DEAR DR. FOX: We have a 2-year-old indoor house cat. She was the sweetest thing for the first 1 1/2 year or so, but in the last six months, she has developed hyperesthesia.

Her back ripples, she bites at it and she tears like a crazed cat all around the house. It has changed her personality. Before this, she was the most social cat I had ever seen -- she wanted to be with us and was happy and playful. Now she is haunted.

Nothing changed in her life. She is still the only cat. We are an older couple without children in the house. Life is very routine, calm and ordered. She does have herpes, and we stopped giving her lysine, which may have helped just a little for a while -- or maybe we just wanted it to help. I don't know.

I do know that it is hard for me to accept that there is nothing that can be done for this poor little cat. I hope you might have some better news for me than I can glean on the Internet. -- T.O., Oklahoma City

DEAR T.O.: I have addressed this bizarre condition in this column, and you will find some answers on my website, DrFoxVet.com. But we need to work together on this because there are no simple solutions. Hearing from other readers who have found ways to alleviate this condition would be appreciated.

Sometimes we miss the obvious culprits that we think are safe, such as certain cat litters, chemical floor cleaners, room fragrance sprays and diffusers, laundry detergent, tick drugs and my personal worst offender -- flea collars!

Next, consider her diet and a possible food allergy or hypersensitivity. Check some of the better cat foods on my website and also my home-prepared recipe for cats.

The skin is a reactive surface to not only environmental allergens and toxic chemicals, which can harm cats' livers and kidneys, but can be an indicator of nutritional deficiencies, especially in omega-3 fatty acids, and intolerance to certain food ingredients.

Removing all fish from one of our cat's diet helped reduce his excessive grooming and evident skin hypersensitivity. The herb catnip also calms him down, as can a low dose of Valium or valerian root. Discuss this with your veterinarian and also the possibility of hyperactive thyroid disease, which will call for a blood test.

There are nutritional supplements that can have a calming effect in humans and other animals, including dogs and cats. PetzLife's @-Eaze, which contains L-Theanine, is one of several calming natural supplements on the market that I would urge you to try.

Keep me informed as to your progress with your poor cat so we can help others overcome this distressing malady.

ANIMAL FATALITIES ON AIRPLANES

The Department of Transportation has released its annual list of animal fatalities on United States airlines.

U.S. airlines reported 17 animal fatalities and 26 injuries in 2014, according to full-year data released by the Department of Transportation. United Airlines reported the most deaths and injuries, five and 13 respectively, followed by Alaska Airlines, which had three animal deaths and 11 injuries.

Most of the injuries involved dogs and cats bloodied and hurt as they tried to escape from their cages, and many of the fatality reports involved animals that managed to escape from transport cages and were hit by vehicles at airports. Other major causes of death were underlying health conditions aggravated by the stress of travel.

From 2010 to 2013, Delta Airlines reported the greatest number of incidents of animals who died, were injured or lost during travel, followed closely by Alaska. Some airlines do not accept short-nosed or snub-nosed dogs such as pugs and English bulldogs because the stress of flight is particularly acute for those breeds.

(Send all mail to animaldocfox@gmail.com or to Dr. Michael Fox in care of Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106. The volume of mail received prohibits personal replies, but questions and comments of general interest will be discussed in future columns.

Visit Dr. Fox's website at DrFoxVet.com.)

DEAR DR. FOX: Some 50 years ago, we adopted a dog from a family who was going to destroy her. We agreed to have her for a week and see how it worked out. Tammy was about a year old and already spayed. In those days, dogs were not required to have shots or a license.

All her life, we fed our Tammy Daily Dog Food from the A&P. She lived to be 19 and never saw the inside of a vet's office until her final visit, when it was obviously time to say goodbye. I seriously doubt whether better nutrition would have prolonged her life or made it any healthier. -- B.B., Fairfield, Connecticut

DEAR B.B.: Fifty years ago, manufactured dog foods contained mainly whole-food ingredients rather than ever more highly processed and denatured human food and beverage industry byproducts, additives and preservatives. The food had very few -- if any -- pesticide residues, and certainly no genetically modified organisms. While they were often too high in grains, they came from better soils than the nutrient-deficient ones of today.

Most crops that are not certified organic now come from depleted soils and finish up on our plates and in pet foods. Most dogs adapted to the high cereal content, along with table scraps, which were generally plentiful when most folks cooked meals from scratch. The composition of dog food was also low in fine particle processed gluten/lectin elements from highly processed grains, which can harm dogs' dental health and cause digestive and intestinal problems.

Fifty years ago, there were fewer pure breeds and "designer dogs," whose genetics now call for special diets, opening up the field of nutrigenomics and the pet food industry's lucrative special prescription diets market. Annual veterinary wellness evaluations are now called for, especially for pure breeds. As for vaccinations, much suffering from distemper and parvovirus has been greatly reduced in the canine population, though some pure breeds in particular have occasional, serious adverse reactions, called vaccinosis.

Veterinary hospitals, boarding kennels and groomers' insistence on up-to-date full vaccination records and vaccination regulations against rabies have certainly helped reduce the incidence of contagious canine diseases, but it brings with it various health problems.

DEAR DR. FOX: After Christmas, we took our 13-year-old Labrador-Rottweiler mix for her yearly checkup. We've been going to this office for approximately three years. I questioned the vet regarding my dog, Reille, getting the rabbi (sic) shot due to her age, but went ahead since the vet said it wouldn't bother her (and she said it was the law). A week later, Reille had a huge lump in the location where the shot was given. The vet says the big lump was a tumor and not a cyst, as I thought. She thought the tumor was cancerous, but said she'd have to get a biopsy to know for sure. We decided not to have the biopsy due to her age.

Could the shot have caused this mass? Now she has difficulty walking. She also sleeps all the time, but she still eats a lot and goes outside to potty.

I'm just concerned that this was caused by the shot. Can you clarify for me? -- D.G., Fenton, Missouri

DEAR D.G.: First, let me correct your error and give an amusing anecdote: It is "rabies," not "rabbi." At an international conference in Boston in the 1980s, where I gave a lecture on animal rights and the horrors of factory farming, an Indian veterinarian gave a lecture discussing rabies in India and said several times, "we are fighting rabbis and we must eradicate rabbis." He was disconcerted when some people began to laugh, but apologized when the moderator intervened and gave him the correct pronunciation.

I regret the experience that you and your old dog have gone through with this vaccination, which is mandatory under the law, but can be given every three years rather than annually. The injection site the veterinarian used is not unusual, but the reaction is. It could be a rare cancer called a fibrosarcoma, which is more common but still of low incidence, at the vaccine injection site. Fibrosarcoma tends to occur more often in cats than dogs.

Sorry to give you the probable bad news, which only a biopsy will confirm.

MORE PET FOOD & TREAT ISSUES

-- The Food and Drug Administration just released a jerky treat investigation update. For more than eight years, pets have been dying and sickened from Chinese jerky treats, and the FDA still can't determine why. The "adverse event reports" total more than "5,800 dogs, 25 cats, three people, and include more than 1,000 canine deaths."

-- J.J. Fuds expanded the list of pet food products it is recalling because of potential contamination with salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes. The recall now covers all products and lots of J.J. Fuds Beef Tender Chunks, Chicken Tender Chunks and Duckling Tender Chunks pet foods. The affected products were distributed to wholesale and retail stores in Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

-- A nationwide class-action lawsuit was recently filed in California charging Nestle Purina with breach of warranty, negligence and negligent misrepresentation (among other things). Visit truthaboutpetfood.com/class-action-lawsuit-filed-against-beneful-dog-food/ for more information.

(Send all mail to animaldocfox@gmail.com or to Dr. Michael Fox in care of Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106. The volume of mail received prohibits personal replies, but questions and comments of general interest will be discussed in future columns.

Visit Dr. Fox's website at DrFoxVet.com.)

DEAR DR. FOX: My cousin has a 7-year-old poodle, Norman, who weighs about 20 pounds. She got him from a shelter, and he suffers from an enlarged heart, collapsed trachea and chronic cough. Her vet prescribes Vetmedin, hydrocodone and a diuretic. Norman will not take the medicine unless he is quite hungry, so he is not being given as many snacks as he is used to.

The vet says that Norman is not in pain, and he has been coughing all of his life. But he does cough a lot, and it is hard to believe that his throat is not raw. What do you think?

Also, the vet says that if Norman goes to a specialist, the specialist will merely tell my cousin the same thing that she tells her. -- P.K., House Springs, Missouri

DEAR P.K.: Sorry, I have nothing to add. This is a fragile breed with inherited anomalies, human-created through selective breeding. In my professional opinion, the attending veterinarian is on the right track.

Note: Never put a leash on the dog's collar; only walk outside with a harness so there are no more traumas to the weak trachea.

DEAR DR. FOX: My husband and I are responsible for approximately 20 cats, most of whom are strays we have fixed, fed and sheltered for 8 years. One female, Charlotte, is 2 1/2 years old. She was spayed when she was a kitten by the same spay and neuter clinic that has taken care of all our cats.

A year ago, she started to exhibit signs that she was going into heat. She yowls, rolls around and urinates all over the house, which is something she never does at other times. This has happened two more times, months apart. We took her to the vet, where they did almost $300 worth of tests to rule out other problems, but never found anything. We were told that when she was spayed, they must have missed a cell and that she would need another surgery to find it. I have never heard of an animal not being completely fixed. Can this really be what is going on, and can it be corrected? We worry about another surgery. -- A.O., Jackson, New Jersey

DEAR A.O.: It is very rare, fortunately, but it does happen that after a cat's ovaries have been removed, the surge of stimulating hormones from the pituitary gland in the brain can awaken possibly embryonic, aberrant ovarian cells, sometimes located around the kidneys or around the tissues supporting where the ovaries were situated.

In some instances, these aggregations of cells can be located and removed, but that calls for major surgery. The alternative is to seize your cat by the scruff of the neck and gently stimulate her genital area with an ear swab. This may put her into a hormonally more quiescent state of false pregnancy. The alternative is to have her given progesterone, but no hormonal treatment is without health risks.

ANOTHER DOG REMOTE-SENSING IN THE "EMPATHOSPHERE"

Sissy, an 11-year-old miniature schnauzer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, ended up at Mercy Medical Center, 20 blocks from her home where her co-owner, Nancy Frank, was recovering from cancer surgery. A surveillance camera in the hospital lobby caught the dog entering through the automatic doors and wandering around.

Husband Dale Frank finally got a call at 5:30 a.m. from a security officer who found his phone number and house address from the tag on Sissy's collar. Frank's daughter went over and got permission to take Sissy up to Nancy Frank for a few minutes, he said. His theory about how Sissy might have navigated 20 blocks to his wife was that Sissy used to ride with him to pick up his wife from work next door to the hospital, though they'd never walked that route before. I disagree with this theory, because Sissy's story is like that of the 7-year-old Samoyed-husky mix, Dolan, who made a hazardous 2-mile journey from his home to the hospital in Islip, New York, to be with his ailing human companion, and he had never been near that hospital before. These canine feats support my "empathosphere" theory that animals can enter this realm of feeling-seeing or remote sensing consciousness and navigate on the basis of their emotional connectedness. Many such instances are documented on my website, DrFoxVet.com, and in my book "Animals & Nature First."

(Send all mail to animaldocfox@gmail.com or to Dr. Michael Fox in care of Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106. The volume of mail received prohibits personal replies, but questions and comments of general interest will be discussed in future columns.

Visit Dr. Fox's website at DrFoxVet.com.)