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June is National Pet Adoption Month. And while a new home can be traumatic for a pet, compared with ancient Egypt, well, we’ve come a long way, baby. A new study published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology on March 24 revealed the physical violence inflicted on wild animals captured by the elite and used as pets.

Injuries in children due to metal landscape edging (metal strips half-buried in the ground to edge lawns) have been previously documented. A 2001 study showed that over a two-year period, 126 children were admitted to the Children’s Hospital in Denver for lacerations caused by metal lawn edging, mostly to the feet and knees. But what about the risk to pets? The danger of metal landscape edging to animals has not been documented until now. A new study shows that the sharp-edged landscaping tool also poses a risk of injury to dogs. Amanda Duffy, DVM, DACVECC, led the study while at Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital (VTH). Her team looked at the frequency and severity of limb injuries in dogs resulting from contact with metal edging. Over a 10 year period, the VTH admitted 60 dogs that fit the conditions for the study. These 60 dogs accounted for nearly one-third of all paw injuries at the VTH’s emergency service, according to the study.

The patient was small: a one-year-old female Burmese cat named Vanilla Bean. The diagnosis was big: a rare congenital heart defect found in children. The solution was unusual: a human cardiology team who guided the veterinary surgeon through a delicate surgery rarely performed on cats due to their size. The University of California at Davis (UC Davis) announced the success of the surgery on May 14.

A report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on May 1 concluded that Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, was present in a blood sample collected from a man hospitalized with pneumonia last summer in Colorado. The source of the illness appears to be his dog.

There could soon be a new weapon in the fight against canine cancer. Researchers at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine are set to begin testing of an anti-cancer drug in dogs this fall. University of Missouri Assistant Professor of Oncology Kimberly Selting, DVM, DACVIM, will lead the research. Selting said the clinical trial will include 15 dogs, and she will start enrolling patients in mid-October. “The study will allow any dog with a confirmed diagnosis of cancer, and that has a tumor that is still measureable,” Selting said. “We will note if any particular cancers respond better than others and that will help us design the next phase of this clinical research, knowing which kinds of cancer to target. In people, taxanes are used often for lung and intestinal cancers, as well as breast and other cancers.”

In the largest project of its kind, scientists at the University of Manchester have been using CT scans and X-rays to identify, noninvasively, what lurks below the surface of Ancient Egypt’s animal mummy cloths. The results surprised them. Of the 800 mummies scanned, one-third revealed no animal or skeletal remains. (Another third contained complete animals, and another third contained partial animals.)

Catch up on the latest pet and veterinary news from the last week. In this update: researchers try to improve police dogs' accuracy, the UK Kennel Club present best dog photography from 2016, a Neapolitan Mastiff wins the World's Ugliest Dog Contest, a dog's leg is saved by bone-growing technology, and a team uses dogs to try to find Amelia Earhart.

Catch up on the latest pet and veterinary news from the last week. In this update: Researchers find biomarkers for heart disease, pet startups grow in popularity, dogs boost owners' physical activity, and a CIA operation to create cat spies.

Catch up on the latest pet and veterinary news from the last week. In this update: people considered marijuana-derived treatments to soothe pets' nerves, the research that has been done on the benefits of therapy animals, and how a cat helped discover a new plastic.

In the veterinary school setting, various materials are used to simulate skin and muscle tissue in order for students to practice incisions and sutures. Practice materials have included raw chickens, rubber sheets, orange rinds and even pieces of carpet padding. Now, veterinarians from Colorado State University’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital (VTH) have created what they hope Is the best alternative to real tissue. VTH Director Dean Henderson, DVM, DACVS, and research scientist Fausto Bellezzo, DVM, invented a type of artificial tissue that simulates sections of animal anatomy including skin, muscle, fascia and even blood. "We had been concerned that the distance between the didactic training our students received and the first live animal surgery was too great,” Hendrickson said. “We felt like we needed something that might more closely mimic normal tissue in both characteristics and the ability to ‘bleed.’”