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 »
What Can Possibly Be The Problem With Grain-Free Dog Food? I’m glad that the alarm bells have stopped ringing about the dangers of grain-free dog food. For a little while, there was a flurry of articles and cautionary advice about avoiding the dog foods labeled as “grain free” because there was a heart condition called… Read more »
Out-of-Litter-Box Issues are still the Biggest Problem for Cat Owners I’m so glad people have written in with out-of-litter-box problems, since this the main reason people give up on their kitties. Everybody who writes me with kitty questions gets a coupon for a free Comfort Zone pheromone diffuser, which for many cats helps to lower… Read more »
I got an enthusiastic message from Jenny, whose young daughter Brooks “is obsessed with dogs & would love to go to Dog Film Festival. Is it playing in our area? We live in Beacon NY & have family we visit in the Berkshires.” I wrote Jenny back to say she was in luck — that… Read more »
How To Get Your Cat Off “Kitty Crack” And Slim Down For all of the 7 ½ years I had my own show on the Martha Stewart channel of Sirius satellite radio, I focused on feline health, especially as it related to nutrition. From my years of research for writing The Cat Bible: Everything Your… Read more »
A New Year’s Resolution: Shed Your Cat’s Excess Baggage [The first in a series of blogs about how to safely and successfully get your cat to lose weight] Many people don’t even realize their cat is fat, because we’ve all become accustomed to seeing overweight cats with hanging bellies, brick-shaped bodies, and a skeleton so… Read more »