Jill Bowen

Jill Bowen has practiced veterinary medicine in England and Texas and has taught at Texas A&M. She lives with her veterinarian husband and two cats in Blacksburg. If you have a question, please write to her in care of The Roanoke Times, P.O. Box 540, Christiansburg, VA 24068, or send an e-mail to mjbowen@radford.edu

Recent columns

• Invisible fences aren’t best option for every dog
• Wrap pets in protection this holiday season
• Take treats so horse associates you with something good
• Illness or change in environment may cause cat to stop using litter box
• Column archive

My cat likes to jump up on the kitchen counter. I don't mind, but my mother says it is unhygienic and I should stop him. What do you think?

There are a number of reasons that cats should be discouraged from walking on the kitchen counters. Traces of urine and feces remain on their paws after trips to the litter box, and that could contaminate any food you are preparing.

Cats like to sit up high so they can see what is going on, so offer somewhere else for your cat to sit, such as a window perch. Do not leave food on the counters, clean up promptly and put unused food away. Clean the countertops with a citrus-based spray, as cats do not like the smell of citrus or pine.

Cats are smart and can easily learn the words "no" and "off," especially if they get a small reward when they respond correctly.

Some people use booby traps to deter cats from jumping onto the counter. These can include shallow foil trays filled with water, upside down mousetraps and precariously piled empty soda cans. When the cat jumps up, a squirt from a water gun, a blast from an air horn or shaking a can of pebbles will distract it and act as a deterrent. It is important to do this as soon as the cat's feet touch the counter. Try to make sure the cat doesn't see you, the idea being that the cat thinks that it is the counter making the noise.

Of course when you are not at home, most cats will hop up onto the counters to have a look around, so it is a good idea to wipe off all the surfaces before starting any food preparation.

* * *

While in the dentist's waiting room, I saw an article about dogs diagnosing cancer. This seemed rather unlikely. Have you heard anything about this ability?

We all have body odor to a great or lesser extent, and this odor is unique to each person. Cancer smells, and apparently the smell is so strong that some dogs can be trained to detect its peculiar odor.

As a cancer grows, it causes a breakdown of certain cells and an inflammatory reaction. This causes a change in the constituents in the body fluids such as urine, sweat and saliva with an associated change in their smell. This change can also be detected on exhaled breath.

Dogs have a keen sense of smell and have been used for hundreds of years to hunt and find lost people, especially children. More recently, dogs have been used to find people buried following earthquakes. among other things.

In 2005, research workers in Portugal demonstrated that dogs could detect these subtle odor changes in the breath of cancer patients, especially breast cancer and lung cancer. In 2004, the British Medical Journal published a report that six dogs had been trained to detect bladder cancer from urine samples. In 2006, after three weeks of training, five dogs were trained to detect cancer both from exhaled breath and urine samples. Later, in a double blind study, the dogs were 99 percent accurate with lung cancer, 88 percent accurate with breast cancer and more than 50 percent accurate with bladder cancer, including one of the controls who was subsequently found to have early bladder cancer.

This research is very much in the early stages, but it does look very promising not only for the early detection of cancer but also for other conditions where cell degradation occurs such as organ-transplant rejection and tuberculosis.