Bone broth for a raw-fed dog

I received a yummy-looking recipe from DogsNaturally magazine recently and decided to make it - bone broth. I hastened down to the local raw-food/canine naturopath to buy some bones.

I shouldn't have been surprised when she said she doesn't bother making bone broth. As she says, it's unlikely that dogs in the wild would be boiling up a batch of broth.

But I wanted to try it.

Fortunately, I  was wise enough to cook it out of the house. I thought of doing it on the back patio, but the thought that Penny might sniff around the slow-cooker and perhaps scald herself was worrisome, so I did it in the glasshouse at the bottom of the garden. The reason for going outdoors was the mention of a bad smell.

Bad smell... Wow! Yes! Disgusting to me. But Penny thought it was interesting, as the slow cooker operated over the next two-and-a-half days. Yep, I decided to give it a nice long cook.

So, after cooking it up, I put it into the fridge and a layer of fat collected on the surface. I skimmed that off and put it into the compost. The result was a thick jelly that looked delicious, but smelled awful. I've put it into ice-cube trays in the freezer. There seems to be enough to feed a pack of dogs for the next century.

Penny thinks it's delicious.

Here's the recipe, but I acknowledge it comes from DogsNaturally and suggest you go over there and check it out properly. There are great photos of the broth preparation.

BONE BROTH FOR DOGS Step 1: Add Bones, Water And Vinegar
 First, I fill my crockpot with bones. Because I like to make sure there’s lots of healthy, joint protecting gelatin in my broth, I use bones with a lot of joints in them like chicken feet. I’ll also add some garlic for health and flavor (and if you think garlic is dangerous for dogs, just leave it out or read this article).If you don’t have a crockpot, you can use a regular old pot on your stove … but you have to leave it cooking overnight so I prefer the crockpot.Organic, grass fed bones will be the best … don’t skimp on the bones and feel free to use discarded bones from your own meals … they’re just fine for broth. Step 2: Add Water And Vinegar Next, I’ll fill the pot so the bones are completely covered, plus an extra two or three inches of water on top. The important part is to add raw apple cider vinegar or lemon juice to the pot … this is the magic ingredient that makes sure your broth has all of that great and healthy gelatin in it … it also pulls the nutritious minerals out of the bones.I’ll add about three or four tablespoons of vinegar to a pot this size.Once I’ve added the bones, water and vinegar, I put my crockpot on high for an hour, then I turn it down to low and leave it cooking for 24 hours. You can leave it cooking for two or three days if you want, but I find it starts cooking down too much after a day and I can still get a good jelly-like consistency after a day. Step 3: Strain The Bones
 When the broth is finished, I need to strain the bones and meat out. These bones shouldn’t be fed to dogs, so I put them in the green bin. My dogs don’t need them anyway … I’ve already got the good parts in my broth.  Step 4: Get Creative Here’s the fun but optional part.When I turn the crockpot off, I’ll add some nutritious extras. For this batch of broth, I added some frozen kale and fresh leftover green beans. But I also like to add medicinal mushrooms, broccoli, kelp and herbs … and sometimes nothing at all. Check out this articlefor some ideas of nutritious veggies you can add.
Toss in any healthy herbs or vegetables your dog loves (and if he doesn’t love them, then bone broth is a great place to hide them).I’ll add these ingredients while the broth is hot, right after I’ve turned it off. Then the broth will cool with the veggies in it, making them just soft enough for my dogs to get their yummy goodness. Step 5: Let It Cool Once my broth is cooled, I’ll put it in the fridge. This is where the magic happens … and in just a few hours, you’ll know if you’ve made a good batch!Once your broth comes out of the fridge, it will have a hard layer of fat on top. You should chip this off and toss it in the green bin. Underneath the fat, your bone broth should now look like jelly … the jelly means you’ve got lots of gelatin in there, and that’s what helps with your dog’s joints and the leaky gut that can cause allergies and digestive upset. That gelatin plugs the holes in leaky gut that can cause allergy symptoms, so the more jelly-like, the better! If your broth doesn’t look like jelly, don’t worry … it just means you didn’t add enough vinegar. Next time just add a little more vinegar and your next batch will be just fine. But first use the broth you have because it will still be packed with healthy goodness! Step 6: Store Your Broth  Because I have a lot of dogs, I just leave my bone broth in the crockpot in their fridge (yes, my dogs have their own fridge, but I’m sure there’s room in your fridge for bone broth). A pot this large will last my five large Labradors about 4 or 5 days. I wouldn’t want to keep it in the fridge for more than a few days anyway so I just make a fresh batch once or twice a week.If you have just one or two dogs, you can take the broth and label it into mason jars and store it. If you’ve got small dogs, you can ladle your broth into an ice cube tray and just pull a cube out at a time.Having a supply of bone broth in your freezer is a super idea … bone broth is incredibly nutritious and healing for sick dogs (think chicken soup). So make sure you have some on hand for emergencies.  Step 7: Give It To Your Dog! The final (and best) step is to feed the bone broth to your dog!I pull bone broth out of the fridge and give my large dogs two or three heaping spoonfuls over their dinner. It’s food not medicine, so I don’t get too hung up on exactly how much I give my dogs.My dogs love hanging out in the kitchen when it’s cooking … and you can see above that Dottie can’t wait to sample it after smelling it all day!So there you have it … it’s incredibly easy to make bone broth and your dogs will love the taste and reap the health benefits.

Raw diet for dogs

All the best for 2018 to all my readers and blogging pals!

I haven't written anything for a while, but Penny has been getting on with life much in her usual way, albeit more slowly now that she is a senior citizen.

We've moved Penny onto a raw diet, after much consideration, and so far she seems well. Her coat is glossy and she is interested in life.

We're giving a limited range of muscle meats. We started with kangaroo, which has the reputation of being the idea meat for dogs, but I'm concerned that my neighbour told me this industry is not regulated well and the babies are often left to die after hunters kill the kangaroos. I'll have to research this more. It's hard to find meat that is ethically sourced.

We had stopped with the kangaroo anyway, because of the dark, runny poos that Penny was doing. Lots of sites on the internet say that this can be expected with a change to kangaroo, but it was still scary, as I couldn't distinguish definitely that Penny was not bleeding somewhere in the upper digestive system.

We moved to veal (yes, another ethically  problematic meat!) and beef, which has led to better bowel motions. We're lucky that a shop has opened in our neighbourhood, providing a huge selection of meats, some with ground bone, some with organ meat, and some with shredded vegetables.

We also give Digestavite, Vitamin C, turmeric, antibiobotanical, home-juiced vegetables and omega oil. We added goat kefir for a few weeks, but I think that doesn't suit her digestive system, so we've stopped that one. For most of her life we've been giving her Glyde for her joints.

Today we've started her on rabbit as a muscle meat, and the naturopath who runs the pet supply shop says this is a very good meat for Penny, because it contains organ meat and bone.

So far so good. The aim is to have a couple of meals a week that consist of a meaty bone, but she tends to simply bury any bone we give her. She then goes back for it a few days later, when it smells delightful to her - but disgusting to us. So bone-eating is still a work-in-progress.

What to feed the dog

I used to feed Penny only raw food, but nowadays we tend to mix raw and cooked. However, since her time in hospital with a bad attack of what seemed to be gastritis, we are super careful that she not get anything that might set back her recovery.

So it was helpful to get an email from the RSPCA tonight with a suggested feeding guide.

We feed her sardines, and I notice the guide says not to feed fish too often, so I'll take notice of that.

Penny tries a special diet

It's been a long, long two weeks...

Penny first became ill on the day before the Very Important Football Grand Final, the long-awaited day when our team contested the last Aussie Rules match of the year. (And won!)

That was Thursday 2 November. It seems such a long time ago...

Then there were days of watching her, after she came back from the Animal Emergency Hospital, checking she wasn't vomiting and that her bowels were once again in action. It seemed as if she had settled, and Gastroenteritis was diagnosed.

But she continued to be unwell, and it's been a tiring couple of weeks, observing her and hoping for the best. She must have been getting well and truly tired of a diet of boiled chicken and rice. The problem for me was knowing whether I was giving her sufficient nutrition, because dogs aren't meant to be on this diet for so long.

When we reintroduced some of her usual foods, she began to vomit again, and the diarrhoea started up again.

A fecal test and a blood test have produced good results - not pancreatitis, as we thought it might be. No little baddies in her gut or her blood.

So, our own vet has concluded that it was Gastroenteritis, as the Animal Emergency vets thought.

Now we're trying a bland diet - Royal Canin Gastro Intestinal Low Fat diet. I don't like the idea of feeding the same thing every day, but after many a cold wait in the dark yard before dawn while Penny circles and vomits, I'm more than happy to stick to this for a while.

Penny looked rather sad in this photo, with a frothy mouth. I hated to see her feeling so bad.

But she's much better now. So far so good..

Two days and she seems well...

BTW, Penny thinks it's delicious, so much so that I'm feeding it in a variety of toys to get her to slow down the eating. She's still getting half of her diet as boiled chicken and rice, but I think we'll gradually take that out and trust the nutritionists at Royal Canin have done their job in formulating the food.

Here she is, enjoying the meal that I think looks so boring. (BTW, the clip is infinitely boring to watch, but Human Number Two is not at home at the moment and might enjoy seeing that Penny's health has improved so much.)



I must pop up to the vet tomorrow and see if there are canned varieties available, because I'd like to try roasting some slices for treats, and also using the soft food to stuff a Kong for her. I learned the trick of baking slices of canned food back in 2011 when we were trying to stick to a non-allergenic diet.

pumpkin for dogs

We often feed Penny cooked pumpkin, so I was interested to read this article today.

the evolution of dog's dogs' diets

I've seen mention on Slavenka's blog about a recent study looking at the genetics of dogs and grey wolves.

Basically, what I gather from the reports, especially one in The Los Angeles Times, is that there are certain genes in dogs that enable them to digest starch. This would suggest that, like humans, they changed in their eating habits when agriculture developed. Here's a short quote from the article:

Taken together, the data fit with the fact that dogs eat more starch than wolves, Axelsson said. He added that this adaptation would have allowed the first dogs to get more goodness out of the waste food they were drawn to at early farming settlements."It makes perfect sense that the most efficient scavengers were the wolves that could cope with this starch-rich diet," he said.
Still, dog domestication may have happened long before humans adopted an agrarian life about 10,000 years ago, said Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA who wasn't involved in the Nature study.
Perhaps dogs evolved through hanging around hunter-gatherers so they could feed on leftover carcasses of the mammoths and mastodons our ancestors killed, Wayne said. In that scenario, the starch-tolerant changes would have cropped up only after dogs were domesticated, just as genetic changes that help break down starch evolved in human beings after we adopted a farming life.

And here's a little of what Patricia McConnell on The Other End of the Leash (one of the most informative and useful blogs on the internet, in my opinion) has to say about it:

 This is obviously of great interest to geneticists and evolutionary biologists, but also to those of us who are feeding domestic dogs on a daily basis. As you all are well aware, some argue that wolves primarily eat meat, raw meat at that, and we should use the diet of wild wolves to direct the menus of our companion dogs. At the risk of stirring the pot (so to speak!), about ideal diets for dogs, we would be wise to use the study above to remind ourselves that dogs evolved as omnivores who ate a little bit of just about everything 10 to 12,000 years ago. That does NOT mean that individual dogs do not do better on a particular diet. There is no question that some dogs do better eating “A,” and other dogs can’t handle “A” and do better eating “B.” I’d say the take away messages are to 1) know your dog and 2) don’t be seduced into claims that a new dog food is best for your dog because “it replicates the diet of a wolf.”

The research casts a new light on the daily question we face, as to what is best to feed our dogs. I'll look forward to seeing how the mega-corporations try to jump on the bandwagon on this one! They'll all be saying we should feed their products.

I'm still of the opinion that a raw diet is the best for Penny, together with some commercial foods to make sure we give her the needed  supplements, and then also a dash of home cooking  - and even more home cooking.

do dogs eat bananas?

Because I'm writing a post on my other blog about bananas, I wanted to write here about Penny eating bananas.

She loves them and begs for a little piece every time someone has one, which is quite frequently. I thought I'd better check my facts before posting on this topic.

There are lots of sites on the Net saying it's okay for dogs to eat bananas, but also some isolated mentions of their being toxic.

The ASPCA lists it as non-toxic.

Lowchens Australia (an amazingly huge and detailed site) includes bananas on its list of plants that are non-toxic to dogs.

I looked in a couple of books on my shelf and two books include banana in recipes.

Dr Sasha Herbert, a vet at Lort Smith Animal Hospital, in her pet cookbook nibble munch chomp, has the following delicious-sounding recipe for fruit muffins for dogs:

preparation time
 Medium: 15-45 minutes to prepare 

 ingredients
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup oat bran
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg lightly beaten
1/4 cup honey
3 tablespoon vegetable oil
3/4 cup milk (low lactose)
1/2 apple grated
1/2 banana mashed 

         
method
Preheat oven to 200°C (390°F).
Line muffin tins with baking paper.
Mix dry ingredients.
In a separate bowl mix the egg, honey, oil and fruit.
Add the milk to the dry ingredients and blend well.
Add the other wet ingredients into the batter and mix well.
Distribute the mix evenly between your muffin tins.
Bake for 15-20 minutes.


serve
Served cooled.

Cooking For Your Dog, by Ingeborg Pils, includes this recipe for banana chips:

12 oz (350g) whole wheat flour
3 fl oz (100 ml) skimmed milk
1 egg
1 pureed banana
1 tablespoon golden syrup

Mix all the ingredients into a dough. Roll our the dough on a floured surface to 1/2 inch (1 cm) thickness and cut into small cubes. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Cover a baking sheet with baking parchment and place the cookies on it. Bake in the hot oven for about 30 minutes.

Penny would think she had gone to heaven if I served up either of these to her, as we don't feed her wheat products or milk. Note I didn't say she never gets them. She usually manages to haul us toward fallen food on the street and has had her share of muffins, bread, hamburgers in a bun, sandwiches, cakes...just about anything you could imagine, actually.

the value of keeping a doggy diary

Penny's been eating grass. She has always used grass to settle her stomach, or to settle her gut, and it usually comes out the other end, all neatly folded and looking like it has passed through her digestive system untouched.

I've posted about it previously.

But this time she's had us worried, so much so that we went to the vet. She's been rushing outside not long after her meals, tearing at the grass like a sheep, and it's been coming through inside her faeces, so that at first we didn't realise it was there. (Now you know that we truly love her - who else would be pulling poo to pieces to see what's in it?) And then she vomited up a heap of grass.

So, to the vet...

He checked her thoroughly, asked if she's been well otherwise. Yes, she has. He listened to her gut for long enough that I started to get worried, and said it was noisier than usual. And I learned a new word when I read his notes - ascultation.

I mentioned to the vet that the first time we saw her rush outside, she had just been out in the garden chewing a three-day-old lamb shank she'd previously buried, and he said some dogs react badly to lamb. He then made sure her worming is up to date and suggested we monitor her for another couple of weeks, at the same time increasing the amount of roughage she gets.

I didn't think much of it until I came home and looked at the diary we keep:
Tuesday 24th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb, snacked on dug-up lamb shank;
Wednesday 25th January: breakfast - lamb and tripe canned food, dinner - not recorded;
Thursday 26th January: breakfast - lamb,dinner - Royal Canin Hypoallergenic dry food (rarely fed but we had some left over);
Friday 27th January: breakfast - beef, dinner - lamb;
Saturday 28th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb;
Sunday 29th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb kidneys;
Monday 30th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - canned lamb and tripe;
Tuesday 1st February: breakfast - lamb kidneys, dinner beef and canned lamb and tripe.

I said to a friend that we might not have twigged about how much lamb we were feeding if we didn't keep a diary, and she said, "What about plain old memory?"

Well, I must admit we feed such a variety usually that I wouldn't be able to recall exactly what Penny's had over the last week. By the way, there have been other ingredients to her meals, such as raw or cooked vegetables, Vets All Natural Complete Mix, Glyde, Melrose Omega-3 oil and healthy treats.

But lamb has accidentally dominated. And why?
Because it was on special in the supermarket and I love a bargain.
Because I happened to buy lamb as the canned food we sometimes feed (high quality ZiwiPeak, by the way).
Because I thought it would be good to mix in some organ meat and didn't stop to think that it was also lamb.

Once we became aware of this, we stopped the lamb, and she has only chewed on a little bit of grass once, that we know of. She's having more roughage than usual, as per the vet's suggestion (cold cooked potato and pumpkin, which she loves), and some rice and cooked chicken for the next couple of days.

Now the question is, should we let her have lamb in future?

My thought is that we overfed one food type, not that lamb per se is the problem. But we'll wait for a few weeks before reintroducing it.

However, I did come across this interesting snippet at K9Web in looking for information for this post:

Dogs are not allergic to a dog food per se, rather they react to one or more of the ingredients in the food. Some of the most common culprits are beef, pork, chicken, milk, whey, eggs, fish, corn, soy, wheat and preservatives. Many animals are now developing allergies to lamb as well. This was once thought to be very hypo-allergenic, but the more it is used, the more sensitivities are springing up.

It's been a lesson for us.

And I'm glad we keep a diary, even though our friends think we're weirdly obsessive.

dogs eating a varied diet

We've prided ourselves for years on feeding Penny an 'interesting' and varied diet. Now I'm having second thoughts, because of something I've just read on Fully Vetted.

This is the problem. If a dog is suspected to have developed a food allergy, then you need to feed only a novel food for quite a length of time, in order to rule out all the foods the dog has ever eaten. We had exactly this problem when Penny developed skin problems last year. The skin specialist asked us to think of a food - an available one! - that she hadn't ever eaten. Kangaroo? She has that quite often. Duck? She's had it once or twice. Camel? She's even had that! And so on...

Fortunately, the specialist decided the problem most likely wasn't a food allergy. Since then we've been very careful about bothersome plants, like the ubiquitous and horrible Wandering Trad, and we wipe her 'private areas' after we come inside, with baby wipes. Worth the trouble, to keep her from licking herself raw!

The article, written by Dr Jennifer Coates, says that this problem of people giving their dogs all sorts of foods means that vets have to prescribe special dry foods. She says:

Veterinarians do still have the ability to prescribe limited antigen diets made from protein sources that have been hydrolyzed (i.e., broken down into such tiny pieces that they don’t stimulate the immune system). To avoid confusion, I’m starting to turn to these more than the novel ingredient foods that I have used in the past.

Now, at last, I understand why our vet had Penny on the seemingly boring special diet last year, before he sent us to see the skin specialist.

the dangers of commercial pet foods in Australia

When Penny was eating a commercial dry food as part of a hypo-allergenic diet to deal with skin issues, I was unhappy, because I prefer not to feed her that kind of food. I can't see that a monotonous diet of one product could possible be healthy. I was relieved when we went to a skin specialist who told us to discontinue the diet.

Recently there has been a report in a newspaper in Queensland, raising serious doubts about the levels of sulphur dioxide in some commercial pet meat products. I sometimes buy these sorts of products, but avoid the ones where there is an extremely long use-by date, because I'm wary of the effects of preservatives on Penny's health.

We do buy 4Legs products, because they say they don't use any preservatives. It was a 4Legs email that sent me the link to the newspaper article, so I guess they are wanting to reassure pet owners that their product is not involved in this problem. On their site they have this to say about pets fed exclusively on pet mince, pet meat or food rolls.

The Australian Veterinary Association (AVA) has warned that pets fed exclusively with pet mince, pet meat or food rolls that are high in preservatives may suffer fatal health problems. This is because these products often contain high levels of sulphur dioxide. Known as Preservative 220 – 228, sulphur can inactivate the vitamin thiamine (Vitamin B1), which is vital for brain development. Degeneration of brain function can quickly lead to paralysis, seizures and death.

In one way this is scary stuff, but on the other hand I don't think anyone would feed their dog exclusively on these products. I think it's more likely that an owner might choose one dry food product - which I think is equally questionable, as I said at the start of this post.

great new veterinary blog

I've been following the new veterinary blog by Dr Renee O'Duhring. It's great to read her take on animal health, because she approaches it from a proactive direction - ie, keep your dog healthy rather than try to fix up problems after they occur.

She has written a post about 'the physical and mental benefits of providing your pet with a natural diet. '

I was interested to read it, because she discusses the question of whether dogs are purely carnivores or whether they do well with some plant matter in their diet. Penny definitely likes some vegetable matter in her diet and will scavenge it for herself if we don't include it - grass, horse poo, possum poo, you name it - she's dining on it when left to her own devices.

I asked Dr Renee a question that I've been trying to research on the Net and in the Yahoo groups, without any luck, and received a most interesting and informative reply.

Here's the comment I put on her post:

Dr Renee, thanks for this great post! I try to feed a varied and natural diet, but sometimes I start to worry that I'm not doing enough. It's hard to resist the blandishments of the big pet food company [companies], whose advertising is in my face every time I enter a pet food shop. (Though I do mostly feed things I buy on special at supermarket meat departments, or through my own butcher, or plant-based ingredients that are similar to what we eat ourselves.

I'd love to ask you something I can't find any information on. I asked at one of the Yahoo Groups I am a member of - won't name it, as I'm disappointed and angry about the only response I got, which was that my question was inappropriate, because I should only feed meat, as this is the only "species appropriate food". Not true, as you have noted, given that in a natural environment, dogs will scavenge some plant matter.

My question is this: I grow yakon, which is a very different plant food, in that it has inulin in it (a great food for human diabetics, might be interesting to know if it would be useful for diabetic dogs...). My dog, Penny, LOVES it, and I occasionally give her tiny scraps.

Do you know of any studies that look at the effect of inulin on dogs?

And if you can give me some advice, wuld it be okay to post your reply on my own website? (Fine if you prefer not, of course.)

And here's the reply, which she said was fine to post here:

Hi Parlance. Interesting question about yakon, and funny timing as I have been experimenting with it myself! There is one study I have come across in the Cambridge journals on the effect of oligofructose (which is the carbohydrate in yakon) in companion animal diets, as well as a few on PubMed. One study showed that inulin "may favourably alter the composition of the colonic bacteria", which is one of its functions as a prebiotic. There is certainly nothing suggesting yakon would be harmful included in the canine diet (in moderation). Some pet foods include chicory root as a source of inulin so it seems that pets do benefit from it. Read more about that here: www.dogfoodproject.com
Not sure whether it would be helpful for a diabetic pet or not, as pet's nutritional requirements are very different from humans. Hope that helps, and glad to hear Penny enjoys foraging for all things delightful!

I'll certainly continue to follow Dr Renee's blog.
.
.

how will we feed protein to our dogs in the future?

Twice this week I've heard about 'test-tube meat' but I can't recall which radio program said that in the Netherlands they've grown pork in a test-tube. I found an old link here. However, I think on the program this week the speaker said that one problem with the experiment is that the cells, as they grow, start to differentiate, to specialise, so that the product is not just muscle meat. (I'm not sure about that, though.)

It is the second mention of the topic, though, that has me writing this post. One of the most informative bloggers around is the US vet, Dr. Patty Khuly, who has written a discussion of the ways in which we might find protein to feed our pets in the future. She looks at the possibility of feeding our animals laboratory-raised meat, or insects, in part referring to a story on npr about in vitro meat.

I think the idea of lab-raised meat is somewhat repulsive, but not half as much as I find it repulsive to think of the cruel way in which we humans treat animals as 'things' and raise them in ghastly factory-farms. If we could create artificial meat in a petri-dish (a GIANT one, lol), perhaps it would be the end of our cruelty to food-animals.

But might it also be the end of those species? Would creatures like cows, chickens or geese, for instance, survive into the future if we stopped farming them? Perhaps it would be another one of those mass extinctions that have dotted history.

If our dogs ate insects or artificial meat, I wonder how they would get the calcium they need? I like feeding Penny meaty bones on occasion, not just to clean her teeth, but to add calcium to her diet. (I'm not very well-informed about all this, so maybe I've got it wrong.)

It's an interesting topic, at any rate. And I think it's a conversation we'll be having over the next decade or so, because it's obvious there just isn't going to be enough protein to feed humanity in the near future, let alone other species.

dogs, allergies and diet

Today we have been set free from the boring, boring hypo-allergenic diet our vet suggested. We followed it religiously, but unhappily, for months, but today when we went to see the skin specialist she said she doesn't believe commercial low allergen diets work, because they all have some proteins in them. For instance, one famous brand has rice, and another has soy.

Hooray! We can go back to our usual wide mix of foods.

Penny still has a rash around her vulva, and still has rashes between her toes, but we are going to wash her bottom with baby wipes (non-alcoholic ones) and try to control the symptoms of her allergies with Elocon cream and lotion, applied as sparingly as we can.

We'll go back for a review in seven weeks. Perhaps we might have tests to see if environmental factors are making Penny itchy, but we'll wait to see whether that is necessary.

Now we can focus on getting organised for Honey's dancing competition. I'll have to think of some nice tasty treats to encourage Penny - but really, she just enjoys the dancing for its own sake.

diets for weight loss for dogs

I was researching the use of cold cooked potato for weight loss in dogs, because I've read it's a good weight loss food for humans - cooked potato that has been allowed to cool, not warm or hot cooked potato. Here's a quote from the European Food Information Council:

A small amount of the starch in potatoes resists digestion (this is called ‘resistant starch’): this particularly occurs when potatoes are eaten cold after being cooked, such as in a potato salad. Resistant starch acts in the body in a similar way to fibre.

I think the effect is that the person has a feeling of fullness after eating, and isn't so hungry, yet the body can't digest the cold potato, so doesn't gain weight.

However, I'm not going to feed potato to Penny until I know more about this, as I've never fed her potato before.

And I came across a site that looks useful, because it discusses the value of home-prepared meals without the angst that sometimes accompanies this topic. The author, who appears to be a vet, with a PhD, also says that if you're going to buy prepared foods, you should buy the reputable ones from a vet, because at least you know a properly qualified staff of nutritionists works for the company. I suppose that is logical. Interestingly, he says something that I've always thought should be true, that since dogs have lived with us for about thirty thousand years, they've adapted to the same sort of diet as we eat. (With notable exceptions such as chocolate, grapes, raisins, garlic, onions, macadamia nuts, tomatoes and avocado.)

I thought the discussion of eggs was interesting - he says eggs should be eaten cooked, not raw, which is news to me. Also, he discusses the fact that we need to assess the danger of high level of mercury in fish against the nutritional value of the omega-3 fatty acids.

The discussion of the best proportions of fat, protein and carbohydrates is one of the clearest I've read.

is tuna safe for dogs?

I was told recently that I shouldn't feed Penny tuna as often as salmon, because tuna has a high level of mercury. I don't know much about that, but I do know salmon is certainly a bit expensive to be a regualr part of her diet.

So I was interested to read this article on PhysOrg.com (a science and technology news site) that some species of tuna have less mercury than others.

when your dog is overweight

I took Penny to a local physiotherapist who deals with dogs, because I suspected she was limping - just before our first-ever big day at a flyball event next Sunday! (The races at the Royal Melbourne Show recently were just a 'taster' for us, as there were only teams from our own club.)

I'm ashamed to say the physio said the main problem is that Penny is overweight.

I asked how much, and he said TWO KILOS. When you only weight 16 kilos, that's 12.5% of your weight, and I calculate she's about 14% overweight. I'm feeling really bad.

But of course we can't just start massively dieting. A friend advised me to cut her food gradually.

So, today is the beginning of the fitness and dieting programmme!

Penny, fortunately, doesn't know the bad news..