If only I couldn't open the cabinet doors myself. It would make it easier for me to maintain my ideal weight, but alas, nobody controls my weight but me. But not so for dogs. We control when and what they eat. And so they should all be at the perfect weight, right? But of course, we know that they are not. A shocking percentage of dogs and cats are problematically overweight, according to the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention. They report that in 2016, 59% of cats and 54 % of dogs in the U.S. were classified as overweight or obese. And the numbers are climbing: in 2009 9% of the dogs were obese, while the percentage rose to 20% in 2016. I was reminded of this in Dr. Chris Zink's great blog titled How to Make your Dog Live Longer. (Subtitle: It's Easy.) And simple. Read More
Archives for January 2020
What Should I Do About My Impossible Dog? said the dental hygienist while cleaning my teeth.
I'm going to break the rules here and start by saying what this post is not: It is not a post about how to deal with an "impossible dog." Or one who is "dominant." Or one who is "aggressive." Rather, it is a forum for us to have a good laugh about all time times any of us, whether knowledgeable pet owners, dog trainers, behaviorists or veterinarians, have been asked difficult dog training questions in impossible situations. I was motivated to write this by, ironically, a wonderful question from a wonderful dental hygienist, who asked me a good, simple question and gave me my mouth back so I could answer. (For the record, her question was "Is my dog really being dominant when he puts his paw on my arm?" Apparently many of her friends had told her that her sweet, soft, loving and benign Read More
Safe and Ecologically Friendly Dog Toys
This is Maggie asked to sit and stay beside her overflowing toy box, the one I promised to clean out over the holiday break. (You can see how well I did.) In spite of having two overfull bags of "toys kept away from Maggie to re-introduce at a later time," the toy box in our living room has gotten out of hand. I will clean it out soon, I will I will I will, but it got me thinking about what is new in dog toys and, heaven help me, what I should be looking for in new ones. Primary on my list is safety, of course, but secondarily I want to buy her new toys from places that are as good to the planet as they are for our dogs. That got me hunting around on the internet for eco-friendly dog toys, where I discovered all kinds of wonderful things. First, I like this post from Read More
Love Has No Age Limit–And nor do the stories of our first days with them!
Nothing like the end of a year and the beginning of a new one to cause us to do some accounting--of things accomplished, and things desired for the future. This morning I was doing a different kind of accounting, looking at book sales as much out of curiosity as anything else, and discovered that the best selling book from my website for the last four years is Love Has No Age Limit. It's sold over 48,000 copies in just the last four years. (The Puppy Primer is close behind, at over 44,000.) I gotta say, that made me really, really happy. Dr. Karen London (see her columns in Bark Magazine) and I co-wrote the book as a labor of love for all the wonderful people who adopt adult or adolescent dogs. It seemed to us that there were lots of books on what to do when bringing home a puppy, Read More