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Pet Boots Designed to Prevent Paw Injuries | Healers Petcare

Pet Boots Designed to Prevent Paw Injuries | Healers Petcare

ANIMAL INNOVATIONS SHOW - EPISODE 31 - HEALER'S PETCARE

Pet Boots Designed to Prevent Paw Injuries | Healers Petcare

If your dog ever suffered from an injury or a paw wound, then you might already know how excruciating the pain can be for your pet.

And yet, home care for dogs’ paw injuries is not only time-consuming; it’s also challenging. Not many pet products can help protect your pups’ paw injuries while they’re in the process of recovering.

A similar situation happened with Terri Entler’s German Shepherd Jake. It opened Terri’s mind to building innovative pet healthcare products.

Eventually, it drove her to establish Healers Petcare, Inc, a company that aims to manufacture and engineer innovative pet products that help keep your pets healthy and safe.

The Experience That Created Healers Petcare

Pet Boots Designed to Prevent Paw Injuries | Healers Petcare

 

According to Terri, it all started when she and her family were out enjoying camping, and her children took Jake for a hike in the woods. When they came back,

“I kind of looked at the ground and noticed that there was blood all over the ground and the dirt. And I was like, ‘Uh oh, what’s wrong?’ And I looked at his paws, and every one of Jake’s paws had been burned off by the hot…soil and cement… We live in Oregon, and it doesn’t get super hot here. I never would have thought that taking a dog for a hike in the woods would cause his paws to melt, literally melt…”

Per conventional wisdom, Terri and her family then put socks on Jake’s injuries and covered them with duct tape before taking their pooch to the veterinarian. However, treatment was terrible, and since they were told that it would take two months for the wounds to completely heal, Terri and her family needed to administer home care daily for the injuries.

“It’s like losing a fingernail for a human… For twice a day, we’d have to unwrap the paws, soak it, put medicine on it, wrap it. The vet only had gauze, and the gauze would stick to the wound when it was starting to crack, scab up. It was just a nightmare. And the boots on the market that we went to try to find to protect it, didn’t breathe, so they would get sweaty and get infected that way. And so…we worked for a year with veterinarians and created what I call our ‘medical boots’. So, that’s what got it started,”

Terri reminisced.

Although an actual electrical engineer by profession, the situation opened Terri’s mind to the importance of developing healthcare products that are necessary for Jake’s—and other wounded dogs’—safety and recovery.

Protecting Your Pets With Healers Petcare

Specializing in rehabilitation and injury prevention products for pets, Healers Petcare, Inc. now offers products like their famous medical dog boots, leg wraps, and urban walkers. However, Terri and her staff always make it a point to take feedback from customers in an effort to continuously improve their product lines.

She continued,

“We just keep building on pet health. All we wanna do is focus on pet health… We spend a lot of time researching and talking to people who can give us a lot of input. Even veterinarians want their animals healthy and not in pain or injured or anything like that.”

Although they are working hard in the meantime to get more into the brick-and-mortar stores and enable pet owners to buy Healers Pet Care products whenever they need them, they still continuously develop new product lines to offer potential customers.

In fact, they also work with the Guide Dogs for the Blind and recently carry a line of supplements and wound healing solutions that they produced from natural ingredients in order to support natural healing. So, if you want to ensure your dogs’ well-being, Healers Petcare, Inc.’s products may be a choice worth looking into.

 

Interested to know more about Healers Pet Care?

Check out their website at https://www.healerspetcare.com/.

Have suggestions for who we should interview next?

Send us a message at [email protected]!

Terri: Hi, I’m Terri Entler, President of Healers Pet Care and I am joining The Animal Innovations Show.

Excited to be here.

Chris: Thank you so much, Terri. Really excited to have you here.

So, tell us a little bit more about who you are and how you’re innovating and helping animals.

Terri: I am an actual Electrical Engineer from Canada. So, that’s my background, worked in high tech and all the greatest, bringing products to the masses in the computer world. And one day, I was out camping with my family, and my kids took our German Shepherd for a hike on a hot day in the Sisters Mountains

And when he came back, I looked at the ground and noticed that there was blood all over the ground and the dirt. And I said, “Uh-oh, what’s wrong?” And I looked at his paws, and every one of Jake’s paws had been burned off by the hot—it actually was soil and cement.

But, between that day—and I never even—we live in Oregon, and it doesn’t get super hot here. I never would have thought that taking a dog for a hike in the woods would cause his paws to melt. Literally, melt.

So, the only thing we had camping was what people have used all these years—socks and duct tape.

So, we socked him up and put duct tape and took him to the veterinarian. And—it’s like losing a fingernail for a human. It takes two months to completely come back.

The treatment was terrible. For twice a day, you’d have to unwrap the paws, soak it, put medicine on it, wrap it. The vet only had gauze, and the gauze will stick to the wound when it was starting to crack—you know, scab up. And it was just a nightmare.

And the boots on the market that we went to try to find to protect it, didn’t breathe, so they would get sweaty and get infected that way.

And so, my engineering mind came to peace, and we worked for a year with veterinarians and created what I call our medical boots.

So, that’s what got it started. So, these breathe, allow airflow. We created a special gauze insert that doesn’t stick through the wound. It has adhesive on it, so it sticks in the boot. And then you can wrap the paw, and unwrap it, and bandage it without using gauze and vet wrap,  and all the stuff that would be terrible to use.

So, that’s how we got started. And from there we made leg wraps so you can do the leg, body wraps so you don’t have to wear the horrible cone. No one likes the cone, right? Get rid of that Cone of Shame. We hate that. And so, that was our foundation.

And then we worked with the Guide Dogs for the Blind to develop a protective boot. And we came up with our Urban Walkers, which—and it’s developed over the years, but this is a more—it has a heavier sole. And it’s got a similar wrap-around design, but it’s designed for hiking and protecting the boot so it doesn’t get injured.

So, we did that for years and years and just kind of built the company by grassroots. It’s kind of a little bit at a time.

Chris: Yeah. So, now what makes your boots different? I mean, you talked about—that they’re breathable. So, what kind of material goes into these?

Terri: Kind of like what you would use if you injured your knee or your elbow. You use that medical wraps to protect it. Same kind of material. It’s got an open foam, but it’s got a waterproof outer layer, so it helps it—it’s water-resistant, I’m sorry.

But it’s breathable. They’re not a neoprene, but kind of like a breathable neoprene. And so, that’s what we use. And then just a really light flexible sole.

I like to call these “my slippers”.

It’s like—for humans, it’s like wearing a slipper around the house—comfortable, soft, cozy. And a lot of people use them to give their dog grips on hardwood floors.

Chris: These sound like they’d be really easy. What I liked about looking at them is they’re really easy to put on.

And that’s the struggle with these—you’re trying to get the dog to hold up their leg, and it’s like putting a shoe on them, and they don’t want to stand still.

Terri: Yeah. I always tell women it’s like putting on a wrap-around skirt. You put it on, and you wrap it around real quick, and it hooks. And, you know, there’s no perfect solution.

It works for probably 80%—90% of animals. Some dogs, they’re not going to let you put boots on, and they’re going to pull them right off. But the majority of the time, they work really well, so we’re excited about it.

Chris: You’ve got different ones, right? Like, you’ve got some—you said they’re more like a shoe—they’re just for, like, urban walking and things like that?

Terri: Yeah. These ones. And this is our third generation. We’ve kind of always take feedback from customers, and we are always looking to improve our product.

But this one is the same kind of thing. It wraps around, but we’ve got a more diagonal strap. As you think about it, you don’t want your pressure points all in one spot in a dog, so this divides it around. But this one has a more rubbery, flexible sole, so it can go for hiking or out in the woods and not worry about the sole tearing or anything like that.

And we have them big enough that they’ll even fit Great Danes and Mastiffs. A lot of big breed dogs have a hard time finding boots that will fit, and we made one just for them.

Chris: You said you’re an electrical engineer, so that seems like an interesting background. But then, you moved into this, and now, you’ve developed even more products, as you said.

How is that—how did that kind of come about?

Terri: For five or six years, all we did were the medical boots and the urban walker, that’s all we did. But we knew that it’s a perfect leading edge to treat wounds with some type of treatment.

So, I hooked up with a veterinarian here in Oregon called Dr. Witherspoon, and he created some holistic topicals, and he let me kind of buy the rights for his line. So, it’s his formulations, but I’m selling them under my name.

And our #1 one is, like, our Hot Spot Relief. You know, a lot of dogs deal with allergies, especially this time, they’re itchy, scratchy, ticks, flea bites. It’s got tea tree oil, so the dogs don’t like the smell. They don’t ta—they won’t lick it off. It absorbs super fast.

It’s got all kinds of conditioning oils in it that help rejuvenates the skin, and it even has hydrocortisone in this one. And we also have a CBD version.

We also have a wound spray for just cleaning and protecting wounds from their cut. We have a conditioning shampoo, so for the skin and that type of thing.

So, that’s what I got from Dr. Witherspoon. And then we also moved into some supplements. So, yeah. So, we just keep building on the pet health, right, we’re just pet— All we want to do is focus on pet health.

Chris: Yeah. And that’s what I really like about this: that you are staying in your lane, like you’re focused on this niche, and you’re trying to make products.

It sounds like you spend a lot of time researching and talking to people. And you said you spent a year, even, just trying to research to get the boots right.

So, what’s next for you? Where are you planning to take this?

Terri: Well, we’re working really hard to get us more into the brick-and-mortar store so that when you need it, you can access it, right, so, you can get to your Petco and PetSmart whatever.

We’re trying to get in some of the grocery stores, too, so that way, when you’re shopping, you can find these products. Just like you buy Neosporin and band-aids at the grocery, you should be able to buy your pet’s band-aids and health needs at the grocery store.

So, that’s kind of the trend that’s happening, and so, we’re really working hard. This year, we’re developing, like I said, our newest version of our Urban Walkers.

Chris: Yeah. That’s really interesting. It seems like you’re taking these connections and these opportunities, I guess, as they come to you, and building it out from there.

Terri: That’s what an engineer does. You know, you kind of think—you’ve been taught to think out of the box and figure out how to solve problems.

So, we are brought problems, and we look for ways to solve them, and that’s what I do.

Chris: Yeah, I was gonna say, “You haven’t developed any electrical products yet fro the dogs thou?” You know, using your background.

Terri: We came up with a LED lighted jacket and it was a special LED that you can actually put in a washing machine. It was a washable jacket and nobody else had anything like it. I had a wire—all this stuff, I hired a bunch of highschool kids to come over and wire all these jackets up. And we were— so we were using my electrical background for that.

But it’s just— it was too much a distraction from the health side. It was a grat product that thing, and we did some LED bandanas and stuff. But it was hard to compete against some of the other Chinese made LED. Cause these LED’s that are machine washable were pretty expensive.

 

So, we discontinued that, we still have some but—yah I did kinda play in the electrical area for awhile. It was kinda fun having all these wiring stations setup in the warehouse and having a—

Chris: There you go, that’s good at least you were using your background for some of this.

Now, I know most of your products are for dogs. I mean, is there future plans for more cat products and other animal products, as well?

Terri: Actually, all our topicals and even some of our supplements can be used for other animals, cats, and dogs. The topicals can be used for rabbits, chickens, horses.

Chris: Oh, wow.

Terri: I never would have thought chickens needed—you know, hot spot relief. But chickens and wound spray—the chickens peck each other and so they’ll get sores and—bleed and stuff, so you need the wound spray. And horses of course, always are getting scratched up with their hooves.

So, it’s very popular—our products are also very popular in the equine world.

Chris: This sounds like, this has been a journey for you. I mean, did you have a career before you started this? You said, you were an electrical engineer—this is now your full-time gig.

Terri: Yeah, I mean—like I said, I worked in the high-tech world as an engineer. Bringing other people’s ideas to market—I guess. I always wanted to have my own business, years and years, I always had that entrepeneur mindset. I’d always come up with ideas and say, “Oh, this is a great idea!” And my husband would return to me and say, “Teri, they already invented that.” Oh I was too late for that one! Because I did not know—”Nope, they already got that one, sorry you missed your opportunity there.”

So, I was always looking for a way to have my own company and build something on my own. When Jake hurt himself and the products were so awful out there. I said, “You know, other people do crazy things and take some products in the market, why shoudn’t I.”

It wasn’t easy. When you don’t have millions of dollars to do things—and you’re doing it—

Chris: When you’re bootstrapped in it, right.

Terri: Yeah, when you’re bootstrapped—it takes longer, but it’s very rewarding.

Chris: So, Terri, why don’t you tell people where they can,find out more about the products, where they can buy them, where can they find them?

Terri: You can find them online at our website, at HEALERSPETCARE.COM

Amazon, Chewy, Walmart, Petco, Track Your Supply— all the majors carry us. We love to talk to our customers, so, of course, we love to have you come to us directly, but we also want to support our customers.

So, we’re happy to have you buy them anywhere that you can find them. In California, you can find us at Pet Food Express and their brick-and-mortar stores.

 And we’re here to help. So, we love talking to you, so give us a call. We have a 1-800 number: 800-924-7036. If you want to just call us, then we’ll tell you how to help you out.

Chris: Terri, this has been really great talking. Is there anything else you wanted to mention before we wrap things up today? 

Terri: I just really am excited about where the pet space is going. And with COVID as bad as it’d been, it’s been so nice to see people adopting pets and having those pets at home.

So, I hope they find a way to use our products to help them keep them safe.

Chris: Well, Terri, I really love learning about your journey and all the products and that that you’ve created. And I’m excited to see where you’re going to take things.

And before we wrap things up, I’m just going to remind our viewers and listeners: if you’ve got an idea like Terri does, or if you know of somebody that I should talk to, just go to INNOVATIONS.SHOW and let us know about it, and we’ll have them on the show.

So, thank you again for coming on today, Terri. It’s great to talk to you.

Terri: Yeah, well, thank you for the opportunity, and I hope to do it again sometimes. Maybe when there’s another topic of interest. So that’d be great.

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