Pet Wellness Advocate
Can Dog Food Cause the Heart Disease DCM? I received a passionate email recently from Mike, a listener who sadly lost his dog due to the heart condition DCM. He believed that his dog died from eating grain-free dog food. Possibly his veterinarian told him it was "caused by nutrition" or Mike reading the confusing... Read more »
Pumpkin Patch Up to the Rescue I have known how beneficial pumpkin is for a dog or cat's digestive system ever since I researched and wrote The Dog Bible and The Cat Bible. However, I've never really promoted the concept of adding pumpkin to the diet of any cat or dog because pure, unsweetened pumpkin... Read more »
Gorgeous Reggae Music For Dogs (and Us!) during COVID-19 Back in 2008, Through a Dog’s Ear scientifically engineered beautiful calming music for dogs. Little would we have guessed that we'd ALL need as much calming and spirit-soothing as we can get while cut off from each other. Long before the current pandemic, bioacoustic/psychoacoustic researcher Joshua... Read more »
Come Hang out with me, Ann Patchett & Kate DiCamillo, the Author Who Changed Her Life I just recorded one of my favorite radio shows of all time --- and that's saying a lot, since I've been doing DOG TALK® (and Kitties, Too!) for 675 shows over 13 years. It is why I especially want... Read more »
Quarantining is a Chance to Reconnect with Your Kitties "Stuck at home" is a survival prescription for the world right now, but let's look at the bright side (at least from our pets' perspective). We can embrace this time of "sheltering in place" as an opportunity to offer our cats the exercise and enrichment they... Read more »
Welcoming Earth Animal to My World For many many years, I drove by the small Earth Animal store in Westport, Connecticut, which is where I grew up --- and where my father and Paul Newman created Newman's Own --- and where my father (at the astounding old age of 102!) still lives 65 years later.... Read more »
Labradoodles are Nobody's Frankenstein Monster! Why was such a fuss made this week about The BBC news podcast of an interview last week with a man named Wally, decrying a crossbred dog he experimented with decades ago? The mainstream media (the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc) grabbed onto the interview as though there... Read more »
Breezing (relatively speaking) Through the Nightmare of an ACL Repair My majestically athletic, exuberant Weimaraner Maisie made it all the way to age six before she tore her ACL ligament in May. I had been living in absolute dread of it tearing for months before it happened. I was doing everything I could to protect... Read more »
Icky Ears? A lot of dogs have ears that are really bothering them---itchy, painful, irritated---and their people do not realize how much discomfort there are in. Do you have a dog with floppy ears---with flaps that hang down and create the perfect environment for bacteria and yeast to flourish? Does your dog scratch at her... Read more »
Make A Shelter Dog's Day: Take Him for Ice Cream I recently interviewed a multi-faceted graduate student, Allison Andrukonis, at the Animal and Food Sciences Department of Texas Tech University. She is doing a study on “compassion fatigue” in shelter workers---specifically “burn-out” and the emotional effects of euthanasia on the spirits of shelter workers. I... Read more »