We were at the Lowcountry Dog Agility Club‘s trials on Sunday checking out the dog agility action. One of my co-workers (who’s a member of the club) took this picture of Nala and a Great Dane checking each other out and saying hi.
Poop watching
We have firm poop!
Probably only something you’d hear a dedicated dog owner say out loud.
The last week or so Nala’s been having issues with really soft runny poop, so finally we decided to drop the fish based food altogether. We had her on 1/2 lamb & rice and 1/2 fish/sweet potatoe for the last few weeks, but after the soft poop started up again, we decided to go with straight lamb & rice food. It’s the 2nd day and the poop has started to get more solid. This is a good thing. Nothing worse than trying to pick up soft mushy poop at the dog park. Hopefully it stays this way.
Graduation day
Nala’s last day of Real Life 101 was yesterday over at Waterfront Park. With all the people and other dogs around, it’s a pretty challenging place for dog obedience traning, but all the dogs in today’s class did very well, even when someone’s escaped dog stopped by to check out all the action and maybe get some play time in. The instructor finished the class off with the presentation of the certificates and a little something for the dogs. All in all, RL101 is a great class for dogs and people who’ve been through regular obedience class, and are looking to help improve their dog’s behaviour out in public. We really had a lot of fun working out in public and going to different places for each class.
Searching for a new dog food
Since the end of December 2005, we’ve been hunting around for a new dog food for Nala. Most people would think "dog food, simple. Just pick up a bag of dog chow at the grocery store". Sure, if you want to feed your dog junk food and crap. Most people don’t think to look at the ingredients of the dog food they buy though, and is something most people should give more consideration to.
Choosing a Dog Food: Guidelines
Understanding Commercial Dog Foods
We’d been feeding her Diamond Large breed Lamb & Rice up to then, and decided to switch to something else until the recalled food problem blew over.
Nala’s breeders had switched to Premium Edge Skin & Coat (a salmon/sweet potato based food) and recommended it to us to try, so we started her on that at the beginning of January. She was doing pretty well on it up until we got to the end of the bag, when her poop started to get really soft and runny (all dog owners seem to eventually turn into hard core poop monitors). Vet said everything looked ok; no worms or anything like that, and she was otherwise normal. So we switched to Wellness Fish & Potato to see if maybe it was the salmon. No change in her poop, so I think maybe Nala’s just not a fish food kind of dog. It’s a shame, because both foods have a really good looking list of ingredients, and her coat was looking really fantastic on the fish based foods too. Adding fibre to her food helped firm up the poop, so I suppose we could have gone that route and stayed on the Premium Edge or Wellness.
We decided to switch Nala back to lamb & rice and try a new food we saw at PetSmart, Blue Adult Lamb & Rice from a company called Blue Buffalo. I was really impressed with the list of ingredients, with lamb and lamb meal as the first two (like with people food, dog food ingredients are listed in order of their amount in the food). Whole grains fill out the last three ingredients in the top 5, which should provide plenty of fibre for nice firm poops. Hopefully Nala will do well on this food (I think she will). It’s a little pricier than the Diamond L&R, but considering a month’s supply costs about as much as we might spend on dinner at a restaurant, it’s not bad. At 442 calories/cup, we might have to add more high fibre veggies to her food just to fill her up stomach though!
Interesting SC laws relating to dogs
The lab retriever club we’re part of had one of their meetings this evening where one of the members (who happens to be an attorney) talked about some of the legal issues involved in owning a dog. Found out about a couple of interesting SC laws relating to dogs. For example:
- Stealing an identifiable dog (identifiable via tag or tatoo) is a misdemeanor. Stealing a cat isn’t.
- Abandoning a dog is illegal in SC. Abandoning a hunting dog isn’t.
- If your dog bites someone, you’re liable, even if:
- the person that got bit jumped the fence into your yard to mess with your dog.
- someone let the dog out either by accident or on purpose
There were other things mentioned, but those were the ones that stuck in my head the most.