be the entire gamut of doggy afflictions. I have consulted it on numerous occasions and have always found answers, which were later confirmed by my vet. It's not just good science, this book is a model of how to process and present information to a reading audience. It's good stuff.
Rating:
Summary: An Invaluable Reference Book
Review: I have found this book to be a wonderful resource! There are lots of pictures and illustrations in addition to simple, down-to-earth descriptions that give you more information about diagnoses your vet has made, common ailments your pet may have, and treatment options. There's also a handy First Aid Section, useful index, and glossary to help you better understand your dog's health. I refer to this book OFTEN.
Rating:
Summary: You can learn so much from this book!
Review: I love learning about dogs. I could never have too much dog knowledge. I crave it. I want to be a veterinarian and there is so much I want to learn about dog veterinary medicine. I don't want to wait for vet school! I'm already learning now. I soak up veterinary information like a sponge.
So since I am like obsessed with vet learning, I read this book heavily. I love having such a comprehensive book sitting on the shelf and available to me whenever the mood strikes me to do some learning. I seriously read it like a text book.
Soooooo all I'm saying is if you want something that tells all about diseases in dogs and how to prevent and treat them, this book will tell ya quite a bit. And it's quite easy to find stuff in it too! Least I think so anyway :)
Rating: 
Summary: The first aid information is almost useless
Review: I was very disappointed with this book, but I suppose it serves a certain purpose. I went to several bookstores looking for a first aid guide for dogs, and this seems to be the standard offering. It includes information about first aid, but it isn't suitable for use in a first aid situation. Instead, it's more of a book for bathroom readers and do-it-yourselfers. I really don't know why the authors chose to include first aid in this book. It must have been for the sake of comprehensiveness -- they must have included it not so it would be useful, but so no one would ask why it was missing. First of all, the pictures are a joke. They're small, they're in black-and-white, and if you don't read the captions, you can't even tell what you're looking at. When you have an injured dog to take care of, you don't want to make decisions based on Rorschach blobs. Clear drawings or _very_ well done color photos are standard for presenting human first aid methods. Second, the decision flowcharts are unhelpful. After looking at several of them, I can't imagine using them in an emergency. Try to answer this question: "Is the dog in distress?" Huh? Some dogs seem to be in distress 24/7. Others will injure themselves without complaint if they think it pleases you. Can you imagine trying to translate the word "distress" into concrete terms while your dog is bleeding? The word might have a precise definition elsewhere in the book, but a good first aid guide doesn't require you to do research in the middle of an emergency. Third, I failed in ten minutes of looking to locate information on the simple injury that brought to my attention my need for such a book. My dog's paws swelled up and started to peel after our first run in summer heat. Strangely, the index didn't send me to a central place for paw injuries. It seems that you have to have a tentative diagnosis before you can find any information. I looked up "blisters" and didn't find anything. I flipped through the book trying to pick up a sense of the organization, which led me to some first aid pages but no information about paws. It turned out that his injuries were burns, a common paw injury that would deserve a place in a book a fifth the size of this one. The information must be in the book somewhere -- how could it be missing from a book that includes abortion, cancer, and geriatrics? -- but I could not diagnose the problem until I put this book down and sought information elsewhere. (By human first aid standards, the authors of this book have bungled a well-understood task, but by dog first aid standards, they might be pretty good, for all I know. All the other books I found with dog first aid information suffered from similar problems, and none were half as useful as a typical human guide. Dozens of excellent first aid guides are available for humans, ranging from useful twenty-page pamphlets produced with line drawings and basic vocabulary to professional manuals larger than this book. Why can't I find a single well done, up-to-date first aid guide for dogs? If I recall correctly, _The Home Pet Vet Guide: Dogs_ was well illustrated and well organized, but it hasn't been updated in twenty years. Another book that I haven't been able to examine, but which sounds promising, is _Dog First Aid Emergency Care for the Hunting, Working, and Outdoor Dog_.) Despite my disappointment with the first aid aspect of the book, I considered buying it anyway for the other veterinary information. I decided against it, since I already have a guide to basic care. I just couldn't imagine myself using it. It may be interesting to read about whelping, but if your dog were about to have puppies, would you really rely on this book, or would you buy a more specialized one? If your dog develops cancer, will you rely on the copy of _Dog Owner's Home Veterinary Handbook_ that's been on your bookshelf for three years, or will you seek a newer, more focused source of information? Or will you trust your vet? The truth is that while there's lots of information in this book, it mostly provides interesting but ultimately insufficient chunks of information. A whole page devoted to a rare disorder might seem like an impressive amount of detail, but it's pointless until your dog develops that disorder. Then that page becomes useful, but it also becomes absurdly inadequate. And it hardly needs to be said that a six hundred page book won't enable you to accurately diagnose your dog or second-guess your vet. A textbook for an undergraduate physiology course -- which most vets take before they enter veterinary school -- contains as much information as this guide (and much more lavish illustrations to boot). If you don't want to take your dog to the vet and are too lazy to study real vet school texts and veterinary reference books, or if you enjoy trivia, or if you want to annoy your vet with half-informed theories about your dog's maladies, then this is the book for you. If you have already have plenty on your reading list and just want a guide for basic care and emergencies, I'm sorry to say I haven't yet found the right book.
Rating:
Summary: The first aid information is almost useless
Review: I was very disappointed with this book, but I suppose it serves a certain purpose. I went to several bookstores looking for a first aid guide for dogs, and this seems to be the standard offering. It includes information about first aid, but it isn't suitable for use in a first aid situation. Instead, it's more of a book for bathroom readers and do-it-yourselfers. I really don't know why the authors chose to include first aid in this book. It must have been for the sake of comprehensiveness -- they must have included it not so it would be useful, but so no one would ask why it was missing. First of all, the pictures are a joke. They're small, they're in black-and-white, and if you don't read the captions, you can't even tell what you're looking at. When you have an injured dog to take care of, you don't want to make decisions based on Rorschach blobs. Clear drawings or _very_ well done color photos are standard for presenting human first aid methods. Second, the decision flowcharts are unhelpful. After looking at several of them, I can't imagine using them in an emergency. Try to answer this question: "Is the dog in distress?" Huh? Some dogs seem to be in distress 24/7. Others will injure themselves without complaint if they think it pleases you. Can you imagine trying to translate the word "distress" into concrete terms while your dog is bleeding? The word might have a precise definition elsewhere in the book, but a good first aid guide doesn't require you to do research in the middle of an emergency. Third, I failed in ten minutes of looking to locate information on the simple injury that brought to my attention my need for such a book. My dog's paws swelled up and started to peel after our first run in summer heat. Strangely, the index didn't send me to a central place for paw injuries. It seems that you have to have a tentative diagnosis before you can find any information. I looked up "blisters" and didn't find anything. I flipped through the book trying to pick up a sense of the organization, which led me to some first aid pages but no information about paws. It turned out that his injuries were burns, a common paw injury that would deserve a place in a book a fifth the size of this one. The information must be in the book somewhere -- how could it be missing from a book that includes abortion, cancer, and geriatrics? -- but I could not diagnose the problem until I put this book down and sought information elsewhere. (By human first aid standards, the authors of this book have bungled a well-understood task, but by dog first aid standards, they might be pretty good, for all I know. All the other books I found with dog first aid information suffered from similar problems, and none were half as useful as a typical human guide. Dozens of excellent first aid guides are available for humans, ranging from useful twenty-page pamphlets produced with line drawings and basic vocabulary to professional manuals larger than this book. Why can't I find a single well done, up-to-date first aid guide for dogs? If I recall correctly, _The Home Pet Vet Guide: Dogs_ was well illustrated and well organized, but it hasn't been updated in twenty years. Another book that I haven't been able to examine, but which sounds promising, is _Dog First Aid Emergency Care for the Hunting, Working, and Outdoor Dog_.) Despite my disappointment with the first aid aspect of the book, I considered buying it anyway for the other veterinary information. I decided against it, since I already have a guide to basic care. I just couldn't imagine myself using it. It may be interesting to read about whelping, but if your dog were about to have puppies, would you really rely on this book, or would you buy a more specialized one? If your dog develops cancer, will you rely on the copy of _Dog Owner's Home Veterinary Handbook_ that's been on your bookshelf for three years, or will you seek a newer, more focused source of information? Or will you trust your vet? The truth is that while there's lots of information in this book, it mostly provides interesting but ultimately insufficient chunks of information. A whole page devoted to a rare disorder might seem like an impressive amount of detail, but it's pointless until your dog develops that disorder. Then that page becomes useful, but it also becomes absurdly inadequate. And it hardly needs to be said that a six hundred page book won't enable you to accurately diagnose your dog or second-guess your vet. A textbook for an undergraduate physiology course -- which most vets take before they enter veterinary school -- contains as much information as this guide (and much more lavish illustrations to boot). If you don't want to take your dog to the vet and are too lazy to study real vet school texts and veterinary reference books, or if you enjoy trivia, or if you want to annoy your vet with half-informed theories about your dog's maladies, then this is the book for you. If you have already have plenty on your reading list and just want a guide for basic care and emergencies, I'm sorry to say I haven't yet found the right book.
Rating:
Summary: Absolute must for every dog lover....
Review: Once in a while a book comes along which in the field of practical applications... is a real treasure. This is one of those books. Full of photos and easy to read text, not to mention helpful advice, "this is it"-- for the dog owner who really cares. It will not turn you completely from being independent of your vet, but it will help in determining which symptoms and cases where you would just have to run to him. For example, in the section "Intestines", it describes the most common irregularities, like diarrhea, the color, consistency, odor, frequency, condition of dog, common causes, and finally the treatment section. And it does not stop there. It will then give related problems about the intestines, from malabsorption syndromes to colitis, obstructions, constipation, voluntary retention, mechanical blockage, damaged nerves, flatulence and coprophagia (yeech!), et.al. And that is just a section, as I said, under Intestines. Whether you have one dog, or several kennels, professional breeder, backyard breeder, or no breeder at all, and just interested in the well-being of man's best friend, it will turn you from a feeling of uncertainty into a confident owner. It's the "leash" you can do. This revised and expanded edition is one of my prime sources of information regarding the health of my dogs. It will save the owner, as it has saved me from needless worries, (or make it worse, depending really on the personality of the owner), and a lot of expenses. Read it, you'll like it.
Rating: 
Summary: UNREADABLE JARGON-FILLED TEXTBOOK
Review: Over the years I've bought practically every dog health book available and I can say unequivocally that this is the worst one on my shelf. I assume people buy The Dog Owner's Veterinary Handbook because it seems encyclopedic. And on one level (its heft) it is. But when you actually try to read the thing, you'll discover it's basically an unreadable veterinary school textbook from the late 1960s.
The book is filled with jargon; page after page of tiny type; headlines with such names as "Bullous Pemphigoid" and "Lupus Erythematosus Complex" (I'm not kidding); and small hideous black-and-white photos with captions that are utterly perplexing (one example: "This Shar-Pei puppy's eyelids have been everted with temporary sutures. This may correct the entropion without need for permanent surgery"). In short, this book is deadly.
For my money, the best book of this type out there today is the Hound Health Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Keeping Your Dog Happy, Healthy, and Active. Written by a vet (Betsy Brevitz), and 554-pages long, it too is comprehensive---but in sharp contrast to the Dog Owner's Home Veterinarian Handbook, the Hound Health Handbook is actually readable, smart, and well-designed (it uses hundreds of real-life Q&As organized by subject).
Rating:
Summary: Terrific and concise
Review: Terrific and concise vet handbook, listing canine symptoms. Helps diagnose the problem, without getting too technical. Arlene Millman, author of BOOMERANG - A MIRACLE TRILOGY (The tale of a remarkable Boston Terrier).
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