Pawcurious Vet Blog: Pet help, stories, and information with Dr. V

We recently received a bag of Alopaw Hawaiian Dog Treats for the pups. Founder Shannon created her vegan treats after learning her adorable black lab Kona was born with a liver shunt and would require a very specialized diet.

So we receive a bag of treats from a dog named Kona, with a picture of a black lab on the front- is there any question who should get to do the product review? My husband and I were just discussing how Koa deserved to be featured a little more than she has been.

I’ve been on a little video kick lately- plenty more of that in the coming weeks- so I figured what the heck, let’s do a review on film:

Would you like to try a bag of Alopaw treats? Leave a comment with which kind you’d like to try and I will pick a winner at random on Friday.

** Chosen at random: Molly and Piper! Congratulations! Zombie bones or paradise palms it is!

The dogs and I went for a nice long walk this morning. And by, “we went for a walk,” I mean “Koa and Brody dragged me around the neighborhood for an hour or so.”

Brody and I had been working hard on the heel command for a while there, and for the most part when it’s just the two of us, he will grudgingly do it. He has the attention span of a gnat, as, unfortunately, do I.

Koa doesn’t want to leave my side to begin with, so regardless of what I do with her she is attached to me by an invisible tether. My four year old can walk her without problems. Individually, they are handle-able.

Together, though? Nightmare. They seem to think that they need to jockey for position, so the second one noses in front of the other, they’re off like the thoroughbreds at Del Mar.

They twist the leashes around each other, and as soon as they hear me scold one will invariably fall into position on my opposite side, across the front, usually tripping and/or hamstringing me in the process.

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As you all know, I’m always exploring and learning more about pet nutrition. It’s one of my favorite topics. I’ve mentioned on several occasions that I rotate the dogs’ food, and one of my regular brands to rotate in is the Honest Kitchen. After reading Made out of Love, their recipe book, I asked founder Lucy Postins if she would be available for a e-mail interview, and she very kindly agreed.

Above all, I was really fascinated that in a business dominated by a handful of large pet food companies, a person with an innovative idea was able to jump in and create a unique product. The concept of home cooking, once considered almost blasphemous, is steadily gaining ground these days, but if you go that route- the choices! The controversy! Raw versus cooked? Is it BALANCED? It can be very intimidating. For those who are interested but maybe not quite there yet, their product is one way to bridge that gap.

This post isn’t a product review, nor was I approached to do it or compensated for writing it. I wouldn’t say that CEOs of pet food companies are generally the most accessible of people (ever try e-mailing the head of Ralston-Purina?), so I wanted to take advantage of Lucy’s accessibility to learn more about her background, her philosophy, and what it’s like to run a pet food company. I find it all very fascinating. Regardless of your feelings on nutrition, I hope you find it interesting too!

What made you make the leap from kibble to home-prepared foods? Did you have a pet with a specific condition or was it just a change in the way you thought about food?

I had been working for another pet food manufacturer (who makes kibble and canned foods) for about 5 years and just became interested in the raw diet when I got my first puppy. I started off making his meals from scratch but found it to be very messy and time consuming. So I started thinking about how to create an alternative that would provide many of the same benefits as fresh food but without the mess, storage issues and inconvenience of having to defrost raw ingredients.

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I like pet memoirs. I read them a lot. Marley and Me, My Dog Skip, you name it, I’ve sobbed over it.

I also like women-finding-themselves memoirs. Like thousands of other women, I flipped raptly through Eat, Pray, Love, planning my own trip to Italy to eat my way to self-discovery.

The two are entirely different beasts, really. While the chick-lit books usually detail the author’s myriad trials in search of the ultimate love with the man of her dreams, most of the well known dog memoirs are penned by guys, love letters to the one great love of their life- their canine.

So when I was sent a copy of Justine van der Leun’s Marcus of Umbria, I was intrigued. Who is this Marcus? Some earthy, olive-skinned Lothario with a burnished chest and a gilded tongue? And why is that dog on the cover?

Turns out, Justine did in fact leave New York for the sun drenched hills of Italy in search of just that: a heart-rending romance. And for a while, she found it. But then, reality hit, and as her affection for her Italian boyfriend waned, he was replaced in her heart by his own dog, Marcus.

I’ll tell you one thing, if an author states in the first few chapters that she desperately doesn’t want a Golden Retriever, that Golden Retrievers represents all that is not what she wants out of life, and I KEEP READING, that alone should tell you this is a book to be reckoned with.

I figured I would like this book, but I really, really liked it. Even people who silently roll their eyes at the whole “Life was nothing until my dog taught me the meaning of it” schtick can pick this book up and enjoy the tale of a fish out of water, an urban expat in a rustic farm town where the Hollywood version of Italy gives way to the hard and dusty reality beneath it. Marcus the pointer is just one component of Justine’s year abroad, an important one, but not the only story to be told.

I love that this is a dog memoir by a young woman instead of a middle aged man, who set out looking for the fairy tale but wound up with a different kind of love. Her characterizations are vivid and sentimental without seeming to be caricatures, even in her descriptions of Marcus. I’ve already loaned my copy out to my co-workers, but I’m adding it to my must-read list for those looking for a unique and heartening summer read.

I’m sorry I haven’t done a lot of picture posts or Barbie posts lately. Those are pretty time consuming, as I think I have mentioned before, and if there is one thing that has been in utterly bleak supply lately it’s been time. Between the end of school, holidays, birthdays, colds, and some other junk going on I have barely- barely!- had time to breathe, let alone set up what I have planned for the next Barbie post. It’s in my head, though, where it has remained since Mother’s Day.

Father’s Day was the usual mass chaos around here. We were invited to my mother’s house for lunch, and she lives an hour away. My daughter also was supposed to perform at the county fair in the evening, which is a half hour away but on the way to my mom’s. I felt badly leaving the dogs home all day, so I recruited my accommodating in-laws, who were also going to my parents’ home, to bring the dogs back to my house so I could bring Brody and Koa to the family gathering and then go straight to the fair afterwards. (I have a point, really I do.)

Usually when I am driving around with the dogs it’s just me, or maybe me plus one kid on the short surface street drive to work. I have a little harness for them that clips into the seatbelt, which is probably not going to protect them a whole lot in an impact but would keep me from getting decapitated.

However, today it was the whole family, squished into the smaller of our automobiles. It is smaller, but it is the main family auto. Two adults in the front, two kids in the backseat in their carseats, and in the hatchback, the dogs plus presents, hurtling at 70+ mph down the interstate. Tight fit. read more >>

Without further ado, here are the winners of the Brody’s Favorite Things Giveaway- chosen with the help of random.org:

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