Breathing & Airways guides
Practical, veterinary-led guidance on Breathing & Airways, written by vets, free to read. View all guides
How to Give a Cat an Inhaler: The AeroKat Technique, Step by Step
Handing an owner an inhaler for their cat usually earns a long, doubtful pause. A cat. An inhaler. The picture that comes to mind is a wrestling match twice a day for the rest of the cat's life, and it's a fair thing to wonder. So let me say the reassuring part up front: cats...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Cat Having an Asthma Attack: What to Do Right Now
Read this paragraph first, then the rest. A cat breathing with its mouth open, or with blue, grey or very pale gums, or heaving hard from the belly to get air, is in a genuine emergency. Go to a vet now. Phone ahead if you can, but do not wait, do not dose from the...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Feline Asthma: The Complete Guide
Most cats reach a feline asthma diagnosis by a roundabout route. For months the cat does that thing, crouching low, neck stretched out, hacking away as if a hairball is finally on its way, and then nothing comes up. You clear the rug, you wait for the hairball that never appears, and you half-file it...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 13 min read
Chronic Bronchitis in Cats: The Close Cousin of Asthma
Asthma and chronic bronchitis get used almost interchangeably in the same conversation, and owners often leave a consult unsure whether they mean the same thing, two different things, or whether anyone is quite certain. It's a fair muddle to be in, and the answer is more interesting than a flat "they're different". Chronic bronchitis is...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Feline Asthma Medicines: The Controller, the Reliever and Why Inhaled Wins
A new asthma diagnosis usually sends you home holding an inhaler the colour of a child's toy and, often, a pot of small tablets. Somebody used words like "controller", "reliever", "steroids" and "lifelong", and by the time you're through the front door half of it has evaporated. So treat this page as the slow version...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Feline Asthma Triggers: Hunting the Things That Set Your Cat Off
Once the diagnosis is in and the inhaler routine has settled, almost every owner asks the same practical question next: what's setting it off, and can I do something about it at home? It's the right instinct. Feline asthma is, at heart, a problem of over-reactive airways, so the air your cat breathes all day...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Asthma or Hairball? How to Tell a Cough from a Coughing-Up
There is a sound most cat owners know by heart. Your cat flattens herself to the floor, stretches her neck out, and makes that awful hacking, retching noise, the one that always seems to end in a swallow or a gag. Every time, you think the same thing: here we go, another hairball. You wait...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Flat-Faced Dogs and Heatstroke: The Rules That Save Lives
For a flat-faced dog, heatstroke is not a hot-summer worry to file away for July. It is a fast, year-round killer, and the difference between a dog that recovers and a dog that doesn't is very often a few decisions an owner makes in the first few minutes, before any vet is involved. So here...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 13 min read
BOAS Surgery: Should We Operate, or Not?
Operate, or not. That is the question this piece is built around, and it's one of the harder ones in flat-faced medicine. Maybe your vet raised surgery after listening to your dog breathe, or maybe you've watched your Frenchie snore through the night and snuffle through every walk and gone looking yourself. Either way it's...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Flat-Faced Dog Breathing: Normal, or Dangerous?
You know the soundtrack already. The soft snore from the dog bed that everyone finds adorable. The little snort when they get excited at the door. The snuffle on a walk, the gulping and gurgling after a drink, the way they flop down propped against a cushion with their chin in the air. If you've...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Thinking of Getting a Flat-Faced Dog? An Honest Guide
There's a reason these dogs are everywhere. A French bulldog tilting its head at you, a pug leaning its whole weight into your shins, a bulldog snoring like a small engine on the sofa: they are funny, affectionate, devoted little companions, and the people who love them love them fiercely. So let me be clear...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Living With a Brachycephalic Dog: The Everyday Playbook
A good life for a flat-faced dog is built out of small, unglamorous, daily habits, and almost none of them cost anything. That is really the whole of this piece. There's no lecture coming about whether you should own the breed, because you already do and you already love the dog. So let's talk instead...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
BOAS Surgery: What It Involves and the Week-by-Week Recovery
Your flat-faced dog is booked in, or has just come home with a shaved patch on a leg and a slightly bewildered look. The practical questions follow quickly. What did the surgeon actually do in there? How worried should you be in these first couple of days, and when will you hear that easier breathing...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
How Bad Is My Dog's BOAS? Grading Explained, and What You Can Check at Home
The snoring, the snorting and the way your Frenchie flops down after a short walk aren't "just the breed", and the penny has dropped: this is effort, your dog working harder to breathe than they should have to. The first question is settled. The harder one is what brings you here now. How bad is...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
BOAS Explained: Why Your Flat-Faced Dog Struggles to Breathe
A pug, a French bulldog or an English bulldog comes with a soundtrack: the snore that fills the room, the snort coming back from a warm walk, the head propped up off the floor at night. It's easy to file all of that under "just the breed", and a lot of people do. I'd gently...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 10 min read
Stent or Medication? How to Think About the Tracheal Collapse Decision
The diagnosis is probably already made by the time you reach a page like this. Your small dog has a collapsing windpipe, the honking cough has a name, and someone, a vet, a forum, a worried part of your own head at two in the morning, has used the word stent. Now you're trying to...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Collapsing Trachea Explained: The Goose-Honk Cough
A small dog, often a little older, suddenly produces a cough so dry and harsh it genuinely sounds like a goose honking. It tends to land at the worst moments: when the doorbell goes, when they get over-excited, when they pull on the lead, or after a drink of water. The first time you hear...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Living With a Long-Term Cough: The Honest Long View
A long-term cough usually arrives with a name attached: collapsing trachea, or chronic bronchitis, or a bit of both. The diagnosis is in, the acute fright has passed, and your vet has started a plan. What the consult room rarely has time for is the question that comes next, once the dog is snoring beside...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Cough Flare-Up: How to Settle It, and When to Act
There's a difference between the cough you've learned to live with and the one that arrives tonight. The familiar one is dry and honking, a note you recognise and mostly manage. Tonight the bouts are closer together, the sound is harsher, and the smallest thing sets them off. The question that actually matters in that...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 10 min read
Canine Chronic Bronchitis: The Other Long-Term Cough
A small, greying dog who coughs most mornings, after a nap, the moment they get up to greet you at the door. Not a one-off, not a kennel-cough fortnight that came and went, but a cough that's become part of the furniture. If someone has said the words "chronic bronchitis" to you, maybe alongside "we've...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 10 min read
Calming a Chronic Cough at Home: The Daily Things That Genuinely Help
A dog with a collapsing windpipe, or a long-term cough of some other airway kind, usually comes home from the consult with a diagnosis explained and a tablet or two to give. Then the honking cough carries on punctuating the evening anyway, and the obvious question is what else there is to do. That question...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
GOLPP: Why Laryngeal Paralysis Is a Whole-Body Condition
A diagnosis of laryngeal paralysis in an older dog usually comes with three things: it's a problem with the voice box, the breathing can be helped, and there's an operation for it. All true. But it's only the first chapter of a longer story, and I'd rather you heard the whole thing from me, gently...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Laryngeal Paralysis Explained: Reading the First Signs in an Older Dog
Laryngeal paralysis usually creeps in so gently that you only see it looking back. The bark sounds a bit different first, hoarser or oddly quiet, as though your dog has a cold that never quite clears. Walks that used to be easy now end with heavier panting than they should, and on a warm day...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Living With Laryngeal Paralysis: The Everyday Routine
The diagnosis is done. The bark has changed, there's that raspy in-breath on a warm walk, and a vet has put a name to it: laryngeal paralysis, very probably the first sign of the wider nerve condition we call GOLPP. What comes next isn't the science again. It's the ordinary stuff: how you actually live...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 9 min read
Heat and Exercise Safety With Laryngeal Paralysis
A dog with laryngeal paralysis can look completely fine and still be minutes away from a crisis. He's lying in the kitchen, breathing easily, maybe snoring a little, and nothing about him says anything is wrong. Then the doorbell goes, or a squirrel breaks cover on a warm walk, or it's just one of those...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Laryngeal Paralysis and the Aspiration Pneumonia Risk: Feeding, Water and the Lifelong Watch
Once a dog is diagnosed with laryngeal paralysis, or comes through the tie-back operation, the phrase "aspiration pneumonia" tends to get raised, and raised seriously. It's an unsettling thing to be handed, especially when the surgery was meant to be what made your dog better. So let me set out, calmly and clearly, what this...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Tie-Back Surgery for Laryngeal Paralysis: How to Decide
A specialist has mentioned a "tie-back", quoted a number that made you blink, and somewhere in the small print was the word aspiration. The dog in question is usually older, often a Labrador or another big breed, with breathing that has turned noisy and laboured, and perhaps a frightening episode already behind you on a...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Kennel Cough: Serious or Not?
Kennel cough nearly always announces itself a day or two after something sociable: a weekend in boarding kennels, a busy morning at daycare, a training class, or just a muddy, crowded park. Then comes a noise most owners have never heard before. A harsh, dry, hacking cough, the kind that sounds like something is stuck...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
When a Cough Becomes Pneumonia
Most coughs are nothing much. A dog comes back from daycare with a honking cough, or a cat does that flat, crouched cough now and then, and within a week or two it has faded and been forgotten. That is the usual story, and it is worth holding onto, because what I want to talk...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 13 min read
Kennel Cough: Vaccination, Spread and How Not to Pass It On
Every autumn we get the same call. A dog comes home from a weekend in boarding kennels, or a busy day at daycare, and a few days later starts up with that unmistakable honking cough. The owner is half worried and half mortified, because they did everything right, they had the jab, and the dog...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
How Long Does Kennel Cough Last?
In an otherwise-well dog, kennel cough usually clears in one to three weeks. That's the short answer, and it's worth having up front before the detail underneath it. Most dogs are over the worst within a week or two and back to themselves by three. The cough is the last thing to fade, and a...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 10 min read
Living With a Breathing Condition: The Daily Playbook
Feline asthma, a flat-faced dog's BOAS, a collapsing windpipe, laryngeal paralysis: these are conditions you don't cure and send home, you live alongside. The appointment is done, you've got the name for it, and somewhere in the conversation the words "lifelong" or "manage it" came up. What nobody quite has time to give you in...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Why Is My Dog Coughing? Is It the Heart or the Lungs?
A cough almost always shows up at the wrong time of day. A dog brings up a dry, hacking cough after a drink, or a soft one that worsens the moment they settle for the night. Or it's the cat, crouched low with her neck stretched out, making a sound you've never quite heard before....
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 13 min read
Belly Breathing in a Cat: The Fluid-Around-the-Lungs Emergency
A cat breathing fast and shallow right now, with the belly doing the work on every breath, and especially with its mouth open, is the situation this opening is for. Don't read to the end of this page first. That picture in a cat is an emergency, and the single most useful thing you can...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
The Snotty Nose That Won't Clear: Causes, and When to Investigate
We're trained from childhood to wave a runny nose away. A sniffle, a sneeze or two, it'll pass. With pets, that instinct is usually right: a snotty nose is common, often harmless, and frequently something we can manage even when we can't make it vanish entirely. But "usually" is doing quiet work in that sentence,...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 14 min read
Lungworm in UK Dogs: The Honest Facts, Without the Hard Sell
Two things tend to bring people to a page like this. One is an advert doing its job, the dramatic "Be Lungworm Aware" sort with the close-up of a slug, leaving behind a low hum of worry. The other is the lawn: you've just watched your own dog hoover up a snail before you could...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Pulmonary Fibrosis ("Westie Lung"): An Honest Guide for the Hard Diagnosis
Pulmonary fibrosis is a phrase most owners first hear in a consulting room, often about a little white terrier who has been part of the family for years. It sounds frightening, and you've come to understand what it means. So I'm going to be straight with you, gently but properly, because I think that's what...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 13 min read
Pneumonia: Nursing Your Pet Through Recovery at Home
The route in varies. Sometimes it's a cough that wouldn't shift, sometimes a moment where the dog was sick and something "went down the wrong way", sometimes an operation, sometimes it lands on top of a laryngeal paralysis you were already managing. The destination is the same: the word pneumonia has been said, your pet...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
When Breathing Gets Harder: Comfort, Quality of Life and the Hard Days
Breathing is the one thing the rest of us never think about, and watching a pet you love work at it is hard to sit with. Perhaps the asthma flares come closer together now, or the flat-faced dog who always snored is tiring on shorter walks, or a dog with laryngeal paralysis is racking up...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Making Your Home a Place for Easy Breathing
A pet with a breathing condition, an asthmatic cat, a flat-faced dog, a windpipe that collapses, a long-term cough, gets most of the attention pointed at the medicine and the vet visits, and rightly so. But your pet spends most of its life not at the clinic, breathing your air, hundreds of times an hour,...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
Harness, Not Collar: The Free Daily Change That Takes Pressure Off Your Dog's Airway
Swap the collar for a harness. It is the kind of advice that gets said quickly at the end of a busy consult, and then the old collar stays on because it is already hanging by the door. I understand that completely. But of all the things on a long management list, this is one...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 11 min read
How Pets Breathe: What's Normal, and When to Worry
Breathing is the one thing a healthy pet does thousands of times a day without you ever noticing. Then one evening you glance across the room and something looks off: the chest moving a little faster than usual, a sound you haven't heard before, or a cat sitting hunched in a way that makes your...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 13 min read
Reverse Sneezing in Dogs and Cats: Alarming to Watch, Usually Harmless
It nearly always happens the same way. Your dog is pottering about, or has just got excited at the door, and suddenly freezes, stretches its neck out and starts making a horrible rapid snorting, gasping noise, as though it's trying to inhale the whole room and can't. It looks for all the world like choking....
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 10 min read
Noisy Breathing: When It's Just a Snore, and When It's Dangerous
A noise on the breath can mean almost nothing or quite a lot, and from the noise alone it's genuinely hard to tell which. Maybe it's a snore that's louder than it used to be, a snort, a raspy catch on the in-breath, or a sudden honking fit that stops you in your tracks. The...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
Is My Pet's Breathing an Emergency?
Breathing is the one symptom where the order you do things in actually matters, so start with the question that decides everything else: is this an emergency right now? Four signs say yes, and any one of them means you stop and phone a vet straight away: a cat breathing with its mouth open, gums...
Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 12 min read
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