Yesterday M’hijito and I went in search of a small but reasonably easy-to-use harness for Cassie the Corgi. Her collar is loose enough that she can easily slip it, and I realized that if our coyote friend had noticed her instead of being intent on some other prey, she might have wriggled loose during a confrontation and tried to run off. That would have been the end of her.
Well, we went into PetSmart, not one of my favorite emporiums, and there we tried on a nylon harness. The part that slips over the dog’s head and is supposed to encircle the chest and shoulders needed to be adjusted. In our efforts to do that, we ended up making it tighter around her neck. So tight, in fact, that I could barely fit my finger under it. Try as we might, we could not loosen it! I finally had to take my jackknife out of my purse (alarming my son, who thought we’d be arrested) (all right, all right, it does look a little fierce and you could think it’s a Mexican switchblade) (but it’s not!)and cut the dog out of the stupid thing. So that was $9.50 for nothing, and a customer lost permanently to PetSmart.
So, to the Internet. The harnesses that operate simply are training devices. Cassie doesn’t really need a training device. She just needs something that won’t slip off her head.
Greyhounds, I recalled belatedly, have bullet-shaped heads that moot the value of a regular buckle collar. To get around that, you use a martingale: a collar with two loops, one of which slides, so that when the dog exerts pressure on it, the collar tightens. Because the martingale is made of nylon or fabric ribbon, it doesn’t jerk or pinch the dog the way a chain collar does. It does, however, work effectively to keep a sighthound from dragging you down the street in chase of cats, birds, and flying plastic bags. Works on a German shepherd, too… And, BTW, if you have a clue how to train a dog, it’s far more humane than chains and pinch collars.
Duh! Sighthounds come in many sizes. Italian greyhounds are chihuahua-sized, and whippets are the size of Cassie: around 25 pounds. Somebody, somewhere, must be making martingales for smaller dogs.
Yea, verily! Google “martingale collar” and up comes a raft of sites, many of them by people who are hand-crafting the things. You can get them much cheaper at Petco (Petsmart doesn’t seem to carry them), but the ones in the chain brick-and-mortars are just plain, ugly nylon things. Greyhound lovers really get into crafts for their dogs, and some of them make gorgeous collars.This outfit, so far, is my favorite. Problem is, I can’t make up my mind! Check these out, if you will, and tell me which would be your preference.
Cassie the Corgi is not quite as large as a grown jackrabbit in a good foraging year. In the eyes of some, she is small, tender, fuzzy, and juicy-looking.
This evening we had a close encounter with a pair of those eyes. We were ambling up the backside of our block, taking in the balmy evening air, when who should come flying across the perpendicular street but a fine, muscular young coyote!
What (from any point of view other than a rabbit’s) an amazing and fantastic animal! It moved like a shadow, soundless and illusory. To come up to that pace, a German shepherd would have to launch into a gallop, but this wild dog’s gait was a smooth, even trot.
Coyotes inhabit our neighborhood. Unknown to most urbanites, they dwell in most districts of the city, and these days they’ve moved into most parts of the United States. A couple of years ago, neighbors were up in arms because we had a denning pair with a litter of pups, making them marginally dangerous. Coyotes who are in the business of raising young do not like to be interfered with by, say, your dog, and so they will ghost over a six-foot fence (easily!) and come after even a large dog.
As for the likes of Cassie the Corgi: dinnertime! Given enough hungry cubs to feed, a coyote will try to grab Fifi right off the end of your leash. Some reports have claimed coyotes have actually tried to snatch little dogs out of the arms of their doting owners. They also, on occasion, will go after small children, but those occasions are extremely rare.
The coyote was so focused on whatever it was chasing (cat?) or whatever it was running from (human?) that I don’t think it noticed us. Nevertheless, I picked up the Corgi and carried her the half-block back to our house. Tomorrow: remember to bring the pit-bull shilelagh! Gotta quit leaving that thing at home.
We’re about out of the fancy home-made treats I got at the dog bakery (yes!) last time I visited the upscale shopping center where the Apple store is located. Cassie likes the things and they appear to be unadulterated (or so the sales staff says), but the cost is ludicrous.
Contemplating one of those little doggie-bite-sized gems, I wondered what, really, could be in this stuff? A cruise on the web revealed that by and large dog treats are made from heavy biscuit dough rolled out thin, cut into cookie-like shapes, and baked until they’re crisp.
We can do that. And we don’t have to pay a queen’s ransom for the privilege. Check this out:
You need:
2 1/2 cups whole wheat (or other) flour
1/2 cup powdered milk
1/2 cup wheat germ
1 egg
2/3 cup water or broth (meat or chicken)
6 tablespoons oil or melted butter
1 cup cheap shredded cheese
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Check the ingredients listed on the cheese package to be sure it’s actually cheese and not an artificial imitation. If you use canned or boxed broth, be sure it doesn’t contain onion, which is toxic for dogs.
Lazy person’s technique: Put the liquid ingredients in a bread mixer’s container. Add the dry ingredients and the cheese. Run the “dough” cycle until the stuff is well mixed and holds together. No need to run the cycle all the way through, since this dough is unleavened and (of course) will not rise.
Another lazy way: Put the ingredients in your food processor and blend until the dough holds together.
Normal person’s technique: Mix the dry ingredients in a big bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon to form stiff dough.
Because I am extremely lazy and desire not to wash the cookie sheets, I Iined the sheets with tinfoil. These dog biscuits do not stick, so you can save the foil to use with your next baking project, which as we speak will be this week’s store of fresh bread (and which, coincidentally or not, will contain whole wheat flour, white flour, powdered milk, wheat germ, egg, and water, among other things).
For a little dog: Roll the dough between your hands to form long strips and, using a sharp knife, cut into small bite-size pieces. Arrange on a cookie sheet.
For bigger dogs: On a lightly floured board, roll out the dough to a thickness of about 1/2 inch. Use cookie cutters or a clean, dry frozen juice can to cut out cookie shapes (cute bone shapes keep the human happy but make no never-mind to the pooch).
Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Cool the baked treats completely before feeding to the dog.
Condo Blues responded with a little clarification of a post I linked to yesterday, in which she described some doggy treats she’s invented. Her discussion of doggy food allergies brought me back to one of my favorite hobby horses: dog food.
Commercial dog food, besides being equivalent in human terms to a steady diet of cheap hot dogs and processed dry cereal, is full of ingredients that are common dog allergens. Corn, for example, is one of the top offenders among canine allergens, and yet most commercial dog foods are full of it, because it’s very cheap. Fish is another common allergen for dogs, yet it’s touted as a main ingredient for some very fancy, very expensive premium dog foods.
Overall, though, the problem with dog food is that it isn’t food. It’s fake food, an even feebler imitation of food than the fast food and junk snacks that humans favor for themselves. While it will sustain most animals, it may not sustain them well.
This fact came to my attention during the late, great Chinese melamine dog food scare. While that was going on, you couldn’t tell what commercial dog foods, if any, were safe—every time you turned around, another brand was being yanked off the shelves. So, I decided to feed my German shepherd and my greyhound human food: real food purchased from the grocery store’s counters of human food. The result was amazing.
I did a fair amount of research to find out what dogs eat and don’t eat. Humans routinely consume a number of foodstuffs that are toxic to dogs, notably onions and chocolate. Condo Blues provides a useful link to a list of dog no-no food items. Interestingly, domestic dogs are unlike cats in that dogs are not “obligatory carnivores.” A cat is: it must have a diet high in animal protein. Dogs, however, having evolved with humans for many tens of thousands of years, thrive on a diet similar to an omnivorous human diet. Apparently they started down that road before they started hanging around with humans: wolves have been observed eating berries and other vegetable matter in the wild.
Understand, this does not mean that dogs are vegetarians (although some people feed pet dogs vegetarian diets without much obvious harm). A look at the teeth should clue you to this: a dog’s mouth is full of tools designed to rip meat, whereas a human has, in comparison, a limited number of teeth designed for tearing meat. Clearly, the animal needs meat as a large part of its diet.
I’m not going to try to track down the research I unearthed just this moment. If you’re interested, google topics such as canine diet and canine nutrition with edu as part of the search string. Adding “edu” will help bring up serious research papers and articles posted by leading veterinary schools. Use some common sense about what you believe: there is a LOT of woo-woo out there—as much woo-woo surrounds the subject of pet diets as you’ll find about human foods. But in addition to New-Agey silliness, you’ll also find ream after ream of propaganda emanating from the pet food industry, and you will discover that many veterinarians buy this propaganda, as many human doctors buy into what Big Pharma tells them. Pet food corporations conduct scientific research, too, and unsurprisingly that research tells them dogs should be eating nothing but dry kibble.
No.
Dogs should eat about what you eat, with a larger proportion of meat or (if the animal can digest it) cheese. Dogs, like humans, need starches, vegetables & fruits, and animal protein; a healthy ratio of these ingredients (for a dog, not for you) is about 1:1:1. That is, 1/3 starch, 1/3 veggies, and 1/3 animal protein. A little more meat and a little less of the others won’t do any harm.
Don’t even think about trying this on your cat! Cats are not dogs, and their metabolism is different from a dog’s. A cat’s nutritional needs are weird, and you will need expert advice to build a feline diet from scratch.
Corn is indigestible for many dogs, and it should be avoided because it often kicks up allergies. Onions and garlic are toxic. Avocadoes are said to be bad for dogs, too. Otherwise: almost anything goes. Like humans, dogs need a variety of veggies: mix green and yellow items, and don’t feel shy about giving the dog squash one day and spinach the next. I’ve been buying Costco’s frozen “Normandy Style Vegetable Blend.” This gives you a lifetime supply of dog and human veggies. It contains broccoli, cauliflower, and two kinds of carrots. For convenience, I microwave a plateful of the veggies and run them through the food processor, providing a week’s worth of finely chopped, easy-to-serve dog vegetables. Unground, they’re mighty good served up to humans, too.
Starches include rice, oatmeal, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peas. In a pinch, I’ve substituted a little bread. Cook potatoes and sweet potatoes well—you can zap them in the microwave, because the dog can’t tell the difference between cooking methods. Rice and oatmeal are easy to cook on the stovetop. Be sure the stuff is cooled off before feeding.
Meat: some people like to feed their dogs raw meat. My own practice is never to feed my dog anything I wouldn’t eat myself, and I do not think raw meat is safe to eat. You have enough vet bills without deliberately exposing the animal to staph, C. difficile, and E. coli infections. So, I feed cooked meat. For the same reason, egg also should be cooked. When I cook a meal for myself, I cook up enough extra meat for the dog to last for several days. A barbecue grill is particularly handy for this purpose.
Hamburger is amazingly overpriced. Watch the meat sales. You can buy roasts marked down, and most butchers will grind it for you. Keep the bones for the purpose I’ll describe below. And taste the fresh-ground hamburger yourself—it’s much better than what you get off the counter. Last week Safeway was selling hamburger for over $2 a pound, but chuck roast was $1.47 a pound. I got enough ground chuck to feed me and the dog for a week. Rump roast is leaner and also sometimes comes on sale at a substantial mark-down. Chicken is often marked down, too—thighs are easiest to debone after cooking.
There’s no need for meat to be ground. You can cut it up into manageable chunks by way of discouraging the dog from setting it on the living-room carpet to chew it up—I use a pair of scissors to snip cooked meat into pieces for Cassie the Corgi. But if you want to grind it, a food processor will grind raw meat for you in a matter of seconds.
If you have a roast ground, ask the butcher to give you the bones. You can use these to make soup for yourself or, if that’s more work than it’s worth, simply drop a bone into the water you use to cook the dog’s rice. This flavors the rice to the dog’s taste, and it also cooks up the last few bits of meat, which you can shave off and add to the rice. Do not, do not, DO NOT let your dog chew on cooked bones! And never give your dog chicken or turkey bones! A dog’s jaws are strong enough to splinter bones, especially cooked bones; the splinters can lodge in the dog’s mouth or perforate its intestines.
And yes, I KNOW wolves and wild dogs eat bones. In the wild, wolves commonly die of perforated intestines.
Because no one really knows all a dog’s nutritional needs—remember, in the wild they’ll eat anything, including insects and some things you’d just as soon not know about—it’s a good idea to add a dog vitamin to one meal each day. Sometimes Trader Joe’s carries dog vitamins, relatively inexpensive compared to the same thing you get at the vet’s office or PetSmart.
Interestingly, as soon as I put the German shepherd and the greyhound on real food, their health changed. Visibly and drastically. The decrepit Ger-shep perked up. She began to move around with a great deal less discomfort, and where before she could only hobble after the beloved Toy, soon she was chasing it at a fast trot. The grey, a far more low-key character, also seemed healthier and happier. He was allergic to corn—a sensitivity that manifested itself as ear infections—and fixing his food myself meant I knew exactly what was and what was not in his dog dish.
It’s a lot of work to turn enough food out of your kitchen to feed a 90-pound dog (to say nothing of two of them…), especially if you’re not in the habit of cooking your own meals all the time. However, a smaller dog is very easy to feed this way. You can prepare several meals at once and store the food in the fridge.
I feed Cassie, who weighs 23 pounds, about 5 ounces of food twice a day, evenly divided between a vegetable, a starch, and meat, egg, or cottage cheese. I refrigerate the cooked ingredients in separate containers and then combine them at mealtime. Microwaving the food about 30 seconds at a medium setting to take the chill off seems to please the dog, though she will eat it cold. If you try this, be sure none of the food in the bowl is too hot, as microwaving heats unevenly.
If you change your dog over from kibble to real food abruptly, your pet likely will have diarrhea for a day or two. This is normal: dogs get enteritis when you change from one fake food to another, and the same effect occurs when you take them off fake food. Afterwards, though, you’ll find that once the animal is acclimated to eating real food, you can introduce a wide variety of foodstuffs without causing any stomach upset.
Real food may cost a little more than commercial pet food (although given the cost of some of the premium brands…maybe not!), but it’s way worth it in terms of the animal’s health and the savings in veterinary bills. Feeding your dog fake food is a classic case of penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Cassie the Corgi is getting a bit on the chunky side.Bad. The corgi is built like a dachshund: short legs under a long spine. This mutation puts a lot of stress on the spinal column, making the dog susceptible to back injuries and debilitating arthritis. Apparently overweight is the most common cause of crippling back pain in these dogs, and the most common cause of premature death.
So it’s time to put the pooch on a diet.
I’ve been feeding her about 8 ounces per twice-daily feeding: 2 ounces of starch, 2 ounces of veggies, and 4 ounces of meat with each meal. Pretty clearly that’s too much: she’s gained three pounds since she moved in with me. That’s a lot, when you’re supposed to weigh about 21 to 23 pounds: 13 percent of her desired body weight!
The rule of thumb for feeding DIY doggie cuisine is 2 percent of of the ideal body weight. Assuming Cassie should weigh 23 pounds, that would be 7.46 ounces a day, or 3.68 ounces a meal. That is not much food! In fact, it seemed way too little to sustain such a lively little dog, and so I just started feeding her by guesswork.
Evidently I guessed wrong. I’ve been feeding her 8 ounces per meal.
Interestingly, not only was she beginning to look like a tiny barrel with legs sticking out, she also had lost her enthusiasm for the beloved doggy dish. She had to be coaxed to eat. No wonder: the poor little thing must have felt like she had a cannonball in her belly.
Yesterday I cut her ration to 5 ounces. This morning she was dee-lighted to scarf breakfast, and she greeted the day by rocketing around the house like a Roman candle run amok. Clearly she feels better on a lighter diet.
This is going to save some cash: half as much frozen vegetables, rice, and chicken represents a significant savings on dog food. I think I’ll ease her down to 4 ounces per feeding and see how she does.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
It occurs to me that what’s sauce for the pooch could be sauce for the human: What if I restricted my feed to 2% of my desired body weight?
That would come to 2.6 pounds of fine cuisine per day.
Seems like a lot. A typical meat portion for me is about 4 ounces. Because there’s nothing to eat on the campus that isn’t junk food, I don’t eat lunch. Somehow I doubt that 2 pieces of bacon, a piece of toast, orange juice, and strawberries in the morning plus 4 ounces of grilled meat and a salad at night come to something over 2 1/2 pounds of food. However, this morning I ate enough oatmeal to create the lead-ball-in-the-belly sensation. And I do eat a fair amount of watermelon and fruit during the day.
The difference is that Cassie eats better than I do. My diet is not a carefully calibrated fusion of mixed vegetables, starch, and meat. I eat whatever comes to hand, which tends to be high on cheese, meat and fish, crackers, and fruits and low on vegetables.
What if I weighed my food and tried to keep the daily volume to 2 percent of the body weight I’d like to have? Or less? What if I made an effort to balance veggies and starches 50-50 with animal proteins? This could be an interesting experiment.
OK, OK, I know: it’s not nice to laugh at other people’s foibles, especially when you have your own foibles. But oh, it’s hard to resist.
The weather having cooled into the 80s at dawn, I settled into the backyard lawn chair with tea and the Times Sunday magazine, a cherished weekend ritual. My dog, having developed a limp, milked it for all it was worth while chasing after me to make sure I did not escape her eyesight. What should greet me but a cover story titled “Pet Pharm.” You think I overspend on my dogs? As nothing. Collectively, Americans are forking over millions of dollars on psychoactive drugs for their pets.
We make the animals nuts by forcing them into distinctly noncanine, nonfeline, nonavian living quarters and behaviors, and then we medicate them because they’re nuts.
Dog and Human Nuttiness
Here’s a guy whose German shepherd has developed a neurotic fixation on him: it has an “overpowering need to be near people, especially Allan. If they put Max outside, he quickly relieved himself and then rushed back indoors; he raced into rooms that Allan was about to occupy; he rested his head against the bathroom door during his master’s ablutions.”
Sounds familiar. Little does Allan know that if he adopted Max out, Max would instantly develop a similar fixation on the next human, much as one Cassie the Corgi has done. Hm. Maybe Cassie needs a few doses of Eli Lilly’s chewable Prozac that tastes like beef. Max goes a little further than Cassie does, though: he throws a fit if Allan hugs his wife, and he chases his tail obsessively, hour after hour. To address these neuroses, Max is being put on a tricyclic antidepressant commonly used in human psychiatric care.
Some of the nonsense humans will put up with defies belief: “Doug noticed that his cat would attack if he smelled strange, so he would take a shower after coming home and then change into his khaki pants lined with ballistic nylon.
Doug, Doug, Doug. Can you spell “put to sleep”?
Follow the Money Trail…
This amazing behavior—on the humans’ part, that is—redounds hugely to Big Pharma’s benefit. The rich get richer and the adoring pet owners get poorer. According to the Times, surveys by a pet products manufacturing group show that 77% of dog owners and 52% of cat owners gave their animals some sort of medication in 2006, both up about 25 percentage points from 2004—that’s a 25% jump in just two years! (My late Ger-shep may have accounted for most of that.) Eli Lilly has created a special “companion animal” division, and Pfizer’s Animal Health has seen its revenues grow 57% since 2003, to nearly a billion dollars. In 2005, according to marketing research firm Ipsos, in 2005 Americans spent at least $15 million on behavior modification drugs for their pets.
The trend thrives on a cast of mind dubbed “humanization,” whereby pet-lovers come to see their animals as little furry four-legged people. The cat becomes a member of the family for whom we would do no less than we would do for our children. The pet industry, of which Big Pharma owns a substantial portion, exploits this sentimentality to separate humans from cash.
Is this good for pets? Maybe. Some of them get to live a little longer than they might have, had their tendencies to rip up the furniture and bite passers-by gone unchecked. They may live on in a drug-induced stupor; they may live on in neurotic or even psychotic misery. I’m not sure that’s good for a dog or a cat.
Is it good for the humans? I doubt it. Forgive my lack of empathy, but I do not believe that calculated exploitation of your emotions is good for you. Au contraire.
My take
Cassie the Corgi does have a few bats in her doggy belfry, no question of that. She never lets the human out of her sight. She sticks to me like a burr in a hound dog’s coat. She will not eat unless I stay nearby. She will not go outside to do her doggy business unless I accompany her and stand there until she’s done.
This could be a problem, come rain and frost. Just now, it’s OK, but I’m not very interested in standing in the rain or freezing my toes on a 30-degree night while I wait for a dog to decide to pee.
Unlike many dogs with separation anxiety, she doesn’t chew or rip up the furniture. But she is afraid of loud noises—the sound of distant July 4th fireworks nearly put her into a frenzy, and a passing thunderstorm alarmed her significantly. The other night a violent monsoon firehosed the house; the sound of heavy rainfall made her nervous, too.
This is not normal dog behavior. Whether it’s inbred or the result of something her previous humans did is irrelevant: a healthy dog does not behave this way.
Am I going to give her doggy Prozac or canine clomipramine? Not a chance! If she can’t adjust to normal life, she can’t adjust. Since she’s not aggressive or destructive, she’ll just be a wacky little dog.
But I can tell you for certain: anyone who goes around in bullet-proof long johns to protect himself from his demented cat is crazier than the cat is! Anyone who puts a dog on psychoactive meds instead of putting it down after it delivered a serious bite to its owner over a cheese plate (as one couple interviewed for the Times piece did) has got more holes in his head than an entire wheel of Swiss cheese.
A dog that is dangerous is a dog that is dangerous. Same is true of cats: although cats are smaller, they can do some serious harm. Dogs and cats are carnivores. Predators. They are built to inflict terminal damage—videlicet, the French woman who had her face ripped off by her pet dog.
No amount of mind-altering drugs will change that basic truth.
