Food and diet

We were sent some useful information recently that we thought you might be interested in. For more great ideas, we have a number of 'how to' recipe video ideas in our 'Diet and Nutrition' video section.

Healthy Dog Food: 4 Things Your Puppy Will Love
If you've been looking at some of the labels on commercial pet food products lately, you may be wondering: how is this supposed to be healthy dog food? There has been a series of scandals recently regarding tainted and low quality pet foods being sold in supermarkets around the nation. 
This has prompted many people to ask themselves weather the foods that we give to our pets are actually safe and good for them. One thing that pet owners need to be aware of, is that unlike human foods, dog food must be certified to be able to meet a dog's nutritional needs, no matter what brand of food it is or where it is sold.

A dog has certain nutritional needs that will differ from humans. According to veterinarians, the best diet for a dog would be one that contains roughly half meat and half vegetables. Avoid foods that have too much grain, wheat, or other ingredients that are simply used as fillers and offer very little in terms of nutritional value. 

While grains can be used as part of a healthy diet for a dog, as they provide long term energy, the problem with them is that they are often used as a cheap filler and to boost the protein count on the label. The best type of food is one which has meat as a primary source of protein.
If you want examples of healthy dog food that provides the proper nutrition and is enjoyable for your dog to eat, then here are four healthy meals for healthy weight. 

Organic Canned Dog Food 
Many pet owners would say that this is the very best that you can offer to a dog you love. It contains organic chicken, turkey, liver, sea salt, kelp, flax seed, plus all the essential nutrients and vitamins to help your pet thrive. It is also a food recommended by veterinarians for dogs that are recovering from health issues.

If you want to skip commercial dog food entirely and make your own, there are some options which are open to you. After all, dogs have been domesticated long before commercial pet food came into existence. Here are some ideas:

Hamburger meat, seafood and liver combination 
This is done by preparing 2 pounds of hamburger, 10 ounces of shrimp or lobster, plus 1 cup of raw liver. You can add half a cup of brown rice to the mix as well.

Vegetarian meal 
While dogs are carnivores, some of the meals can be vegetarian. One idea to make a vegetarian dish is using 2 lbs of grated carrots, 3 bunches of grated broccoli, 2 cups of brown rice and 4 grated zucchinis. 

Dog meatloaf plus vegetables
You take 2 lbs of lean ground beef, add 2 carrots, 3 small potatoes, 1 chopped celery stalk to make a meal that your dog will definitely love and enjoy eating.

These are just some examples of recipes you can make at home. Before making your own dog food, you need to do your research, as there are items such as grapes, chocolate and some onions can be very harmful to dogs.

Fantastic new veterinary practice

We have had a lovely day today in Swindon with Joe Inglis and Jez, celebrating the opening of their new 'Vet's Klinic' surgery. It really is great to see such innovation in the world of general veterinary practices, this Klinic has a large glass fronted room for preparing dogs for surgery and completing minor procedures such as dental work.

The vets will use iPads to record their client's information and behaviourist Jez will also be able to use their technology to record behaviour sessions for owners to watch back afterwards.

We have been ultra efficient at editing this video and so it is live already here.

We look forward to them opening a new surgery closer to us, we will certainly be one of the first to sign up!

While we were there we met up with 'Mugly'- officially The World's Ugliest Dog! We asked his owner Bev to explain how he got the title, that video should be live in our September issue.

Animal Aiders and Portuguese Water Dogs

We went off to Bury-St-Edmunds today to interview Sophie Flux from Animal Aiders.

Animal Aiders provides practical and high quality vet led courses in animal first aid throughout the country. With her invaluable help, we were able to produce videos on: basic health signs - how to tell when something is wrong and what to do; eye injuries – signs of and how to treat; poisons and poisoning; and heat stroke. Sophie was a perfect host and a dream to film. We look forward to meeting up with her again for more articles in the future.

It was all go today, after filming Sophie in the morning, we were off to another part of Suffolk to meet Jocelyn Creffield to interview her about Portuguese Water Dogs. PWD’s turned out to be an affectionate and lively breed. As the name suggests, the dog is native to Portugal, is an excellent swimmer, and worked for hundreds of years helping fishermen. The “lion trim” they were given, where the rear is close cut, helped them to work in the water, and is still used in the show ring today. Many thanks go to Jocelyn for her time and hospitality. We look forward to adding this video to our breed library soon.

Cavalier Matters

We met up with Tanya Ledger and Margaret Carter from Cavalier Matters today.

Cavalier Matters is a not-for-profit organisation set up to provide health and other information about the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. It’s brilliant website may be full of fun cartoons but is jam packed with useful information on serious issues for CKCS owners.

It’s founder, Tanya, was prompted to set it up after she discovered her own Cav suffering from some serious health issues. We did an interview about the organisation, one about health issues and another about how to buy a healthy Cav. Tanya is keen that future CKCS owners don’t face the problems she had to.

August 2012 is live

Our August issue is live, this month we have some practical demonstrations including Behaviour Adjustment Training in action to help a dog overcome it's fear of vacuum cleaners and an instruction video on how to clip your dog's claws.

We also have a very interesting article on the Critical Periods of a puppy's development, an explanation of the assessment process at Canine Partners and we find out more about the research behind the CV247 cancer therapy.

We met up with Xtradog to find out about the benefits of harnesses, Lizi Angel gave us some advice on how to help dogs with Separation Distress and Jez discusses how he would help an unusual problem of a dog who didn't like 'walkies'.