Dog park today with one neurotic ball obsessed beagle, one intact male lab (for now) who’s decided he wants to be the boss dog, and one only slightly less ball obsessed girl lab was enough frazzle even my nerves today. It’s usually not too much of a problem for me to keep an eye on Nala and Simba, but dividing my attention three ways today to make sure nobody wasn’t getting into trouble was a little tougher. There was Sam howling at me to throw the ball and howling at everyone else to stay away from her ball and Simba trying to mix it up with the other dogs. Poor little Nala ended up getting neglected and didn’t get the ball thrown like she normally does.
Sam goes back to her owner in two weeks, and Simba goes in to get fixed on the 1st. It’s going to be a very long two weeks…
Simba’s so helpful
Simba’s figured out that when we go to the dog park, I grab his favourite blue football out of the trunk of the car. So now instead of waiting for slowpoke me to grab the ball, he’ll just hop into the trunk, grab the ball and jump out. The people at the dog park thought it was pretty funny when they saw him jump into the trunk.
What’s even better is that sometimes when we’re leaving, he’ll jump into the trunk to put the ball back and then jump back out. Most of the time though he’ll just jump in to try and grab one of the other toys we stash in there.
Fish-breath dogs
The dogs have been doing pretty well on California Natural Lamb & Rice kibble since we started feeding it to them about 8 months ago. It’s a nice simple kibble with not a lot of ingredients and no grains other than rice. This is important because we discovered early last year that Nala has problems with barley. Finding a kibble that doesn’t contain any barley is harder than you might think too. So far I’ve only seen about 3 or 4 other kibbles that don’t contain barley or wheat that I can rotate through.
Lately I’ve noticed that while Nala and Simba’s coats are still nice and glossy, their skin has started to get a little flaky, so I decided it was time to add some fish oil back to their diets. When we first got Nala, we were supplementing her food with fish oil (3V Caps) but then stopped for a while to see how she would do without it. Now we’re adding some Grizzly Salmon Oil (from Grizzly Pet Products) to their food. Dolittles happened to have some and since I was there picking up another bag of food for the dogs, so I figured I might as well try it out. While it’s not quite as fishy smelling as the 3V Caps were, you can still tell it’s fish oil and it definitely gives the dogs some funky fish breath for a while. Getting them to drink more water helps wash some of it away, but you definitely don’t want them licking you for a while after their meals.
They’ve only been on it for a couple of days now so it’s too early to tell if it’s helping with the flaky skin. The dogs don’t seem to mind the extra addition to their food.
Dog show weekend
Spent a good chunk of the weekend at the CSCLRC‘s Supported Entry dog show, which was held in conjunction with the Charleston Kennel Club‘s annual show.
Saw lots of good looking labs parading through the ring for all the different classes
There were lots of really neat things being raffled away by the club
and some really good BBQ for lunch on Saturday from what I heard (I had to leave early so I missed the food, darn it)
It was another good weekend and we had a great time up there hanging out and watching the dogs.
Another dog-gone weekend
Coming up this weekend is the Charleston Kennel Club‘s annual dog show up at the Ladson fairgrounds. To go along with the dog show, the CSCLRC is hosting the supported entry for labs. I’m told there are 147 labs entered for showing Saturday and Sunday, so it should be a lot of good looking dogs to check out.
CSCLRC is also having a raffle along with hosting lunch (for a small donation) on Sunday, so if anybody is interested in a weekend of dogs, stop on by. I’ll only be there part of the day Saturday since Simba has a Real Life 101 class at 1, but I’m going to try to hang out most of the day Sunday.