During the pandemic, my vet clinic didn't allow owners inside. We handed our dogs off to a Vet Tech, and stood outside waiting in the snow, or the rain, or the sun, and paced around the parking lot. We sat in the car and checked our phones. One vet told me some clients drove off on errands, not returning when their dogs were ready to be picked up. I wasn't thrilled about handing my dog off, but I understood. I have tremendous faith in my primary veterinary clinic, the Spring Green Animal Hospital, and appreciated their trying to keep everyone safe while providing good care for my pets. Skip tended to trot away without a backward glance, while Princess Maggie kept looking back at me. Why are you not coming? I had no way to answer her. I tried to forget knowing what the Read More

Want to join me in doing research on our dogs' food preferences in our own homes? I was inspired by a section in Linda Case's book, Feeding Smart with the  Science Dog, that I wrote about in my last post. Somehow I missed a section on food preference research when I first went through the book, but became enthralled as I was reading through it a second time. (I apparently require multiple trials to get anything down correctly.) The research is based on "preference ranking tests," in which nutritionists used "food-dispensing toys" to allow dogs to choose what kind of fat, protein, or carbs that they preferred. Simply, they taught dogs that the hollow toys would be stuffed with different kinds of food, allowed the dogs to sniff each toy, and then to select which one they wanted out of the Read More

Nutrionist Linda Case's new book, Feeding Smart with the Science Dog, is great. Truly great. I wrote several other introductory sentences, deleted them all, and finally settled on the simplest and most accurate one. If you're anything like me, and I know many of you are, and you want to feed your dog as well as you can, it's a fantastic resource. What I love especially about this book is that the author dives deep into the recent research on canine nutrition, and summarizes what she found for us mortals who are not trained in the field. She clearly distinguishes between--hear me clapping--facts versus opinions, unlike many other resources out there. She and I spoke a while ago about what she found, and what she took away from her research for the book. I asked Linda what the main Read More

We were going to go. Then we weren't. We'd had plans for six months to go to Hawaii with friends. We all cancelled a few weeks ago, after Omicron raised its ugly head. Every morning for a week after we cancelled I woke up heartsick. I've been lucky in my travels--lucky beyond anything I could have dreamed--traveling for work to New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, England, Germany, Mexico, Alaska, not to mention five times to Africa. But, I've never been to Hawaii, I've always wanted to go, and it felt like I was losing my chance. I decided to let the universe make the call. If the place we had rented, and then canceled, was still open, we'd take it and re-book the flights. If it wasn't, then okay, we weren't supposed to go. It was. We went. It was wonderful. We stayed in the rainforest Read More

Bark magazine has a great article on the benefit of not labeling a dog's breed--or more likely, it's supposed breed, on its cage in a shelter. A Shelter Dog's Fate Can Rest on What Breed He is Labeled describes how breed labels are first, often wrong, and second, influence buyers of all dogs, and not in a good way. There are so many reasons for this. First off, and critically in some cases, shelters and people who post about mixed breeds on Petfinder, are almost always guessing about a dog's heritage. And are often wrong. I remember a study done a long time ago by Victoria Voith about that very issue. At an IFAAB meeting (Interdisciplinary Forum on Applied Animal Behavior), she showed us slides of dogs in a shelter and asked us to identify them by breed. I was not proud that most of my Read More