We're revamping Abby.
Tonight she starts a 10 week obedience class. She's overall doing very well in that regard, but there are mainly 2 things that we haven't been able to teach her: come and don't jump. It's rather embarrassing. We take her to an off-leash park and when it comes time to pack up and go home, she just won't have it. When she was a puppy we could outrun and outsmart her to catch her and bring her home, but now she knows our tricks. She's on a park hiatus until we finish the obedience training, or until she learns to come.
Also, I've started feeding new food. After all the craziness with the pet food recalls, I started reading up on pet food a lot more. I know it's lame that it takes such a drastic situation for me to clue in, but it's better late than never, no? Anywho, upon reading
this LJ post, I went out and purchased
Food Pets Die For: Shocking Facts About Pet Food. The first day I started reading it I started feeling horrible for having been feeding Abby mass-produced commercial pet food for over a year. I won't go into all the disgusting details, but let's just say that horrible horrible things go into the making of commercial pet food. I had been feeding Abby
this stuff, which contains exactly the same ingredients as Iams, so I thought I was doing pretty well. Sure, the stuff is exactly like Iams, in fact most pet foods come from the same processing plants, as we've all been able to witness from the recent recalls. Doesn't matter if you charge $20 or $50 for the bag, it's the same crap. The book suggests a home-cooked diet, which I'm sorry, but I have no intention of ever doing. It also lists some good all-natural human-grade commercial alternatives. So I've chosen
Innova Evo by Natura Pet Products, a human-grade product containing fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy products and meat. No meat by-products (you don't even want to know what this can legally contain), no remains from human food processing, no nastiness. Abby simply loves it. She never used to scarf down her old food - sometimes she wouldn't eat her bowl for a few days (she's surprisingly not very food-driven), but this stuff - wow, she just inhales it! For the first few days she had some constipation and then a bit of diarrhea and was a bit gassy (so nasty!), but now her stomach has seemed to have settled. The new food is obviously pricier, but it's still not that bad. Around $70 for a huge bag that would probably last her about 2 months. I mean, that's way less than we spend on food, why would I lower my standards for my little puppy love? She means way more than that to me.
I highly recommend
Food Pets Die For: Shocking Facts About Pet Food to anyone with a cat/dog they care dearly about. Of course the book's to be taken with a grain of salt, but most of it is well researched and provides an eye-opening look into the commercial mass-produced pet food industry.
