My name is Louisa Oneill. I have spent my whole life with animals.
Sixty years of experience with dogs and other animals.
I grew up in Blacktown, in Sydney’s west, around horses. The stray dogs in the area worked out fairly quickly which child would feed them, and they used to follow me home. I fed them off my own plate. My mother had opinions about this. The dogs kept coming anyway.
Later I lived on a hobby farm, where I bred horses and kept a lot of animals, dogs among them. Over the years I have owned a wolfhound, a Jack Russell terrier, and several rottweilers and dobermans — which is a fairly wide spread of size, temperament and, as it turns out, health problems. These days I live on the Gold Coast in Queensland with two purebred toy poodles, who I adore and who are considerably more spoiled than the Blacktown strays ever were.
That is more than sixty years of working with animals: feeding and nutrition, grooming, managing illness, insect and tick prevention, injuries, and breeding. I am also a qualified groomer and I ran my own dog grooming business at one point.
I know alot about dogs but I’m not a vet.
Everything I know I learned by doing it. Decades of it, across a lot of animals, in a lot of conditions. That is a real kind of knowledge and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
However, I am not a veterinarian, and I do not hold a veterinary or naturopathic qualification. Nothing on this site is veterinary advice, and nothing here can diagnose your dog. If your dog is unwell, the person who needs to see it is your vet. What I can do is help you understand what you are looking at, ask better questions, and know which things are worth trying and which are nonsense.
What my site is for
Search for some dog health question in Australia and you will land on an American website, and an american site has no knowledge of australian conditions.
American sites do not know about paralysis ticks, because Ixodes holocyclus does not exist in America. They do not know about cane toads, or brown snakes, or what a Queensland summer does to a dog, or which of our native plants will poison one. They recommend products you cannot buy here at prices that do not apply. Their tick advice is written for a completely different tick.
Meanwhile vet bills have gone up, most Australian dogs are uninsured, and a lot of people are quietly trying to manage things at home that they would rather take to a vet. Those people deserve better than a website written for someone else’s country.
How I write this site
- Your vet comes first. On anything serious, I will tell you to go, and I will tell you early rather than at the bottom of the page.
- When the evidence is weak, I say so. Plenty of natural remedies have very little behind them. You will not find me pretending a thing works better than it does — including things I use myself.
- When something doesn’t work, I say that too. There is no natural prevention for paralysis tick that I would trust with a dog’s life, and I have written that plainly even though it sits awkwardly on a site like this one.
- Australian products, Australian prices, Australian conditions. If I mention something, you can buy it here.
- If I earn a commission from a link, it will say so at the top of the page.
Getting in touch
I am always happy to hear from people, and I read everything. If there is a topic you want covered, or something on the site that isn’t clear, or you think I have got something wrong — please tell me. Being corrected is how this site gets better.
One thing I can’t do, and I hope you’ll understand why: I can’t tell you what is wrong with your dog, or what to give it. That is a veterinarian’s job, and anyone who offers to do it over the internet without examining your animal is doing you a disservice. General questions about topics on this site, I will always try to help with. A sick dog needs a vet.
Natural Dogs Australia is general information only and is not veterinary advice. It is not a substitute for examination, diagnosis or treatment by a registered veterinarian. In an emergency, contact your vet or an after-hours animal emergency centre immediately.